Crunchy Cons

I’ve tried to keep my entries in this blog apolitical (and areligious and essentially asexual) because politics is one of those topics that one shouldn’t start in on with strangers. And the nature of a blog is that of a conversation with strangers, at least theoretically.

That, and I don’t want to be someone just keeping a diary online for everyone to read.

That being said, this is meant to be an outlet and a refining crucible for my thinking. If I’m putting a thought out there for the world to read then it needs to be a coherent one. If I’m trying to convince people to agree with the thought in question then I need to present my thinking persuasively. There’s nothing like having an audience of people who disagree with me, or potentially disagree with me, to force me to refine my thinking.

This is why your comments are so important…

Anyway, although I spend a lot of my time consuming political news and blogs, I’ve tried not to dive into politics during the less-than-a-month that I’ve myself been blogging.

That ends today.

Still, rather than cannonballing into the political discussion, splashing some of the contents of the discussion pool all about (my favorite way of entering a non-metaphorical pool of water), for now I’m simply going to put my toe in. I’m going to talk about Crunchy Conservatives.

I’ve heard the term Crunchy Con recently and found myself using it in a discussion this morning with my father.

My father is wrestling with a recent realization that he is outside of the current conservative mainstream. Until recently I think he’s thought of himself as the epitome of the conservative mainstream, so this is coming as a bit of a shock to him.

He described himself as being fiscally conservative, but able to see the necessity of some social services. He says there’s a clear conflict between those two ideas, so he has to try to reconcile them as best he can.

I told him they’re reconcilable, the trick is to take a longer term view. In the long run it’s expensive for society to have people living in poverty. Social programs make fiscal sense if the long-term benefit of the programs makes fiscal sense.

This is one of those ideas I’m going to be refining, myself. I need numbers to back it up.

Anyway, as part of this discussion I asked my father if he’d heard of Crunchy Cons. He hadn’t. I told him it was a relatively new type of conservative voter – like a neocon or even an Obamacon. I had the impression that a Crunchy Con might have a similar place to my father’s on the political spectrum.

Well, today I have investigated what a Crunchy Con is, and it turns out I was deeply wrong about my assumption of their place on the political spectrum.

Crunchy Cons are to the right of my father, but they could conceivably be mistaken as being to the left of me. They have conservative values fiscally and religiously, but they are likely to eat organic produce and encourage their local farm co-operative rather than shop at Wal-Mart. They’re as suspicious of big business as they are of big government. They think we should conserve our natural resources rather than exploit them.

Basically, they’re kind of granola, hence the “crunchy”.

The term was coined by Rod Dreher in 2002, and then the idea was expanded into a book he wrote in 2006. This excerpt from the book is probably the best place to find out what a Crunchy Con is.

The Crunchy Con movement may actually consist entirely of Dreher, but I’m guessing his blog has more readers than mine.

I’m just glad to see someone realize that their ideals don’t dictate that they must live the same lifestyle as other people who share those ideals. Or, conversely, that they must have the same ideals as other people who live the same lifestyle they do.

I have some crunchy friends - some may even be Crunchy Cons - and I aspire to be crunchy myself someday. I doubt that I'll become a Conservative anytime soon, though. I guess I hope to become a Crunchy Lib. Or maybe a Crunchy Mod.