I’m about to take a nap because I was up most of the night working on the mag piece and woke up early to do CNN. But my short answer on this crunchy con versus metro con thing is pretty straightforward. I think metropolitan conservatism actually describes a real, longstanding cultural distinction among conservatives. I don’t think it necessarily describes or seeks to describe a new ideology, cause or movement. Rather, I think urban versus rural is a useful distinction, relied upon by historians, sociogists et al. to describe real differences in sentiment. As I recall Derb’s column he was making the point that “blue state” conservatives find common cause and common arguments with “red state” conservatives even if they have different lifestyles.
The crunchy con thing is almost the exact reverse: a “movement” — real or imagined — seeking to distinguish itself from mainstream conservatism because of ones lifestyle. Rod’s crunchy conservatism claims to be something new, something distinct something which doesn’t fit neatly or comfortably under the label conservative (though I note that he now cites the Southern Agrarians as UR-crunchy cons, a point I made originally to demonstrate that what Rod calls crunchy conservatism is in fact not new).
For all of the reasons we hashed out before, I don’t buy CCism and I don’t really like it. And, if Derb were to do the same thing with his metro-con thing I would reject that too. But as far as I know, Derb still calls himself a plain old conservative and only got into this metropolitan conservatism thing in order to explain himself when severely pressed by a pushy woman. Hardly the begining of the revolution if you ask me. My apologies if I sound too cranky, me very tired.