I linked yesterday to several posts, reviews, and articles about "Crunchy Cons" (the cult) and Crunchy Cons (the book). Matt Peterson of The Claremont Institute points me to a book review that I had not seen. It's by Douglas Jeffrey, and it appears in the Summer 2006 issue of The Claremont Review of Books. It's also available online, here. I commend the review. Here's a taste:
In appearing to promote an extension of the social safety net to guarantee the ability to home-school, he [Rod Dreher, the author of Crunchy Cons] does not acknowledge, much less engage, the considerable scholarship over the past 40 years suggesting that the welfare state has proved destructive of the family, both here and (more dramatically) in parts of Western Europe. Nor does he betray cognizance of the school-choice movement into which Milton Friedman and others have poured so much effort in recent decades. The irresponsibility that plagues this book reaches one of its crescendos when he writes: "What kind of an economy should we have, then? I don't know; I'm a writer, not an economist" (emphasis added).
