With climate-change legislation working through Congress, conservatives and liberals have more or less lined up on predictable sides to oppose or favor, but historically the divisions haven’t been so neat. Indeed, one wonders why conservatives gave the environmentalist movement over to liberals and the left during the 1960s and 70s.
For there is a long strain of conservatism that aligns well with environmentalist thinking. It might be termed the “agrarian” lineage, the thinking that favors the yeoman farmer over agribusiness, the small businessman over the factory owner, the village over the city, and small capitalism over big capitalism (so to speak). This version of conservatism claims that capitalism in its largest forms — the corporation, conglomerate, monopoly, investment bank — breaks down local customs and breaks up families, destroys traditions and fosters rootlessness. It pushes industrialization and urbanization, along with the vice and alienation that go with them (the Underground Man couldn’t exist in a small town).
Plus, it devastates the land and water and air. This is the connection of conservatism with conservation, and why the right let go of environmentalism is a puzzling question.
Was it a cultural thing, that is, in the 1960s environmentalism came to be associated with hippies and peaceniks?
Was it that free-market libertarians triumphed over agrarians, arguing that environmentalism simply cost too much and leads to too much government regulation?
Whatever the cause, it was a tactical mistake, for we are all environmentalists now. The serious questions about it today aren’t ideological. They’re practical and policy-oriented, in other words, a matter of where you draw the lines on growth, greenspace, wilderness protection . . . No politician wants to stand up and say, “I’m against environmentalism.” The last bastion of that hard line has been, “I think global warming is a hoax,” but that assertion, too, is fading with time.
A few years ago, columnist Rod Dreher tried to reclaim the tradition with his “Crunchy Cons” campaign, but it didn’t seem to get much traction outside of some tolerant smiles within the conservative intelligentsia. According to Dreher, crunchy cons read Edmund Burke but buy organic food. They don’t like chain stores or mass culture, and they admire homeschoolers and small churches.
Dreher has compiled a manifesto at _National Review’_s web site, which includes:
“2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.
3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.
5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship — especially of the natural world — is not fundamentally conservative.
6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.
7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.
8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.”
They are, in a word, countercultural. With liberalism having become the cultural doctrine of the moment, and conservatism having drifted away from its roots in respect for local norms and traditions, crunchy cons have no home on the political map and no resting point in the cultural sphere. (Dreher and his wife shop in an organic co-op but carry their vegetables in a National Review tote bag.)
It’s too bad. As part of the repair of the Republican Party and of conservatism in general, conservatives would be wise to remove any ideological meaning from global warming, pesticides, organic broccoli, recycling . . .
