Rod Dreher’s Personal Weakness

Rod Dreher is a weak man.

He is a museum quality specimen of a weak generation.

TAC:

“I am not a political person. I have political views, but I don’t have a deep interest in politics and how it works. I am more attuned to religion and culture. That’s where my passions lie. Over the past few years, my political pessimism has grown as I have watched the Republican Party, the only political party in which social and religious conservatives have any voice at all, fail to defend principles and institutions that ought to be defended …

Notice right now that none, or almost none, of the Republican political leaders are speaking out against this progressive putsch. They are hoping that it will all go away, and that after Trump, they can get back to tax cuts and serving corporations, while making impotent gestures of support to religious and social conservatives. But this is not going to work. The game is up. Trump has been a terrible strategist and tactician, but he emerged because of some real and genuine grievances. Those aren’t going to go away. …

I am hearing from some of you who are astonished and appalled by how quickly church leaders are falling in the face of this assault. From what you are writing me, you are all supportive of efforts to identity and fight racism, but you are seeing (white) churches lose their minds in this current hysteria, and endorse things that are not Christian. I believe that many church authorities, desperate to be liked, will fail as leaders. In The Benedict Option, I talk about ways to build up longterm resistance. But please don’t expect leaders to ride to the rescue and save us from the mob. It will be wonderful if they do, but don’t expect it.Here’s what I really worry about: that the coming battle will actually sideline many practicing Christians. That it will be between the Woke on one side, and white nationalists on the other. There is no way that authentic followers of Jesus Christ can endorse race nationalism of either the white or the black kind. In fact, a Christian reader emailed the other day: …

Note well: I am not going to approve any comments advocating race nationalism, and I anticipate that I am going to spike most progressive comments. If you are on the left, this is not something I want your commentary on, unless you can be constructive. I also welcome advice for the reader who is trying to reach out to her friend in danger of going white nationalist, to pull him back from that. Tragically, I believe that the future politics of America are going to be ethnocentric, militant, and angry. For years I have said here that the identity-politics left has no idea what kind of demons it is calling up by endorsing illiberal, positive discrimination on behalf of nonwhites. Well, they’re about to show themselves in a big way in Weimar America.

Believe it not, but I actually have a lot in common with Rod.

I’ve also read Aristotle and Alasdair MacIntyre. The difference is that I have taken what they both said to heart when it comes to my moral beliefs. The founding settlers of America and all the generations that followed them up until Rod’s generation also had the Bible and Protestantism. Insofar as racial nationalism ever existed in America, they were the ones who pioneered it.

After reading Aristotle, Alasdair MacIntyre and Martin Luther, it seemed to me that the upshot of what I had read is that cowardice is a serious moral failing. Morality has nothing to do with this laundry list of -isms and -phobias which were invented in the 20th century. Previous generations were raised to believe that moral qualities were things like honesty, integrity, bravery, fortitude and honor. Unlike modern day conservative liberals like Rod, their speech was plain, honest and forthright.

Martin Luther had more integrity in his little finger than all of the mainstream conservatives of Rod’s generation. Those men also set up state churches in Germany and national churches in Scandinavia in the wake of the Reformation. Church and state were integrated in Northern Europe until the 19th century. In those days, no one flagellated themselves over being German or Swedish. The mainstream consensus until the mid-20th century was also that America was a “White Man’s Country.”

If you want my opinion, I think the morals of conservatives like Rod have simply been corrupted by luxury. They have a social status and a job to preserve. It is not the first time it has happened in history. They were born into an age of materialism. They stood idly and did nothing while our country degenerated and unraveled. Even worse, they attacked the young men who were brave enough to honor their fathers for the mob wouldn’t come for them, which is why we are in this unfortunate situation.

Obviously, it won’t be men like Rod who lead us out of this mess. Rod’s blog is a daily chronicle of why young White men should expect nothing from conservative liberalism. Rusty Reno’s latest book is a fairly decent account of how mainstream conservatism is part and parcel of this culture of weakness. It couldn’t be mainstream without being … WEAK. By definition, strong men are eliminated from conservatism and so now you are left with nothing but the morons, grifters and the social climbers.

For the sake of the Christian faith, I wish Rod would stop trying to make it out to be as feminine and unappealing as possible to young men because countless people never get past this presentation. He does the faith no favors by associating it with men like Russell Moore. I do what I can to correct this by reminding my readers that Christians used to be made of strong stuff (see, for example, King Alfred the Great and the unification of England), but there is only so much I can do.

ATHELSTAN King,
Lord among Earls,
Bracelet-bestower and
Baron of Barons,
He with his brother,
Edmund Atheling,
Gaining a lifelong
Glory in battle,
Slew with the sword-edge
There by Brunanburh,
Brake the shield-wall,
Hew’d the lindenwood,
Hack’d the battleshield,
Sons of Edward with hammer’d brands.

Theirs was a greatness
Got from their Grandsires—
Theirs that so often in
Strife with their enemies
Struck for their hoards and their hearths and their homes.

Bow’d the spoiler,
Bent the Scotsman,
Fell the shipcrews
Doom’d to the death.
All the field with blood of the fighters
Flow’d, from when first the great
Sun-star of morningtide,
Lamp of the Lord God
Lord everlasting,
Glode over earth till the glorious creature
Sank to his setting.

There lay many a man
Marr’d by the javelin,
Men of the Northland
Shot over shield.
There was the Scotsman
Weary of war.

We the West-Saxons,
Long as the daylight
Lasted, in companies
Troubled the track of the host that we hated,
Grimly with swords that were sharp from the grindstone,
Fiercely we hack’d at the flyers before us.

Mighty the Mercian,
Hard was his hand-play,
Sparing not any of
Those that with Anlaf,
Warriors over the
Weltering waters
Borne in the bark’s-bosom,
Drew to this island:
Doom’d to the death.

Five young kings put asleep by the sword-stroke,
Seven strong Earls of the army of Anlaf
Fell on the war-field, numberless numbers,
Shipmen and Scotsmen.

Then the Norse leader.
Dire was his need of it,
Few were his following,
Fled to his warship
Fleeted his vessel to sea with the king in it.
Saving his life on the fallow flood.

Also the crafty one,
Constantinus,
Crept to his North again,
Hoar-headed hero!

Slender warrant had
He to be proud of
The welcome of war-knives—
He that was reft of his
Folk and his friends that had
Fallen in conflict,
Leaving his son too
Lost in the carnage,
Mangled to morsels,
A youngster in war!

Slender reason had
He to be glad of
The clash of the war-glaive—
Traitor and trickster
And spurner of treaties—
He nor had Anlaf
With armies so broken
A reason for bragging
That they had the better
In perils of battle
On places of slaughter—
The struggle of standards,
The rush of the javelins,
The crash of the charges,
The wielding of weapons—
The play that they play’d with
The children of Edward.

Then with their nail’d prows
Parted the Norsemen, a
Blood-redden’d relic of
Javelins over
The jarring breaker, the deep-sea billow,
Shaping their way toward Dyflen again,
Shamed in their souls.

Also the brethren,
King and Atheling,
Each in his glory,
Went to his own in his own West-Saxonland,
Glad of the war.

Many a carcase they left to be carrion,
Many a livid one, many a sallow-skin—
Left for the white-tail’d eagle to tear it, and
Left for the horny-nibb’d raven to rend it, and
Gave to the garbaging war-hawk to gorge it, and
That gray beast, the wolf of the weald.

Never had huger
Slaughter of heroes
Slain by the sword-edge—
Such as old writers
Have writ of in histories—
Hapt in this isle, since
Up from the East hither
Saxon and Angle from
Over the broad billow
Broke into Britain with
Haughty war-workers who
Harried the Welshman, when
Earls that were lured by the
Hunger of glory gat
Hold of the land.