After September 11, 2001, Rod Dreher, then a writer for National Review and now an editor at the Dallas Morning News, wrote a series of articles exploring how some conservatives were rejecting the free market and individual liberty espoused by Republicanism and were returning to an older tradition of human-scale living and traditional ways of production and consumption. Based on his colleagues’ comments that his enthusiasm for an organic market in Brooklyn was “too lefty,” Mr. Dreher began to identify himself as a “crunchy con,” that is, a conservative who lived outside the mainstream of the Republican Party.

At first, the term sounds like a meaningless hook. Defining and redefining the various right-wing groups has long been a conservative pastime, and so it would be tempting to ignore this book as a publishing exaggeration. That would be a mistake. “Crunchy Cons” (Crown Forum, 259 pages, $24), even with its weaknesses, may be a clarion call for conservatives who have come to realize that the most important things in life cannot be found either in politics or the marketplace, and that what passes for political discourse is largely empty of meaning.

This is no academic treatise but rather a look at what America has become since the revolutions of the 1960s and the Reagan era. The ethos of “do your own thing,” promoted by 1960s radicals and latter-day libertines, has been combined with a capitalist system all too happy to separate people from traditional commitments and to remake them instead into atomistic consumers tossed amid the “creative destruction” of the marketplace. The results have been broken families, destroyed neighborhoods, environmental degradation, and neglect of the duties one generation owes to another.

Mr. Dreher recounts his own journey to crunchy conservatism and those of others who have opted out, in various ways, from the dominant culture. We see here organic farmers, home schoolers, natural farmers, devotees of traditional urban architecture, and others who “don’t buy into the consumerist and individualistic mainstream of American life.” Mr. Dreher organizes his chapters thematically, with subjects such as “Home, “Food,” and “Education.” Each chapter is centered around Mr. Dreher’s own experiences, or those of others of a similar disposition. Thus, in the “Home” chapter, he describes how he and his wife selected a home in an urban Dallas neighborhood rather than a suburb, so they would not have to rely on a car and where the neighborhood architecture lent itself to living on a human scale.

The results are impressionistic, but no less impressive. Mr. Dreher has tapped into an undercurrent of conservative (mostly Republican) dissidents, who have more in common with those few remaining hippies than they do with the mainstream Republican juggernaut. And at times, Mr. Dreher sounds just as harsh as any liberal critic of the free-market utopia promised by the party’s leaders: “Consumerism has become our religion, and it is difficult to identify anything within the contemporary Republican Party that stands against the dogma of the Market Supreme.” His jeremiads against the cult of efficiency are likewise worthwhile: Unless we know to what ends our economy is directed, efficiency is an empty word.

The Democrats, too, have bought into the same false promises of progress and materialism as the Republicans, with the added liability of having positions on issues such as abortion and biotech issues that do not endear them to crunchy cons who may otherwise approve of their position on, say, the environment. The appeal of Mr. Dreher’s book, however, is that it largely eschews politics. His crunchy cons, generally, are just trying to live their lives, sometimes in accord with what they perceive as a religious vocation, and sometimes not.

This crunchy conservatism is not new, of course; there is a long tradition of conservative critique of materialism and consumerism. Moreover, left-wing writers from Christopher Lasch to George McGovern to – gasp – a former president, Jimmy Carter, all echo, in varying degrees, Mr. Dreher’s concerns. Mr. Dreher has done his homework, and he names Russell Kirk, the founder of traditionalist conservatism and a figure rarely praised by the official conservative “movement,” as the godfather of crunchy cons. Kirk wrote his books from his family home in rural Michigan, and he had little patience for a conservatism that promoted an uncontrolled free market, or “liberty” unconstrained by morality or tradition. Mr. Dreher has traded in Kirk’s trademark suit and watch fob for Birkenstocks and shopping at Whole Foods, but the effect is the same.

But how real is all this? While Mr. Dreher is obviously excited about the kindred spirits he has found, there are limits to crunchy conservatism, and it is too early to tell whether it is a stable trend. For one thing, the elements of crunchiness Mr. Dreher points to, such as gentrified architecture and organic foods, are largely made possible in this generation only by the larger materialist culture that has enabled smaller artisan producers to survive. In other words, without all those hedge fund managers, no Whole Foods. Other areas of life that most Americans would consider important – health care, for example – remain untouched by Mr. Dreher’s analysis. We do not see, for example, people making their own clothes or flocking to open small farms.

This is not surprising, of course, as Mr. Dreher is not advocating a wholescale rejection of modern convenience. However, without a more nuanced defense of the crunchy con viewpoint, his assertions become little more than matters of taste. Everyone agrees that neighborhoods are important; if I choose to live in a prefab McMansion and spend weekends at the country club, what is it to you? Mr. Dreher wants to say that such choices are somehow less authentic or more harmful in the long run than others, and we may well agree; but assertion is not argument, and it is unlikely to persuade those who do not share Mr. Dreher’s predilections.

The risk of Mr. Dreher’s crunchy conservatism is its potential to become just another “lifestyle choice” that the market is perfectly happy to satisfy. Rock music can be used to sell cars, so why not country music to sell the crunchy con lifestyle? The rejection of (some types of) consumerism is itself inseparable from a free market that makes consumerism possible. Crunchy cons may end up little different from David Brooks’s bourgeois bohemians, who go barely mentioned here. Crunchy cons would have their virtue and still live in enclaves of liberal cities that provide the crunchy amenities unavailable, say, in East Coast rust-belt towns.

“Crunchy Cons” has jump-started a serous conversation among young conservatives who are discovering, once again, that happiness lies not in Mammon or power but in brightening the corner where you are.

Mr. Russello, the editor of the University Bookman, last wrote for these pages on Todd Gitlin. He lives in Brooklyn.