I'm a grindcore conservative

When I was in high school, before I became a full blown film fanatic, I was a music fan. So were most of my friends. One of our favorite pastimes was to categorize and sub-categorize and classify every single possible variation of the various blends of rock music we listened to. There’d be metal, grind metal, death metal, black metal, grindcore, hardcore, grungecore, metalcore, hair metal, operatic metal, doom metal, wank metal, even murdercore. (Don’t ask me what that is.) And those are just the metal variants (and truthfully, not even all of them). It was musical narcissism: we wanted to define and label, to the nth degree, every possible permutation of what we liked.

Little did I know that the conservative movement I’d join as a young adult would bear at least one major similarity to the extreme metal scene of my youth. Not only are there mainstream conservatives, paleoconservatives, neoconservatives, religious conservatives, libertarians, compassionate conservatives, the dreaded crunchy conservatives, and so forth, there are a slew of as of yet not fully developed conservative flavors that I refuse to even mention. Now Rich Lowry adds to the pile of subgroup nomenclature with this post over at the Corner:

Jed Babbin has a response to my “To Hell with Them” Hawks piece here. He says he's not a “To Hell with Them” Hawk, but an “Endgame Conservative.” Andy McCarthy also addresses the piece here--and he is not happy with the “To Hell with Them” Hawk label either. Derb, bless him, is perfectly happy to own up to the label (although he thinks it's too clunky), and will have a mighty blast at my piece up tomorrow. I will respond at some point after we finish the issue we are putting to bed right now. But while we're quibbling over labels, let me say that I'm not a “neo-Wilsonian,” as Babin says, but a “neo-realist” (Stanley Kurtz is the other one, in case you're keeping score at home).

These days, you can’t just be a conservative. You have to preface the word with a book’s worth of prefixes, like titled-aristocracy, and then, if you’re so inclined, mention any slight differences you may have with your chosen tribe. There’s a certain pleasure in it, of course, for all of us who spend a large portion of our time parsing out tiny differences in ideology and approach to policy, but there’s also a danger here that we’ll spend so much time labeling and classifying what we believe that we won’t actually get anything done. I think this is most apparent in the Crunchy Con blog, a niche of the web so exhaustively nitpicky in its attempts to battle over every little theoretical in and out of their club I can barely read it. Perhaps more important though, is that it seems to me to be a sign of rising disunity on the right that we increasingly define ourselves by our divisions and differences than by what we share. Are we headed toward a left-styled interest-group coalition? This pro-life libertarian certainly hopes not.