Crunchy Con Day

If you haven't heard, today (my son Patrick's birthday) is Cruncy Con Day. Ron Dreher's book which is publishing today which I believe ushers a change of the conservative alliance which created the modern conservative movement. The conservative alliance combined various streams in conservatism (libertarianism, traditionalism, hawks) into a combined force to resist communism. Well, last I heard the Berlin Wall came down and its time for the conservative movement to realize that trads will no longer be considered blindly in the alliance.

Here is Ron's Cruncy-Con manifesto which would appeal to most distributists:

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

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.

9. We share Russell Kirk's conviction that the institution most essential to conserve is the family.

Dreher is a wake-up call for those who don't consconsider themselveselves traditionalists under the banner of the term "Crunchy-Con". I don't know of the traditionalistalist is as good as it used to be. I prefer the term "neotrad" myself but I don't know if all these different terms are just slicing the differences a little too thin.

Anyhow Ron's blog on Crunchy Con comes from the article he orginally wrote for the National Review