That is all.
Friday, February 27, 2015
The Ultra-Naive Rod Dreher
One problem with the conservative movement is that too many folks are determined to believe in the good will of the other side, no matter how much the other side shows their bad will.
This is especially a problem with The American Conservative, which has turned from a paleoconservative publication (Taki's and Unz.com seem to fill the gap) to essentially a wishy-washy pseudoconservative magazine that wants to appear reasonable.
This particular article by Rod Dreher, where he insists that it is bad form for Giuliani to suggest that Obama does not love America, when he clearly hates America, at least in its current form, shows his extreme unwillingness to face facts.
So here is my opinion of Rod in that article:
That is all.
That is all.
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2 comments:
Thank you for this.
Yep. That's pretty much how it is.
Rod Dreher may be naive, but that's not the salient feature of his commentary. The salient features would be (1) compulsive manufacture of verbiage and (2) severe other-directedness. Dreher the opinion journalist is addled by how he appears to a posited collection of observers (or several sets of observers). You have the continual striking of attitudes and on the other the repeated fixation on the topic of whether some set of others have declared themselves on one or another statement which supposedly transgresses some contrived boundary. A more studied version of this silliness is provided by Conor Friedersdorf.
Dreher's association with the alt-right is an extension of this. He was, subsequent to his employment at National Review at pains to establish himself as a purveyor of something Special, but found that others (e.g. Maggie Gallagher) regarded his efforts dismissively.
The common feature of all alt-right discourse is the conviction that they trade in something which has some sort of special property which distinguishes the purveyors from the vulgar exponents of the conventional right. For some its a fidelity to a fanciful 'conservatism' prevalent before the Jew wire-pullers ruined it; for others a (fanciful) sophistication in the assessment of foreign affairs; for others it's their committment to Science and their willingness to Notice Things (usually regarding Jew wire-pullers or dumb blacks or Jew wire-pullers using dumb blacks); for others, it's their inside knowledge of various and sundry Jew wire-puller conspiracies. And so forth.
You're dissatisfied with The American Conservative? Of course you are. Daniel McCarthy has assembled a corps of contributors notable for vanity in the service of status anxiety. That's what it trades in.
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