Re-crunching Crunchy Conservatism

John Savage takes me and this blog to the woodshed for being insufficiently crunchy-connish, though I confess I find his complaints fairly incoherent. Let's take them one at a time:

Unfortunately it seems like contra Mark, Mr. Crunchy himself likes Huckabee way too much, though the opposition of Daniel Larison and James Poulos has tempered his enthusiasm a bit. So it’s no time for crunchy cons to be smug, is it?

Do I like Huck? Yes I do. Do I think his conservatism and mine are consonant? No, not really, but significantly more than the other GOP candidates. I've said here before that I'm rooting for him not because he's an avatar of my kind of conservatism, but because I think that for all his faults, he represents the best chance to open up the conservative mainstream to the kinds of ideas that appeal to me and to the conservatives I most identify with. And I am quite obviously fascinated by what Huck's rise says about the state of the broader conservative movement, and its priorities. Why aren't all conservatives, even those who can't stand him?

Rod Dreher is a good man and I don’t intend for this post to be in any way a personal attack on him. But the way that most crunchy cons look to him alone to define crunchy conservatism is unhealthy, especially when he’s the type who’s easily made to feel apologetic about taking conservative positions, and has an excessive need to just get along and ingratiate himself with the Left.

Well, sure, I wrote the book about it, but by no means should people look to me to define this sensibility. I would consider my book something of a failure if it didn't make you want to investigate the thought and writing of Russell Kirk, Wendell Berry, and others. I consider "Crunchy Cons" a conversation-starter, not a conversation-ender.

But what a stupid thing to say, this presumed "need" I have to "ingratiate" myself with the Left. I don't have a "need" to get along with liberals, though I do happen to like getting along with people, as a rule. And this is bad ... why? This may come as news to Savage, but I don't decide my friends based on their ideological orientation. There are on both sides of the political spectrum a certain sort of person who mistrusts people on their own side who gets along with their ideological opponents. I was only at National Review for a year, and only had the privilege of spending time at Bill Buckley's dinner table two or three times, but on each occasion there was a prominent liberal as the guest of honor at the table. Buckley treated these guests with unfailing civility and kindness, and he questioned them intensely, not because he wanted to catch them out and defeat them as a debater, but because, it seemed to me, he really wanted to learn something about them and their worldview. WFB struck me as genuinely interested in people, and unwilling to judge other people solely in terms of ideological commitment.

Leftists love the fact that Dreher often seems more concerned with sticking it to neoconservative enemies than much of anything else. Thus Dreher capitulates to the Left (and many leftists, such as Frank Rich, have had little but high praise for Huckabee) without really realizing that’s what he’s doing. Where he should oppose neocons and the Left, he forgets about the latter.

I don't get this complaint. As a general matter I'm less interested in what the left is up to than what my side is doing. Perhaps it's because I don't find the ideological and philosophical battles on the left to be all that interesting, at least not right now. I'm sure there's an audience on the right for constant railing on the left, but it just bores me. It's not that I disagree with the criticism of the left, but it seems to me that it's a creative and even moral dead-end to focus all one's energies as a conservative on bitching about the left. We on the right have a lot of serious thinking to do about why conservatism has run aground, and how to refloat it. That's what interests me most right now, not carrying the pitchforks against liberalism. There are sites where you can get that sort of thing. This isn't one of them, at least not consistently.

Dreher is mostly a single-issue “conservative” whose single issue is traditional morality, narrowly construed as being pro-life, anti-promiscuous-sex, and anti-homosexual-unions. When I say, “narrowly construed”, I mean that an interpretation of traditional morality such as Darrell Dow’s would presumably shock Dreher.

Yeah, Darrell Dow's thoughts on the morality of the death penalty boils down to "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out." If that's Savage's definition of a traditional conservative, sorry, I happily don't meet it. Neither does the Pope, that well-known squish.

Dreher’s site is mobbed by Obama-ite commenters who gush over their desire for “reconciliation” with conservatives. Conservatives who would like to confront such people on the issues are scorned there.

Oh? Confront away, I welcome that -- but do it civilly. Like I said, there are plenty of sites on the web where you can scream your head off at the eeeeevil conservatives or the eeeeevil liberals. I don't want this site to be that.

Dreher gives inordinate weight to the statements of clergy, of any denomination. As long as they belong to a “conservative” denomination, he doesn’t pay their statements the kind of scrutiny he would if he thought he was reading something from liberals.

Huh?

He’s the kind of guy who believes that the enemy of his enemy is his friend. Hence, anyone who dislikes his betes noires (i.e. Washington insider pundits, like Jonah Goldberg, who ridiculed his book), he considers an ally. Dreher has dwelled on GOP insider scorn for Mike Huckabee, for instance, and feeds off this shared resentment at being a scorned outsider.

That's silly. I imagine Jonah Goldberg and I have many of the same ideological enemies, but that doesn't mean we have the same conservative philosophy. It's true that I'm interested in Huckabee in part for the same reason my book was written off by some mainstream conservative commentators: because they presume that a social conservative who doesn't follow GOP economic orthodoxy can't possibly be a conservative, which is absurd. I recognize that there are different kinds of conservatives, and the preoccupation many right-wing gatekeepers have with ideological purity prevents them from seeing ideas that fit within the broader range of philosophical conservatism. Conservatism is a body of thought, not a church. It would come as a shock to quite a few conservative greats of ages past, this idea that the free market is entirely consonant with traditional conservatism. There is not enough critical attention paid to this subject on the American right. And that's because gatekeepers insist that while we must open the big tent to conservatives like Rudy Giuliani, who have no use for the kinds of issues that matter most to social and religious conservatives, we must anathematize conservatives like Mike Huckabee, who aren't perfectly orthodox on economic issues. I think that's not only foolish, it's self-destructive.

Dreher is possibly a case of “any organization not explicitly right-wing becomes left-wing over time”.

Perhaps I should formulate a new version: “Any blog that doesn’t drive away leftist commenters in some fashion becomes left-wing over time.” Or maybe, “Any blog that isn’t explicitly politically incorrect becomes PC over time.”

So I'm supposed to tell left-liberals they aren't welcome to leave comments at my site -- and my failure to "drive away" liberals is a sign that I've become politically correct? How ... childish.

For solid criticism of Huckabee's populism (and, implicitly, my openness to it), go read Romney-backing Mark at Protestant Pontifications.