The T-Word
[NRO Staff  03/16 10:43 AM]

An e-mail:

We keep hearing that CCism is not just a fetishization of certain 'crunchy' lifestyle choices, but rather an effort to focus on the transcendentals.

However, perhaps people would mis-understand the crunchy cause less if there was actually a little more focus on transcendentals on the blog itself. Instead, we seem to get a lot of pronouncements (admitedly most of them from Caleb) about how moving away from your ancestral home is almost always selfish, parents who put their kids in daycare are nearly always negligent, and those who live in suburbs (perhaps in search of larger houses and larger yards) are a bunch of consumerists who don't care about community.

Now, I have the feeling that the vast majority of 'mainstream conservatives' at least those who are 'social conservatives' actually care a great deal about transcendentals, and would be willing to hear a calm explanation of how certain ways of life they haven't considered (such as moving into an older neighborhood or buying free range food) would tie in to those transcentendals.

But if all the blog is interested in doing is huffily demanding whether those who disagree with it on architecture or home size are sufficiently against abortion and gay marriage (an odd accusation, considering that from at least one comment on the blog it is apparently 'crunchy' to vote for pro-choice liberals if they're sufficiently 'pro-environment') then all it will achieve is to convince mainstream conservatives (and many 'crunchy' ones) that the writers are hot heads.