That’s a fair point. I suppose I just don’t see that it distinguishes crunchy cons from any other sort of “crunchies”. To me, practicing “conservatism of place” and “proportion” is a necessary condition to be a real conservative, but not a sufficient condition. And as regards “virtue”, crunchies of all stripes try to practice it, but often define it quite liberally. If not for his pro-life and traditional-marriage stance, can we assume Rod would self-identify as a conservative?

As for the emphasis on “reconciliation”, I think the comments section of Rod’s post on this topic essentially proves my point. The general tone, which Rod also partakes of (and is influenced by): “We don’t need people like John Savage because they want everything to be ‘polarized’ (Franklin Evans), disrupt the ‘common ground’ (naturalmom), etc.” The focus of the criticism of me, and I’m no longer surprised these days, was not that my views were wrong; it was that I was being mean, polarizing, or intolerant of the way that Rod called himself a conservative while arguably not measuring up to a standard I was setting.

Whereas I thought much of the rationale for even having a crunchy conservative movement was that American culture was so degraded that it was about time to put up more fences and walls to separate ourselves from corrupting influences. My understanding was that we were to separate from the leftist-dominated society and media, which would certainly preclude “reconciliation” with the Left. We were to agree with a certain type of leftist only on the idea of separating from each other. “Tolerance” in any sort of liberal sense was not to be a crunchy conservative value, as I understood things. Leftists are in the habit of preaching “tolerance”, and then stabbing conservatives in the back. Rod seems to be losing sight of that fact. And no one can really tell him he is threatening to become a heretic to crunchy conservatism by doing so — it’s viewed as his movement. Those would be my main complaints about the direction that crunchy conservatism is going.

And yet, Saint Obama’s current and completely unabashed membership in a black nationalist church is treated as a non-story by the “news” media. I only wish I could say that this is surprising, but nevertheless, it’s still absolutely sickening.

Since you quoted Brooks, compare it to Boboism. Basically, we ought to be able to perceive that Bobos are a real cultural fact while still being free to judge them either well or ill. Rod goes too far down the advocacy route.