You may be familiar with the “crunchy” disposition, which takes its name from the texture of the granola its adherents enjoy eating. My own exposure to the crunchies has been largely limited to the college campus, where they are a clique, a type, every bit as recognizable as, say, the frat boy or the fish-eyed “intellectual.” Like these other groups, the crunchies are differentiated by their lifestyle cues. These include a certain fondness for frisbee, organic farming, the out of doors, drum circles, teach-ins, burlap apparel, and hemp jewelry.

There is a crunchy politics, of course—a sort of bohemian, back-to-the-earth eco-sensitivity—but the politics are potted, de rigueur, a way to relate to peers. You hesitate to devote any serious thought to the opinions in the same way you might hesitate to applaud performing seals: After all, they’re just going through the motions.

Perhaps this assessment is unfair, but not if Rod Dreher’s self-indulgent, irretrievably awful new book is any indication. In Crunchy Cons, as the title suggests, he attempts to graft the crunchy ethic onto conservatism. His “crunchy conservatism,” I suppose, is only the latest contrived boutique conservatism to be inflicted on the American mind in the past few years. Remember compassionate conservatism? Or “South Park” conservatism? Crunchy conservatism is headed straight for the same garbage barge.

Dreher is unhappy with much of modern life, and he sees the encroachments of chaos everywhere. America is apparently in the teeth of “empty consumerist prosperity,”