Rod Dreher Gets It Right

Let's hope no one listens to him.

Dreher's problem with Limbaugh and the movement he leads, though he doesn't say it in so many words, is that they're not being honest with themselves or anyone else about what they believe. 

No need to return to first principles and recalibrate policies to account for new realities. Just find a better messenger for the same old same old. You begin to see why nobody inside that bubble could grasp what a flop Bobby Jindal's reheated Republican mush of a speech was going to be ahead of time. Here's a transcript of the entire Limbaugh CPAC speech. Take a look at this passage, and please tell me what is conservative about it?:

After excerpting the portion of Limbaugh's rant that tried, against all evidence, to convince everyone that conservatives love people, Dreher wrote,

This is a comforting lie. It is Rousseau conservatism: the idea that man is born innocent, but corrupted by society, or government. Remove the chains of government, and man will return to his natural, good state, which is one of limitless possibility. This denies two bedrock truths of philosophical conservatism, which are that 1) human nature is fallen, and 2) man must learn to live within limits. A conservatism that is not founded on a conscious recognition of those two truths is a false conservatism, and has a shaky foundation from which to criticize liberal utopianism.

Dreher is perhaps the worst at opposing his own caricature of liberalism, though the strawman population boom within the conservative movement outpaces that of Salmonella in a Tyson slaughterhouse and continues unabated.  However, he is exactly right about what conservatives are supposed to believe.

A principled conservative movement would indeed resist things like marriage equality, equal pay for women, reproductive freedom, etc.  Human history is in part a gradual reduction of the list of groups that can be legimately oppressed by the majority.  The modern conservative movement certainly has this part down.

But a principled conservative movement would not throw out their commitment to a belief in fallen humanity and necessary limits upon it when dealing with corporations and the rich people who control them.  The movement that is singularly focused upon (everyone else's) sin and shortcoming becomes as licentious and hedonistic as their worst unfounded fears about liberals whenever someone manages to put "CEO" after their name or a couple million in the bank.

Dreher goes on to recognize the Leninism found in Limbaugh's words, the desire to root out the Enemies of the (Conservative) People and quell all dissent, whether from the left or the right.  Of course, for Dreher this is "simply a crudely politicized form of philosophical liberalism," rather than yet another example of the authoritarian impulse found in so much of humanity.  Dreher thinks that Lenin and Stalin purged and murdered because of their supposed liberalism, whereas the truth is clearly that their evil acts were a result of their authoritarianism, which replaced whatever liberalism or leftist ideas they ever had, if any at all.

What Dreher is really trying to say is that Limbaugh is what he claims to hate.  He is the very picture*, to put it in theological terms, of antinomianism in action.  The movement of which Limbaugh is the unquestioned leader is now predicated upon the belief that the Law, as it were, is something they devise for other people to follow.  The true believers assembled at CPAC showed themselves as an undifferentiated ego mass, projecting their own worst impulses and excesses upon their enemies and vowing to fight them to the death.

So kudos to Rod Dreher.  Finally, a conservative willing to tell the truth about what he believes. 

*Ok, compare that picture with this one.  Who in the hell is that guy on Rush Limbaugh's website?  Vain, much?

Comments

[Sir Charles]

Plus Crunchy Con Rod invokes the band "The Tubes" in his headline "White Punks on Dope." Dreher is pretty creepy and I am sure Rush does not appeal much to his world view.

I wonder how soon before he has to apologize to remain in good graces in the madhouse that they call conservatism?

[oddjob]

On a different, but probably related, note, it appears perhaps someone has decided to start a whisper campaign against Steele?