Dreher didn’t invent this social category. He put a label on something that has been evolving for a while. American subcultures tend to bleed into each other, influencing one another in unexpected ways, even if they initially seem to be antagonists. And then, like other married couples, they start to look alike: They can peer back at their youthful selves and suddenly see resemblances that were invisible at the time.

The hippies, like the conservatives, can be divided into libertarian and traditionalist tendencies. The libertarians said things like “follow your bliss,” “do your own thing,” and “we are as gods and might as well get good at it.” At the same time, from the folk music revival of the ’50s and early ’60s to the rural bohemia of the ’70s—a stronghold of homeschooling, homesteading, and other activities celebrated in Dreher’s book—there always was a strain in the counterculture that wanted to preserve the past and restore lost traditions. By 1970 or so, the paradigmatic hippies were not urban runaways eating acid at a lightshow but a troupe of would-be farmers heading to the countryside. On their soundtrack, instead of some endless psychedelic jam, you could hear a series of country-rock songs by Dylan, the Byrds, the Band. Granted, many of those farmers might never manage to get anything to grow. But that was true of some of the Right’s traditionalists, too. Call them hi-fi agrarians.

Indeed, by 1975, in Up from Communism, the historian John Patrick Diggins could casually cap off a discussion of the I’ll Take My Stand crowd by saying “it was not the Old Left but the young student New Left, with its pastoral idyll of small self-sufficient communities pursuing happiness through the joys of soil labor and craftsmanship, that would raise again the questions of decentralization that had occupied the Agrarians. Technology’s children would find in rock music and drugs what the older conservatives had claimed for poetry—imagination, mystery, and the inviolability of consciousness against the threat of science.” Diggins may use the phrase “New Left,” but the picture he paints is more Whole Earth Catalog than SDS. Over the next couple of decades, as the dilettantes moved back to the city and the serious homesteaders learned to live off the soil, the people in that picture would intermingle with the antimodernists of the Right. Both found increasingly similar ways to reject industrial food, industrial education, and industrial medicine. (I am reminded of a conversation with a friend who was studying to be a midwife. Her study group, she told me, included three Protestant fundamentalists, one Catholic, one Orthodox Jew—and three pagans. They got along reasonably well, at least until one of the goddess-worshippers casually mentioned that she’d had three abortions.)

The libertarian and traditionalist wings of the hippie movement engaged in a similar interplay. The Whole Earth Catalog, for example, managed to reflect both sensibilities simultaneously, invoking the archetypes of both the cowboy (mobile, individualistic, settling a new frontier) and the Indian (rooted, communal, respectful of his ancestors). The Catalog readers’ revolt against the centralized, bureaucratic segments of society was driven both by an individualist interest in shaping their own fate and a desire to strengthen the little platoons that rely on convention and cooperation rather than compulsion. (Just to confuse matters further, the Stanford historian Fred Turner makes a compelling case in 2006’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture that the Catalog and its ethos were heavily influenced by the very technocratic Cold War institutions that both the libertarians and the traditionalists were rebelling against.)

Dreher doesn’t explore this history, but as he profiles his fellow crunchies you can glimpse it in the background. In a chapter on religion, an Eastern Orthodox crunchy con tells Dreher that “Orthodoxy attracts a tremendous number of what you might call ‘alternative-lifestyle’ people. We see a lot of former hippies.” Apparently, the same spiritual seeking that led young hipsters to Westernized Buddhism, the Jesus Movement, or est sometimes brought them to traditional faiths as well. Another figure in Dreher’s book, this one an Orthodox Jew, sums up the last path: “When you see that the world as presented by pop culture can’t add up to anything worthwhile, the logical next step is to look into the wealth of a religious or spiritual tradition. And you know what? It might as well be a real one.”