Review of Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 288 pp. $13.95.

National Review didn’t pay much attention to the Summer of Love as it actually transpired in the middle months of 1967. The flagship journal of the conservative movement ran a rather addled essay that August comparing the flower children to the Adamites, an early Christian sect that believed it had reclaimed the sinless innocence of the first man. The magazine then stayed mostly mum until November, when an unsigned article wrote off the hippies as a dying fad. “For many the affair ended with the first cold wave,” the author declared. “For others, the irredeemable ones, it goes on, a hazy romance of poverty and degradation vainly seeking the lower depths of a society which permits all. When the last hippie dies, he will have been loved to death.”

The world must need more love, because the last hippie has yet to die. Forty years after that editorial appeared, we still have hippies and we still have National Review. We also have Rod Dreher, the former National Review writer best known for the cult hit Crunchy Cons. A jeremiad against the materialism and consumerism of the modern Right, Dreher’s book is a manifesto for—to quote its original subtitle—“Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives.” (Sorry, no Adamites.) In a series of profiles and personal stories, Dreher describes a few of the places, from the Slow Food movement to the revolt against modern architecture, where cultural conservatism and countercultural rebellion can coalesce after all.

It’s not as though the original Summer of Love was devoid of right-wingers. It’s just that, at a time when the Right was usually divided into “libertarian” and “traditionalist” tribes, it was the libertarians who were prone to wear their hair long and don beads. You didn’t have to be a hippie to be a libertarian, of course, but if you were a hippie, you were much more likely to be a lib than a trad. In A Generation Divided, her 1999 study of the ’60s Left and Right, the sociologist Rebecca Klatch notes that in the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, a “common joke” had it “that traditionalists wore colorless ties, sat straight, and prayed while libertarians wore necklaces and slurped their soup.” A few of the trads in Klatch’s study had some kind words for the dropouts—Alan MacKay, who would go on to serve on the board of Howard Phillips’s Conservative Caucus, said he agreed with the hippies about the “hypocrisy in American institutions”—but an overwhelming majority hated the love generation. By contrast, when Ayn Rand tried to disassociate herself from the libertarian movement, she derided them as “hippies of the right.” She never said anything like that about Russell Kirk.

But it is Kirk, the traditionalist who once wrote that “the devil was the original libertarian,” whom Dreher taps as “the pater-familias of all crunchy cons.” The most interesting thing about Dreher’s volume is not that it combines conservatism with the counterculture. It’s that it combines traditionalism with the counterculture, marrying two trends that seemed as they emerged in the postwar era to be opposites. What’s more, it does this in a way that makes sociological sense. His crunchy cons might not be dropping acid or living in communes, but those aren’t the only legacies of the hippies. When Dreher writes that “Small and Local and Old and Particular are to be preferred over Big and Global and New and Abstract,” he could be quoting Kirk. He could also be quoting the liner notes of a dusty Dylan LP.