Jonah, I take your point(s), but I disagree somewhat. Using labels (“punky con,” “crunchy con,” “religious right,” etc.) is a useful shorthand with which to discuss differences — philosophical, temperamental, and strategic — among various members of the conservative tribe. There are some serious differences between (say) Virginia Postrel and Gary Bauer, which is why the labels “libertarian” and “religious conservative” mean something. “Crunchy con” refers to people who consider themselves to be political conservatives, but who tend to dissent from the conservative mainstream on issues of aesthetics (art, architecture), the environment, morality (in many cases they’re religious conservatives, but not all cases), and in general, man’s proper relationship to the natural world (e.g., stewardship, rather than dominion). Sometimes the crunchy-con view on a given issue looks left-ish; but I’ve found that crunchy-cons can better be understood as paleo-cons without the fixation on race, and without the foreign-policy isolationism. Anyway, I don’t want to go into the whole crunchy debate again. I simply want to point out that labels, while by definition limiting, mean something, and are indispensable in discussion factionalism within any political movement as broad as contemporary American conservatism. Almost 40 years ago, “Goldwater conservatives” stood within the broad stream of the conservative movement, but also apart from it in important ways — ways that would, in time, become more mainstream within conservatism. Would you claim that the appellation “Goldwater conservative” was pointless, misleading or harmful?