Earlier, I promised to have some thoughts on the Crunchy Con Manifesto (sorry Mark, it just rolls off the tongue easier) so here they are, point by point.

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.
On its face, this seems like a very condescending statement. Yet that characteristic may go away when we define “conservative mainstream.” (Distinct from mainstream conservative.) The ordering of the words suggests to me that the manifesto is talking less about individual conservatives as conservative institutions. Specifically, I think they are talking about the “inside the Beltway” institutions like the Family Research Council, Heritage Foundation, etc. With that in mind, I think this is a starting point to the end assertion that conservatism has gotten too caught up in policy to the exclusion of other, more important things.

Read on to get a better sense of what I’m after…

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.
This point speaks to both individuals and institutions.
To the institutions…
For conservatives the end of money and power is to pass policy. Yet each of those will only take you so far. Moreover, when you trade principles for these you end up losing. Rod Dreher expands on how placing your emphasis on accumulating power weakens you in the long run when he notes that, “if we as a movement were sufficiently concerned with what we ought to be about, instead of the perks of power, we wouldn’t have this fiscal mess, and Abramoff wouldn’t have become such a power broker.” Incidentally, this emphasis on the need to debate ideas reminds me of this article by WFB protege Austin Bramwell.

To the individuals:
The manifesto urges us to take matters into our own hands. Drop the materialism, it urges, and focus your lives on the permenant things. To paraphrase Austin Ruse’s speech at the 2006 Students for Life Conference, “Doing good is infinitely more important than living well.” Indeed, point 10 is an explicit call to do as much.

3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
This is not a new thing for conservatism. As Mark notes in his first paragraph here, conservatism at its beginnings was tired of industrialization and the growth of bigger business. It’s not worth rehashing it.

4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.
Those arguing against the CC position have asserted that this is a three legged stool, and that one falls without the others. While its true that each impacts the other, to give each equal weight strikes me as absurd.

Let’s take the relationship between culture and politics first. While you could write books on the matter, let’s suffice it to say that politics are ultimately shaped by culture far more than culture is shaped by politics. For example, as a general rule you simply do not have a conservative elected by an overwhelmingly liberal culture (see NY). Yet even under a government that is overwhelmingly permissive or even repressive of a culture you can still see it flourish. Early Christianity flourished despite a repressive Roman government. That’s because a devout culture (as the manifesto calls us to) will suffer impermenant things for the Permenant Things. In contrast, politics bends entirely to whoever holds power, no matter how temporarily.

Now to say that economics impacts culture as much as culture does economics is absurd. We tried an economic ban on something (alcohol) but when the culture wanted it, it got it. In contrast, when a culture doesn’t want something (pork in a Jewish enclave in NY) economics are force to bend.

5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
I think the manifesto is out to defend our connection to the land. It is defending the value of the family farm as an institution in our culture against the economic sense of the factory farm. Moreover, the call for restraint as a guiding rule in life is as old as Christianity’s condemnation of gluttony.

Tomorrow: Manifesto points 6-10.

Alex is also going to be making a post in reference to this, but I so loathe the term “Cruncy” Conservatism I wish to reword it a bit.

First I think we can say that we can probably drop all the monikers in front of it. Truth be told, true conservatism is for the most part extremely skeptical about the excesses of capitalism. The interesting fact is that American conservatism, the type espoused by Reagan, Toomey, Pence, etc is a mix of the classical liberalism of continental Europe (free trade, capitalism, free speech, etc) with the Anglo (British, Irish, Scotch, etc) rural conservatism that was so weary of industrialization.

Its an interesting mix that sometime leads to the cross currents we see in American Conservatism today. The libertarian wing draws more strongly from the continental classical liberals, whereas the “Crunchy” or traditionalist wing draws more heavily from the rural conservatives in Britain, Ireland, etc. I myself as a Burkean draw more from the rural anti-industrialists. As I posted awhile back about “political” vs “cultural” conservatism, this is a mere extension of that.

Capitalism is good at providing for people in more abundance than any other system we know, but it is not perfect. The problem with so many libertoids is how they elevate the market to God. The politics of prescription (Burke’s description of conservatism) demands a balance to all things in life, with the end goal of allowing the citizens to have the best chance to live the “good life.” The good life doesn’t mean material abundance, it means abundance of happiness and virtue. Capitalism leads to abundance but not virtue, which is why it is so important for there to be social institutions such as the Church that mitigate against the greed incentive that is a neccesary evil of the system.

Capitalism is a tremendously succesful system when coupled with these strong institutions. It can lead to abundant happiness and virtue, but it is just a tool of policy, not a God. It can not solve our every problem, nor would we want it to. In the end, conservatism marches on as it always has as a defense of the wisdom of our ancestors, a reform of the current system, and the knowledge that man is fallen but not forlorne.

Here

Funniest thing I’ve seen in, well… awhile.

Bartlett makes an excellent case here as to why it’s hard to believe Bush will actually follow through with this entitlement reform seeing how he has failed to deliver on Social Security and tax reform all while having a Republican controlled legislature, even. What I find amusing about this reform is that Bush feels the need to create a committee whose function will be to study the problem of entitlement spending. As if this needs to be studied. As if we don’t already know the problem. This is another waste of government resources to produce another result, that based on history, Bush will just ignore anyway.

One of the more amusing lines in President Bush’s State of the Union Address last month was his call for yet another commission to study the problem of entitlement spending. Entitlements are programs that do not require annual appropriations. The money is paid out automatically to anyone who meets the eligibility criteria. Spending cannot be capped because people have a legal right to their benefits. Hence, spending for entitlements can only be reduced by changing the basic law applying to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

There are two reasons why the Bush proposal cannot be taken seriously. First, he has shown contempt for the whole idea of federal commissions. He appointed a Social Security commission early in his presidency, which produced a solid, credible report. But its work was utterly ignored when Bush started his failed Social Security reform effort last year. A key reason for that failure, I believe, is that the effort was all speeches and sound bites, with no substance — not even a formal proposal that could be studied and analyzed.

More recently, Bush appointed a tax reform commission. It spent most of 2005 holding hearings and issued a report with options for fundamentally restructuring the income tax. Members of the commission assumed that he would announce a tax reform proposal in the budget or State of the Union Address. They were deeply disappointed that Bush simply ignored their work. According to press reports, he didn’t even thank the commission members for it.

The rest of the article is here

There I was, sitting in the geology library (supposedly studying) and wearing my Chaco sandals when I came across a new blog dedicated to Crunchy Conservatism.

It is a fascinating read, and looks like it will be one of the best blogs NR has rolled out in the last year or so. I know I’ve added it to my aggregator, and so should you.

UPDATE:
I should have included this the first time, but here’s the Crunchy Con Manifesto. More thoughts on it later…

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.”

10. Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.

I think we can all rest a little easier now that Germany is starting to get serious regarding the Iranian threat. Economic sanctions are exactly what we need to defuse this nuclear bomb. (sarcasm attempted) And though a lot of what Iran, via Ahmadinejad, has said is unspeakable, we are sure to see worse if this problem isn’t addressed seriously by the sophists of the EU & UN.