Critiquing "Crunchy Cons"

This should be good. The influential Reformed writer Douglas Wilson has read "Crunchy Cons," and is now beginning a series of blogs reviewing it. He apparently liked the book, but is not uncritical. I'm grateful for his attention, and am looking forward to his critique. Excerpt from the first entry:

Dreher is really strong in describing some of the soul-wasting assumptions that are frequently found on America's right wing. But the solution, whatever it is, will still not be imposed from the top down, even if there are local and personal reasons for thinking that "there ought to be a law." And in addition, there are a multitude of statist restrictions and regulations (by definition applied from the top) that will impede the restoration of sanity in our local communities. In short, the solution is going to be found in worship of the triune God -- no baals can deliver us. Not the home-grown organic local baals, and not the nationalist Baal of war, commerce and empire. I believe that Dreher would agree with this, but in the course of this review I want to push it a good deal further than I believe he does.

"This is not to encourage a head-for-the-hills utopianism (though sometimes the hills do start to look pretty inviting), but rather a movement to change our own lifestyles so that they are more faithful to our convictions as conservatives, and over time rebuild the strength and stability of our communities, our schools, our churches, and all the 'little platoons' that Edmund Burke identified as necessary to civil life" (p. 23).

This is all very good, but it brings the central question I have about this book to the forefront. As we are investing ourselves in Burke's little platoons, what are we willing to make other people do, and why? This is the question underneath all matters of law and justice, and answering it will tell us how to take and apply this book. Eating free range chicken for dinner and supporting legislation that will restrict carbon emissions (to prevent 2017's laughing-stock, global warming) may seem like different aspects of the same worldview. But they are not at all. The first is a personal choice in a free country, and the second is bad coercive law based on bad science, in what is decreasingly a free country. The former feeds the mouths of your family and the latter feeds the maw of the state.

All this said, I enjoyed this book greatly, and hope that the questions it raises will be as profitable in this series of reviews as they were for me in the book itself.

I spent much of yesterday afternoon working on the proposal for my next book, which will push the questions further than I did in CC. I don't want to reveal too much about it until my agent has the final proposal and is shopping it around, but I think it will both widen the audience for these ideas, and take the diagnosis and prescription significantly further than "Crunchy Cons" does.

Many thanks to reader Jon Luker for bringing this to my attention. Jon, a Reformec Christians of traditionalist conservative sensibilities, blogs here. I'm enthusiastically adding his blog Politeuma to my personal blog roll.