<![CDATA[Crunchy Culture: Witness the further deterioration of American political discourse, the rise of politics as fashion on the right. Here is a family apparently living right-wing according to left-wing values but still fixated on the evils of “lefties.”
By day he is a right-leaning pundit and opinion editor at the Dallas Morning News — grappling with his disappointment with how the war in Iraq is turning out. At night he comes home in a used 1993 Mercedes sedan with 109,512 miles on it, to live, like Thoreau at Walden, deliberately . (Oh, to hear him spill apologetically on about the car, how he didn’t mean to wind up driving something so un-crunchy, so perceptibly fat cat, but really, when you compare it value-wise to a used Honda, and anyhow, please note that the AC is always broken . . . roll down your window and feel that? It’s the cool breeze of intentional livin’.)
The Dreher family lives in a smallish, 1914 Craftsman bungalow near downtown Dallas — a contradiction to the exurb-centric, sprawly-mall Republican ways of the megalopolis that surrounds them.
“A house like this, in a lefty city?” Dreher asks. “We would never be able to afford it. But here? In ‘the hood’? We got this so cheap. We like it aesthetically. That’s not always valued here.”
So, now that we’re wearing our conservatism or liberalism like a, well, we’re wrapped in it like a flag, how can anyone conduct a political debate without it becoming just a personal attack? This development of a my-way-is-the-high-way because of the car I drive and the food I eat, not to mention the way I prepare it and how I educate my kids, approach to political orientation essentially inoculates politics from reasoned discussion of public issues. It was a disease on the left, too.
Marketing isn’t politics. Thought we all knew that by now.
Technorati Tags: democracy, politics, Republicans
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