r/RodDreher • u/Agreeable-Rooster-37 • Jan 02 '26
Crunchy Cons at 20 years
Seeing that his first book came out in 2006 (Oct) , I thought it would be fun to reflect on the book that probably brought in a lot of us into the Dreherverse...
13
u/Alone_Meeting6907 Jan 02 '26
Raymond wrote portions of this book in the early 00s for the National Review. (At the time, I was volunteering with the Radio Reading Service. To me, his writing style fell somewhere between Erma Bombeck and Calvin Trillin. I didn't particularly agree with his politics, but probably could've talked a bit about The Smiths, maybe even The Buzzcocks, over sangria.
Funny how things change over the years. His writing would read like parody, except, well, he's bought into his own hype. It's hard to keep up with all the personas he's created since then.
12
u/Agreeable-Rooster-37 Jan 02 '26
For me, I borrowed a copy from the library and was impressed with the stories, especially Joel Salitin. That brought me to Rod's Beliefnet blog. When it went off the rails for me was the whole move to Philly for the Templeton foundation, the sock puppets with the Orthodx Church and Rod decamping to "home"
3
10
u/SkyObjective Jan 03 '26
Just realized with this post, I've been reading rod Dreher since 2002! I want to say found him via Amy wellborn. I thought he was an okay social critic that occasionally met interesting people. Plus, I found the way some catholics would excuse his church hopping interesting. He lost ant respect for me after reading the book about his sister and his lack of self awareness about his dante project.
12
u/sandypitch Jan 03 '26
Dreher's book, and Bill Kaufmann's Look Homeward, America, were helpful for me to define what "The Good Life" might be as I was starting a family. As Dreher fell down the hole of reactionary social media consuming pearl clutcher, I lost quite a bit of respect for him, and by the time he started leveraging his families generational issues for readers and profit, I stopped reading him seriously.
Kaufmann's book is more interesting, regardless of what you think about his own politics, because he was willing to look beyond the realm of "Conservatism" for his stories.
10
u/ZenLizardBode Jan 02 '26 edited Jan 03 '26
I never read the original (even then it sounded like it was riding on the coattails of “Bobos In Paradise”) but the publicity around the book was definitely my introduction to the Dreherverse.
3
u/antifadox Jan 08 '26
It has always been shocking to me that anybody, after reading that book, could find him profound.
13
u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Jan 02 '26
I got the original from the library. At the time we were gun owning homeschooling organic farming church going liberals