The “debate” prompted by the publication of Rod’s Crunchy Cons (now in paperback with a new, improved and shorter subtitle) has tended to degenerate into a good deal of carping and one-sided arguments on one side and rather bitter retaliatory strikes on the other, which is to say the crunchy side.  But, then, it was never much of a real “debate” to start with, since a real debate would presuppose two sides of relatively serious and engaged people interested in striving for the truth about the subject in question.  The lack of anything like serious critics dictated the nature of the sometimes harsh response from the “crunchy cons” themselves, as well as from traditional conservatives and paleoconservatives, such as myself, who were sympathetic to the basic common sense of making a high priority of loyalty to community, place and family as part of a living tradition and inspired by religious vocation.  Similarly, it was important to sympathisers of this idea to attack what seemed to be certain conservatives’ ideas of what constituted social, political and economic goods when they diverged wildly from a vision of order that privileged community, place, tradition and family.  These were the so-called “mainstream conservatives,” for whom the Wal-Marts of the world are the benefactors of the community, “community” itself was often enough just code for state interference, efficiency takes precedence over a great many considerations and individual choice is sovereign.  If the original formulation about these conservatives was overstated (as pretty much all of us on the crunchy/traditionalist side were willing to grant on reflection), the basic critique that too many conservatives now found themselves living as if they were on the wrong side of Voegelin’s divide between those who accepted the enduring moral order and the materialists was basically sound and was revealed in the course of the debate.  This critique not only targeted a real phenomenon and attempted to subject this kind of life to conservative ethical scrutiny, but hit many people quite literally where they lived–hence the strained, emotional and largely incoherent responses that it generated.   

The “debate,” such as it was, revealed that most of the people who were defending the much-maligned “mainstream conservatives simply did not privilege the claims of these things as highly and were often proud that they did not (they were defending Freedom and capitalist enterprise!) and they literally could not understand people who said that their way of thinking was potentially at odds with the broad tradition of conservative social and political thought.  This failure to understand was perhaps never quite as willful as we made it out to be, since conservatism for these people had never had anything to do with Kirk or Bradford or Chesterton in concrete, meaningful terms.  These were writers whom they may have read, but whose social and economic ideals were as strange and alien as if they had come from Fourier or Condorcet.  In this atmosphere, we could quote Kirk, the Agrarians and Wendell Berry, let’s say, until we were blue in the face (and we did), and the other side of the “debate” would say something equivalent to, “So what?  I like Wal-Mart, I like Burger King, and you can’t make me not like them.”  This claim that the critics of the idea were defending human freedom against the imperious crunchy Cylons was very handy and very wrong, but it was one of these unshakeable assumptions that ultimately caused defenders of CCism to throw up their hands in disgust on the assumption that only willfully stubborn and rather intellectually dodgy people could refuse to acknowledge much, if any, merit in the idea.  Then, after we threw up our hands in disgust in the face of such implacable hostility, it was counted to us as a vice that we had given up trying to convince the most incorrigible and obnoxious among the critics.  

There were much more solid criticisms coming from the paleo right, since most of the themes and ideas enunciated in Crunchy Cons had made their appearance in the pages of Chronicles, for example, years and decades before and had reached a depth and intensity that the crunchy con argument, which had also been expressed in much more popular, layman’s terms, never did reach.  There were telling critiques at The Rockford Institute’s summer school, The American Agrarian Tradition, that argued–from impeccably strong agrarian and traditional conservative grounds–that the problem with CCism was not that it went too far but that it was often too superficial and too preoccupied with the quest for authenticity.  If this sounds similar to the kinds of arguments that the regular critics made, it really isn’t all that similar.  It was never the trendiness or relatively lighter aspects of CCism that deeply offended and antagonised people–they used these as easy foils to make light of the opposing argument (“does it really matter whether I eat organic vegetables?” they would ask mockingly).  No, it was at those moments when CCism began to touch on much more significant questions of how to live a virtuous life and what our ethical obligations to our community are and how we live them out that the critics pounced with every red-herring and yelp of horror they could manage. 

Had there been more critiques grounded strongly in agrarianism, liturgical Christianity and an even deeper respect for embodying the requirements of a living tradition, not only would “crunchy cons” and their friends have taken those criticisms more seriously but they would have had some reason to take them seriously.  As it was, critiques ranged from the “there is no such thing as crunchy conservatism” to “you sound like a leftist” to “you want to expand the size of government” to the mad carping of certain pitiful monomaniacs who knew nothing of the conservative tradition and were simply interested in validating their own preferences just as we had been saying all along.

In late 2005 I had noticed the upcoming publication of Crunchy Cons and commented on the points of contact with many paleoconservative arguments, noting that the paleos had written extensively on all these things for a very long time.  But I could see the potential virtue in the crunchy idea, and it seemed consistent with many of the things that I, as a paleo, held to be true.  When the discussion at Crunchy Con began, it was mostly made up of sympathetic and constructive people who were interested in really engaging with the material.  Then there were the expected naysayers who, well, did a lot of naysaying and not much else.  At that point, I jumped into the fray and began attacking from the sidelines, not really having anything to do with the entire project until then.  At some point, I went from occasional observer to arch-defender of crunchy conservatism, even though in many respects I could not and did not claim to be a
“crunchy” myself. 

Now I am particularly inclined towards polemics (as some may have noticed), and the blogging format exacerabtes that polemical inclination by making it exceedingly easy to fire off the first thing that comes to mind and to frame retorts in sharp, barbed and caustic ways.  So, as I entered the arena, I undoubtedly contributed somewhat to the embittering of attitudes on the other side, and I take responsibility for feeding some of the more strained and hysterical reactions to the whole array of conservative values that we were defending. 

I admit that I had a very hard time taking the objections of the critics seriously, usually because they were so poorly stated or founded in assumptions that I had genuine difficulty believing conservatives held.  It was not because I believed that they were arguing in bad faith, but because even if they were arguing in good faith I was deeply frustrated by the misdirection of their declaring that they were somehow representing the body of conservative opinion against a few malefactors and dissidents who were presuming to redefine the natue of conservatism.  As I saw it, it was clearly they who derived from a much more recent lineage, it was they who seemed to frequently confuse human freedom with choice and the good life with satisfaction of desires, and it was they who found CCism alien to a large extent because they were unfamiliar with or hostile to the legacy of the agrarianism, localism and traditionalism of the Agrarians (up through and including Weaver and Bradford) and the New Conservatives.  The complete incomprehension with which the critics greeted the sympathetic citation of Prof. Lukacs’ line about those who were opposed to the cement mixers and concrete pourers was emblematic of the entire “debate.” The “debate,” after all, usually went something like this:

Critic: Endless devlopment and growth are essential to freedom. 

Sympathiser: That is possibly the most misguided thing I have ever heard!  Endless devlopment and growth are fundamental threats to human freedom and a humane and sane way of life. 

Critic: Socialist!  Elitist!  I like progress!    

Recognising the sacramental nature of life, the giftedness of creation, and accepting our duty to do what we can to preserve the natural order as part of a humane life lived according to our own nature were all obvious virtues of the “crunchy con” idea, even if they may have been lost in translation or if the particular examples that Rod gave in the book were not always those that others interested in the same kinds of things might have chosen.  But the realities that they plainly had more value than the critics ever gave them and that the critics were openly espousing a way of life that seemed perfectly antithetical to most of the values expressed in the book were quite clear.  There undoubtedly were many people who objected to the crunchy con idea, not counting paleo critics, because they could not accept that this was what conservatism meant, and it is a shame if the bitter controversy over this idea alienated or drove away many of those people from giving it due consideration.  However, it struck me very early on that much of what CCism embodied was nothing other than the essential themes of traditional conservatism and paleoconservatism, and that the reason why it provoked such a fierce response is that the critics disliked both of these things and were intent on keeping them in their “proper” place at the relative margins of the American right.