What's Wrong With Rod Dreher?

A few weeks back Robert Stacy McCain wrote an extremely interesting post umasking Rod Dreher, the "crunchy conservative," for his abject surrender to the forces of postmodern cultural nihilism.

More on that below. For now, it turns out that Dreher, in the wake of his recent gay marriage debate with Damon Linker and Andrew Sullivan, has a new essay at Real Clear Politics discussing the "tyranny of liberalism" in contemporary culture (where he cites the new book by James Kalb). The article's generally a pleasure to read. It lays out clearly Kalb's case for leftist cultural totalitarianism, but I'm taken back by the conclusion:

Conservatives find it hard to articulate a case for traditional marriage in terms acceptable in liberal rights discourse, as well as in the shallow rhetoric of contemporary debate. Defending traditional marriage requires burrowing deep into the meaning of the human person, sex, gender, society and law - and that's just for starters. Life in community is a mysterious and complex thing that cannot be radically remade to suit a preferred outcome.

"If you can redefine [marriage] so that the sex of the parties has nothing to do with it, then you can redefine anything in human life any way you want," Kalb told me in an interview. "Man becomes the artifact of whoever is in power."

This, I think, is what scares ordinary people the most about the swift attempt to kick the foundation out from under traditional marriage. They intuit that there is something, well, tyrannical in the idea that virtually overnight, the long-settled meaning of marriage could change in a vast social experiment without historical precedent - and that any attempt to resist this radicalization stands condemned as God-intoxicated bigotry.

Trads are on the losing side of this argument, at least in the short run, given the cultural conditioning of latter-day Americans. Still, it is instructive to ponder the fate of modern Western societies that have cast out the biblical god as the source of moral reality. Wrote eminent historian Paul Johnson, "The history of modern times is in great part the history of how that vacuum has been filled."

For those fearful of despotism, it is not a happy tale.

This is poppycock. 

"Trads," which is short for "traditionalists," don't have problems "articulating a case" for the historical and normative foundations of marriage. In fact, huge majorities in Iowa and nationally not only discern the stark cultural revisionism in the left's hegemonic same-sex marriage discourse, but they reject it as well. See my recent essay at Pajamas Media for more on that, "An Attack on Traditional Marriage in Iowa." 

The problem for Dreher is he's totalitarian himself. In his debate with Linker and Sullivan, he was easily pigeonholed as a bigot because he apparently rejects loving same-sex partnerships altogether, not just gay marriage. But note that the data show that that position violates popular sensibilities just as much as does the left's gay marriage extremism.

Conservatives have no reason to fear the "tyranny of liberalism." We live in a democracy of majority rights under the rule of law. The Iowa Supreme Court's ruling last week was deeply flawed on the both the merits and the result. But what's worse is for allegedly "crunchy cons" to throw in the towel on the penultimate battle of today's culture wars, the right's "hill to die on." In any case, here's Robert's conclusion at his post taking down Dreher: 

We are now a mere 18 months from Labor Day 2010, when that climactic political battle will be fully engaged. There a lot of important work to be done -- and done now, over the next three to six months -- if there is to be any hope of anything but the abomination of desolation. Our utter destruction is at hand unless good men rally to the colors, and we no longer have the luxury of indulging in these petty playground feuds and the children who enjoy them.

To the extent that conservatives need a philosopher now, I'd say we need to be studying Sun-Tzu.

If Rod Dreher wants to join Andrew Sullivan and David Brock (yes, I said "Brock," not "Brooks") in the ranks of the vaunting army outside the camp, let him go over and be gone. But don't sit pouting inside the camp, giving aid and comfort to the adversary by your demoralizing pronouncements. If that stuff is going to be tolerated among conservatives, there won't be enough left of a constitutional republic after Nov. 3 for anyone to bother trying to "conserve" it, and no hope at all that it might be restored.

As always, I'll have more on this in upcoming posts ...