By Dylan Matthews
Reihan Salam claims Animal Collective for Rod Dreher and the Crunchy Cons based on the lyrics to "My Girls". Fair enough; the last verse ("I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things like a social status / I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls") certainly seems to point in that direction. That said, the last line of the first verse - "I only want a proper house" - indicates a belief in universal home ownership that I think Dreher would find distasteful. He has written, somewhat callously, that the financial crisis came about because "our good intentions about expanding home ownership to more Americans led us to foolishly overextend our financial system." While Panda Bear's modest ambitions for his adobe home jibe well with crunchy conservatism, I don't know that Dreher would approve of him getting a home at all. In any case, I think we can all agree that Merriweather Post Pavillion is best interpreted as a work of economic policy analysis and that we should reorient the stimulus package around it. Larry Summers, Avey Tare - get on it.
