PERHAPS A FIFTH COLUMN, BUT STILL BLUE STATERS :

Birkenstocked Burkeans : Confessions of a granola conservative. (Rod Dreher, July 12, 2002, National Review)

[David] Brooks told me that conservative writers just have to live with the fact that we share certain tastes with the predominantly liberal intellectual class. But if there's nothing to it, and the consumer choices people make are purely a function of social determinism, then it leaves no room for the person who purchases certain products simply because the products look good, taste good or offer superior value, despite costing more. It means accepting bad beer, lousy coffee, Top-40 radio, strip malls, and all popular manifestations of cheapness and ugliness as proof that One Is Not an Effete Liberal. And that's just as phony as anything the Bobos stand for.

Charles Murtaugh takes perverse pleasure in contrasting Mr. Dreher's opinion with ours, expressed last week, in I KNOW WHAT AMERICA'S THINKING, THE GARDENER TELLS ME that :

[A]t the NY Times, populism means getting together for group Sex in the City viewing parties and talking to all the real folks who drive your cabs or cut your lawn in the Hamptons and having a French impressionist ballet poster on your wall, just like all your friends have. But out here in America we watch NASCAR, wrestling, Baywatch, and baseball. We cut our own lawns. We drink canned beer, not wine. . . We think SUVs should be bigger. We own guns. We think Maxwell House is gourmet coffee and you should drink it black. We like Marty Stewart, not Martha Stewart. We salt our melons, butter our steaks, and drink whole milk. . . And, yes, we think singing fish are a hoot.

We accept his riposte and note the seeming contradiction. And were it the case that our taste for such things were merely affected in order to distinguish ourselves from liberals, he would have an entirely valid point. But Mr. Dreher is talking not about Red State conservatives here, but about that most unfortunate of creatures, the Blue State conservative, and not just any Blue State conservative, but an even more unlikely subset of intellectuals who happen to be conservative and to live in those Blue States :

The Granola Conservatives I know tend not to be wealthy, but labor in the creative and intellectual vineyards as writers, professors, and artists.

This being the case, Mr. Dreher appears to be precisely wrong--his tastes are socially determined--for the society he inhabits is not a conservative society, but a liberal one. Folks like Bill Buckley, Jonah Goldberg, John Derbyshire, John Podhoretz, Rich Lowry, and Mr. Dreher are residents of New York City or the surrounding metropolitan area. Heck, Mr. Buckley ran for mayor of New York and Mr. Lowry nearly did and New York is one pole, the other being LA, of the Axis of Blue. We can hardly be surprised then that they mostly share the tastes of those with whom they share a society.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 14, 2002 8:17 AM