Not to revisit old fights, but my problem with Rod’s admonition is that it leaves out the fact that his Crunchy Conservatism actually rests on many of the same assumptions of Bush’s compassionate conservatism. Conservatism, according to Crunchy Conservatism, has become too cold and calculating, too obsessed with the mighty dollar and the moral unimpeachability of the free market. Conservatism isn’t spiritual enough, humane enough, activist enough, quoth Rod. “Hillary Clinton got a bum rap from the right,” he admitted, “it really does take a village to raise a child.” Well, this is pretty much the same indictment at the heart of compassionate conservatism, which speaks relentlessly of leaving no children behind.

I’d take Rod’s laments about how we all should have turned on Bush earlier if only compassionate conservatism and crunchy conservatism didn’t have so much in common. Indeed, now that he’s aligning himself so much with so-called “paleos” it’s worth also noting that Pat Buchanan considered Bush’s compassionate conservatism a rip-off of his “conservatism of the heart.”  ~Jonah Goldberg

Ross and Rod have made the main points, so I won’t get into this too much.  Not to revisit old fights, but Goldberg demonstrates once again that he still has no idea what “crunchy” conservatism is.  Also, any “rip-off” from Buchananism was at the level of rhetoric only, since no one could possibly confuse Mr. Bush’s actual policies for an appeal to the interests of Middle Americans.  

At the core of “compassionate conservatism” is the notion that, as Mr. Bush once put it, “when people hurt, government has got to move.”  Compassionate conservatism was, is, a justification for conservatives to nationalise virtually all issues, use the welfare state for their ends and put forward inclusive rhetoric.  It is the “big tent” plus big government.  On the other hand, “crunchy” conservatism (in addition to not being a set of policy prescriptions or an attitude towards how to use the central government for conservative ends) looks to the legacy of the Agrarians and traditionalists, who obviously abhorred an activist federal government far more than Goldberg the wannabe libertarian.  They also obviously defended local communities and intermediary institutions as necessary to the cultivation of a stable, well-ordered society that would not need the constant intervention of a bureaucratic state apparatus.  That is the tradition from which “crunchy” conservatism is derived, and that is its message.  In the traditionalist view, the breakdown of social order and community inevitably invited state interference: as traditional morality and local communities withered, the state would use the resulting problems as pretexts for intervention and increased control.  Compassionate conservatives are the ones who would like to bring the state in to fill the gap, whereas traditionalists (or neo-traditionalists, as we are sometimes disparagingly called) want to build up more self-sufficient communities and support a greater decentralisation of power away from Washington.  Those interested in reducing the role of government in Americans’ lives–which is what a supposedly increasingly libertarian person might want–should be naturally inclined towards “crunchy” conservatism, rather than confusing it with something diametrically opposed to it. 

The difference between these visions is not a small change of emphasis, but rather a huge, yawning chasm between entirely different conceptions of what conservatism is, what our current predicament is and how we should go about addressing that predicament.  That Goldberg should conflate two radically different, even opposed, tendencies is typical.