You [Rod Dreher] claim to have second thoughts about Iraq and regrets for your support of that War, but you are apparently no wiser; indeed you seem to have grown in folly.

I have long thought that “crunchy con” sounded like some sort of swindle, a scam. Now I know it: when it comes to moral principle and foreign policy a crunchy con is just a neocon in sandals. ~Daniel Nichols, Caelum et Terra

Let me say first that I understand Mr. Nichols’ dissatisfaction and disagreement with Rod’s views on the war in Lebanon.  I share many of his objections to Rod’s statements about proportionality and Rod’s judgements about the justifiability of what has been happening to the civilian population of Lebanon.  While I also understand the reasons why Rod continues to support the campaign, I obviously believe the better arguments in terms of both charity and justice rest with the critics of the campaign and further I think these arguments are more in accordance with the humane conservatism and Christian tradition to which Rod, Mr. Nichols and I all belong.  

But I must agree with Maclin Horton, who distanced himself from these statements, that they overreach, assume far too much and, unfortunately, tend towards a degree of inflexibility in discussing questions of policy that is far better suited to the journals of the very neoconservatives whom Mr. Nichols and I both fervently oppose.  It is very much their style to denounce and cast out someone lacking in ideological rigour when he fails to meet a test of seeing eye to eye with them on a question of policy, typically foreign policy in the Near East.  Imitating that particular model does not seem very appealing.  While there are very good arguments to be made for the inconsistency of praising a life of restraint, virtue and proportion and endorsing a military campaign that is sorely lacking in several of these, dismissing everything that you have in common with Rod and everything that Rod has right because he does not see the war on Lebanon as you do is a bad mistake.  Claiming that he is simply a fraud because he takes a different view on policy is to assume far too much–it is what we might call the Frum fallacy. 

Though Rod has been criticised by traditionalists and paleoconservatives for not going deep enough into the themes he wrote about in Crunchy Cons and having an insufficient grasp of the connections between the agrarian tradition, liturgical Christianity and rooted, humane life, as I intend to discuss in a future post when I return to blogging on the TRI agrarian summer school, his thinking on these topics has raised many of the right questions and proposed more than a few tentative, reasonable answers for recovering a humane way of life.  What has always infuriated and baffled those who wanted to make the crunchy con idea into a policy debate has been Rod’s consistent refusal to pigeonhole an authentic conservative temperament according to the specific prudential policy prescriptions that he or anyone else thinks should be followed.  As all of us repeated time and again, this conservatism is a temperament, a persuasion, not a system, much less a platform or policy agenda.  Though certainly never apolitical, the concerns of “crunchy conservatism” for building up local communities, the cultivation of agrarianism, preserving the family, and conserving the natural world are in many respects those of traditional and paleoconservatives, and throughout all of it is the common sense of restraint and a sense of the sacramental nature of life.  In one of my last statements on crunchy conservatism, I wrote this description:

To these core elements that Mr. Goss identifies I would add, in no particular order, a certain degree of the spirit of self-denial and asceticism, festivity and (as an aspect of sacramentality) communion, in the sense here of being closely bound to a place and the people in the community, as well as cultivating a sense of obligation before religious tradition and local community.  Additionally, a key idea running throughout all of these is right proportion or right measure, which finds its expression in the principle of moderation that informs the crunchy attitude and the appreciation of beautiful things in terms of their proportion, balance and harmonious arrangement of space.

Crunchy Cons was a first attempt to break out of the stifling atmosphere of the modern conservative movement, in which the wise men who fathered the movement were known mostly only as names to be invoked, their principles long since discarded by a movement that needed principles a little more flexible and usable.  It was an attempt to remember the humane conservatism of Russell Kirk, among others, and so it is with some curious irony that the the issue that has driven Mr. Nichols to attack Rod so sharply is none other than U.S. and Israeli policy in the Near East in the current war on Lebanon. 

I say irony, because one of the many critics of the Israeli war on Lebanon is none other than Kirk’s own daughter, Andrea Kirk Assaf, which pits the kin of the the man Rod named the “patron saint” of crunchy conservatism against the author of Crunchy Cons.  It is not unreasonable to suppose that Kirk himself, an outspoken opponent of the first Gulf War, would have at least had strong objections to the way that the war on Lebanon has been waged, even if he might have accepted in principle the justice of some sort of Israeli response to the taking of its soldiers.  Obviously, as my numerous posts over the last two weeks have made clear, I take a dim view of the attacks on civilian targets, the displacement of three quarters of a million people and the general devastation of an entire country that have taken place in the last three weeks in Lebanon, and many of those posts have been direct or indirect critiques of positions Rod has taken on his blog. 

Now, someone might say, “Oh, very well, Kirk’s daughter is against it, and Kirk might have opposed it, but they might be wrong.”  That is certainly possible, and it is also not enough simply to cite Kirk’s past views, but I think it only makes sense for a leading proponent of reviving Kirkian conservatism to consider Kirk’s history of foreign policy views that leaned towards limiting and avoiding war as much as possible.  If crunchy conservatism is one kind of embrace and application of the Permanent Things in modern life, it is incumbent on those persuaded by the virtue of this idea to consider also what fidelity to the Permanent Things could require of us when it comes to contemporary politics and policies.   

That said, it is far too excessive to declare that “when it comes to moral principle and foreign policy a crunchy con is just a neocon in sandals.”  As I already noted in my comment at CetT, a “neocon in sandals” would have no grasp of the importance of local community, agrarian life, decentralism or the moral and social problems created by the structures of state capitalism and the corporate economy, nor would he care much for talk of restraint, virtue or asceticism; the crunchy cons’ religiosity would probably scare the neocon in sandals more than a little, and their proclivity to homeschool their children would make him shudder.  I agree that Rod has been mistaken in his statements about Lebanon, but the neocon in sandals would undoubtedly be mistaken about everything and in far worse ways than I would care to imagine.