Rod of Arc
In his most recent post donkey punching the GOP, Rod Dreher draws his line in the sand, pokes his finger in the dike, and makes his stand in the pass at Thermopylae:
I am not a libertarian; if anything, I’m a Red Tory, or a Christian Democrat in the European sense. But ours is not a culture where Red Toryism or Christian Democracy makes much sense. It might have at one time, but not anymore. I have been thinking for a couple of years now that if I’m going to protect my religious liberty rights (the most important right, in my view), I’m going to have to figure out how to do so within a libertarian framework.
So here we have Dreher's latest branding: no longer the impossible to sell Crunchy Con, he has now burst forth transcendentally from that crunchy chrysalis to become the Jean D'Arc standing between you and the lime eaters ready to strip you of your religious liberty.
First question(s): How much relief and confidence does Rod's new stance instill in you? Enough to overlook his _______ (fill in the blank)?
Second question(s): Clearly in our current environment this is a gambit with potential. If you yourself wouldn't follow Rod to the barricades, who do you see as his most likely market and followers?
Final question(s): If your individual liberty ends up getting discounted and falling somewhere behind your religious liberty, are you still okay with having your religious options preserved for you by some non-individual-you religious group (the alternative to your own individual choice)? Might be the religious group you belong to now. Might not.
Oh...and where would you look to politics and in particular any of the political parties in all of this?
Funny. He sheds his rCatholicism in 2006. Then he ditches his deep aversion to the suburbs in 2010. Now he's accepting the libertarian framework and figuring out how to defend his religious liberties in the midst of one.
ReplyDeleteStill no Benedict Option. Or maybe "figur[ing] out how to [defend religious liberty] within a libertarian framework" is the new definition of the Benedict Option?
Well, let's see, Pauli. If your highest value is religious liberty and you reject both that child-raping Catholic Church with their statistically gay priests he reiterated 3 times AND politics and the public square as well, where does that leave the trusting follower?
DeleteBuilding a church in the backyard, I guess. Right beside the moonshine still.
DeletePauli, you just made me think of this.
DeleteWhat is it about Dreher that always reminds us of scenes from comedy movies? I remember that originally the concept of Crunchy Conservatism put me in mind of scenes from Waiting for Guffman and What's Eating Gilbert Grape.
DeleteKeith, there are and will be no followers, because there is nothing to follow. Sure, there are those who "follow" Dreher simply to read affirmation of their own tastes (Palin/Cruz conservatives are icky, churches are icky unless in Europe or in the woods, foodie wannabes, literary confabs, etc.). But they're not asked to change anything about their own lives, or even encouraged to beyond reading Dante. Hey, Franklin Evans (pagan from BeliefNet days) got to use that damn ice hammer of Dreher's and get his picture on the blog -- he didn't have to change anything.
DeleteOur nation is currently being "transformed" by the most liberal segment of Democrats on the political spectrum, yet Dreher wants us to believe (via this ventriloquist's dummy, as you put it, Keith) that the problem is that the GOP that has "given up on America"? And that "[t]heir idea of America ... [is] a lone family, left alone by government and everyone else, in the woods with their guns"? How mis-informed or fraudulent, take your pick, must one be to write (regurgitate) such a thing.
ReplyDeleteI'll give the dummy the benefit of the doubt, and call him mis-informed. Dreher, on the other hand, is fraudulent -- he's using this just as a chance to put "Has the GOP Given Up on America?" in a headline with a photo of a sunken Lady Liberty.
The fraud is made obvious by Dreher's going on for paragraphs on how the GOP's focus on "maximal individual liberty" (as if!) is a bad thing leading to all sorts of ills. Yet his personal response is that he himself needs to run away with the libertarian circus? What the hell? (Oh, I forgot, perfect segue to B.O.)
So to answer your questions:
1. None, of course.
2. Rod's not going to the barricades. He's never gone to the barricades for anything. He just wants someone else to pay for others to go to the barricades so he can write about it.
3. Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2 make 4 -- all else follows from that. Individual liberty can never fall behind religious liberty -- if you have religious liberty, you have individual liberty, and if you don't have religious liberty, you have no liberty at all.
Oh...and: Given the totalitarian left that is pressing its boot heel against our throats today, we could use more than a little libertarianism just to get some breathing room.
This has always been the way of Dreher. If the country is going to the dogs it's the fault of the republicans/conservatives. It is never acknowledged that the liberals have anything to do with it at all, even though they are the ones hurling thousands of large boulders over the ramparts.
DeleteLet's keep in mind that it was Rod's sister Ruthie who embraced the trans-individualistic community of her home town, not Rod, employing herself as that most selfless of community contributors, a grade school teacher.
DeleteRod, OTOH, took off as fast as his pudgy little individualistic legs could carry him on his individualistic quest for fame and fortune. And, upon returning home, he immediately found himself in the same position of mutual communal loathing that he left.
His extra-individual connections today, such as they are, are courtesy of the cyber-molecular chemistry of the internet - pen pals on steroids. And, in the case of his blog, only pen pals who submit to the rules of his inner world: "Hey, Pauli, loved your letter. You didn't mind, did you, that I rewrote one of your paragraphs to tighten it up, then mashed in my own NFK at the end to correct what you mistakenly wrote?"
Even stark Randian Objectivism would be a cleansing bath from the bizarre demography of mating dung beetles or whatever this poor dude seems to be trapped within.
Keith, there will always be Casella and those moonlit nights in Tuscany...
DeleteWhat else should we expect from NPR's favorite "Conservative"? Jonathan Carpenter
ReplyDeleteQuiz: This is the beginning of what document? (Feel free to use a search engine.)
ReplyDeleteA sense of the dignity of the human person has been impressing itself more and more deeply on the consciousness of contemporary man, and the demand is increasingly made that men should act on their own judgment, enjoying and making use of a responsible freedom, not driven by coercion but motivated by a sense of duty. The demand is likewise made that constitutional limits should be set to the powers of government, in order that there may be no encroachment on the rightful freedom of the person and of associations. This demand for freedom in human society chiefly regards the quest for the values proper to the human spirit. It regards, in the first place, the free exercise of religion in society....
But of course.
DeleteCall me callow, but I've increasingly come under the impression that Rod's entire world view if not his theology as well is reducible to wanting a strong man like Vladimir Putin to stand bare-chested athwart his teenage buttocks as he lies there on that eternal high school field trip to keep all transgressors at bay. Oh, and to smite said buttocks smartly with a good peeled Russian birch switch if Rod should stray into thinking naughty thoughts himself. And if that's good enough for Rod, why not everyone else?
This demand for freedom in human society chiefly regards the quest for the values proper to the human spirit.
DeleteThis must be re-emphasized in these days in which we hope to break the chains of over-aggressive government. One must not confuse license with liberty. Being free to become a heroin addict is not liberty -- there is no fundamental right to do evil. Liberty is indeed the freedom to pursue "values proper to the human spirit". Or the unalienable right, endowed by our Creator, to the pursuit of happiness.
Dreher's stupid post that is the subject of this post makes that very error. He considers SSM to be an "expansion of liberty", and sees the question as being one of how to moderate these liberty rights of the individual, "for the common good" you know.
Rather, the answer is instead a proper understanding of what liberty is and what liberty isn't. Sadly, this has been an uphill battle since Roe v. Wade when the Court found a liberty interest in the evil of abortion.
P.S. And yes, thanks Pauli for making me search for the source of that passage. It is good to be reminded of that.
He considers SSM to be an "expansion of liberty",
DeleteIndicative of the sort of silliness you expect from libertarians, not soi-disant red tories.
Call me callow, but I've increasingly come under the impression that Rod's entire world view if not his theology
DeleteI'll offer he's an abnormally other-directed man. His 'ideology' is a series of performances, an expression of alternating states of embarrassment and intense resentment. The personal is the political in his case.
His post is unusual. One of his shticks is to start with "A friend employed in [insert trade here] writes that..." The 'friend' is usually described in terms rendering him authoritative on some question and relates something congruent with what RD has been saying all along. This time, the 'friend' is actually named, so I guess they are not all fictional.
ReplyDeleteOther than persuading Congress to dismantle the Office of Economic Opportunity ca. 1973, deregulating the price of petroleum products in 1981, incremental deregulation of broadcasting during the Reagan Administration, implementing understandings of anti-trust law driven by economic reasoning during the Reagan Administration, changing some Medicaid and Medicare re-imbursement methods to constrain escalating expenditure ca. 1984, and buffaloing Bilge Clinton into accepting lifetime time limits on AFDC clientage (now gutted), the GOP has little history of actually succeeding at any sort of libertarian endeavours. They all made one shot at tax reform ca. 1986 (with Daniel Rostenkowski), but are generally fixated on marginal rates, not the preferences encoded into the contours of the tax base.
I think that, for Dreher, libertarian has a negative, abstract meaning and always used as a slur. It stands for individualism set against community and freedom set against authority. Thinking about actual policies and accomplishments like you mention which may be called "libertarian" would be counter-productive to his goal of whining about how horrible everything is.
DeletePoor little snowflake thinks he's living in Babylon. If only Vladimir Putin or someone would build a big enough safe house for him so that them Babylonians couldn't sneak up from behind the mission church he had the freedom to build in his own back yard and pull his pants down in their fiendishly horrid Babylonian fashion.
DeleteSeems Dreher has more fun being the edgy non-conformist among conservatives, pushing them to consider certain liberal-associated ideas (ala Crunchy Con) than he has being the edgy non-conformist among liberals, pushing them to consider certain traditionalist ideas. In the former case, he is all too ready to tweak the stodgy conservatives (while being a useful idiot for the liberals), but in the latter case, he simply screeches and runs away from the confrontation.
DeleteYou read this and you realize RD is an ordinary journalist. He does not assess actual collective or institutional or even individual behavior. He can only process slogans and talking points. That the Republican Party is an omnibus of people with various reactions to the projects of the permanent government does not register with him. That the modal type of Republican pol is a Chamber-of-Commerce luncheon denizen who is not sympathetic with and would never initiate the usual run of pet liberal programs but is too confused and refractory to map out goals and strategies which would dismantle extant programs (or even mount a systematic critique of them) does not occur to him. How many Republican pols will put forward and press for a program to liquidate the Department of Housing and Urban Development? Fat, juicy target that, but even massive scandals ca. 1989 did not persuade the GOP to push to dissolve it.
ReplyDeleteIndeed so.
DeleteI'd add, tho, that the modern "modal type of Republican pol" doesn't dismantle programs out of confusion or being refractory, but rather because he, too, is part of the Ruling Class and simply has a different set of preferred programs than those of the other team.
You'll be able to tell an actual reformer (in a libertarian sense) by his dismantling of a federal program that does things he likes -- but dismantling it simply because it's not the proper role of government.
Wow, good point.
DeleteIn the first case, he's like the debutante making all the adults chuckle. Then he gets embarrassed, then angry, etc.
In the second case, he's the substitute teacher trying to impress his juniors. As they wink at each other and begin to bare their teeth, suddenly he realizes that those conservatives were a lot nicer....
Pik and Pauli (I'm reading these two comments as going together; sorry if I got it wrong), there's another explanation that doesn't necessarily displace or contradict either of yours but still seems to me to illuminate everything Dreher attempts intellectually.
DeleteI'm talking of course about the rurally-born sort who remains pathologically in fear of being perceived as a bumpkin, even as he affirms that he'll always be one through a congenital psychological incontinence perpetually advertising his insecurity.
Dreher doesn't choose his religion or political ideology on any rational or morally authoritative basis, he makes these shifting elections based on which at any given moment he thinks will make him seem least likely to have been born and raised in Starhill, LA and most likely to have really been born in Paris, or Florence, or, for that funkiest in sophistication, the Netherlands. And so at any given moment his sushi buffet of personal presentation may contain this niblet from conservatism, that from liberalism, something else neither strictly religious or political at all, all having in common the uncommon as a cloak of faux-sophistication trying and failing to mask a signature whining, snarling, white-trash resentment of a potentially judgemental world that simmers just beneath the surface of everything he traffics in.
In my experience neither true sophisticates nor honest-to-God down to earth country people present themselves in this way; both poles are happy that they are what they are, for better or worse. This fashion shopping through the malls of idea options is, by contrast, almost always the sign of the poseur, not the synthesist: the synthesist diligently works to rid himself of the sort of internal contradictions/fashion mismatches we poke fun at the cowboy hat/referee shirt/tartan kilt-wearing Dreher, the clown who sees himself as an iconoclast, for every day.
I do not know if I would go with Rod of Arc as a title. Given his support for Putin and the Rodina; why not refer to him as Zampolit Dreher? Jonathan Carpenter
ReplyDelete