Shop class, slow food, crunchy conservatism

Kelefa Sanneh of the New Yorker has a delicious review essay of several books having to do with crunchy-ish topics, focusing mostly on Matthew Crawford's terrific "Shop Class as Soulcraft." Excerpt:

In this decade, the revival of traditional craftsmanship and homegrown food has generally been seen as a progressive cause, loosely aligned with environmentalism, blue-state snobbery, and all-purpose anti-corporate activism. But "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" was a hit partly because it pushed back against lefty idealism. "Everyone's just about out of gumption," Pirsig's narrator says. "And I think it's about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource--individual worth. There are political reactionaries who've been saying something close to this for years. I'm not one of them, but to the extent they're talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich, they're right." Crawford himself has cultivated alliances with conservative institutions. He once received funding from the right-leaning John M. Olin Foundation (he admits to spending its research grant on an air compressor), and the think tank where he worked, which goes unnamed in the book, was the George C. Marshall Institute, which advances a skeptical view of the environmental movement. (He was the executive director, and says that his job consisted of "coming up with the best arguments money could buy.") He recently delivered a lecture based on the book at the offices of the Heritage Foundation, and his Times Magazine essay earned an enthusiastic endorsement from the Web site of National Review. Although Crawford avoids overt political advocacy, he lays out his ideological program in a sharply worded paragraph near the end of the book:

It is now the capitalist who says, "Workers of the world, unite!," the better to dissolve those "inefficiencies" in the labor market (that is, high wages) that arise from political boundaries. The slogan once expressed a hope to organize a body of workers who were dispersed and hence exploitable, whereas now it captures the desire for a mass of "human resources," exploitable because undifferentiated. This latter intention is accompanied by all the easy moral prestige of multiculturalism, so it finds its champions on the erstwhile Left. Those at the top of the food chain get a new identity in which to take pride, that of the sushi-eating, Brazilian-girlfriend-having cosmopolitan.

Crawford seems to yearn for a rethinking of left and right, as they're now configured. Agrarianism, like environmentalism, hasn't always been considered a progressive cause, and there's nothing inherently liberal about artisanal cheese, or artisanal bikes--and, just as important, nothing inherently conservative about multinational corporations. Rod Dreher, a National Review contributor and the author of "Crunchy Cons," is ardently pro-organic and ardently anti-gay marriage. Victor Davis Hanson, the author of "Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea," is also the author of "Mexifornia," about the dangers posed by immigration. And one of the heroes of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" describes himself as a "Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmental-lunatic farmer." Part of the appeal of the localist-artisanal creed, for certain liberals and conservatives alike, is precisely that it's anti-cosmopolitan, anti-corporate, anti-progress--an alternative to the creative destruction of capitalism. It tugs against the shared assumptions of most Democrats and Republicans: that America's future is bright; that change is good.

Yeah! Right-wing Christian hippies unite! All three of us!