Rod Dreher and Robert E. Lee: The little-known third option

 Dreher offers up a semi-defense of Lee, reflecting on a 1970s-era essay by Wendell Berry: 

As Berry makes clear, the tragedy of Robert E. Lee was that no matter which choice he made, there would have been pain. For Lee to have remained loyal to the Union would not have entailed mere disagreement with his family and his people; it would have required him to make war on them.

This is something I don’t think we fully consider today — that is, what it means to make war (a real shooting war) on your own family. Could you do it today, to remain loyal to the government in Washington? Even though we are far more connected and aware today, thanks to technology, than the Americans of the 1860s were, it is still a hell of a thing to ask people to take up arms against their own friends and family to be loyal to a distant abstraction.

Would you turn your abilities against your own people? Even if those people believed wrong things? Even if they believed wicked things? I could conceive of a circumstance under which I could do that, but it would be extreme. I would like to think that I would have fought against the slave state of the Confederacy, but I think it would have been so very difficult for a Southerner in 1861 to have turned his back on everything and everyone he had ever known to take up arms against them, even if he believed their cause was unjust.

There was a third option, of course: Not to make war at all.

I understand that would have been a difficult choice to make, particularly for Lee, a lifelong military man. I suspect there is no realistic counterfactual that involves him choosing neither to fight against the Union nor to make war on his own family. It's likely he would have been imprisoned or otherwise persecuted -- by one side or the other -- to put his military skills to use. Still, Lee made a choice, and one of the choices on offer was to sit this one out. Instead he lead an army in defense of slavery and for the dissolution of his country. It wasn't a great choice. 

Rod Dreher plays dummy, again.

Photo by Nikolett Emmert from Pexels

I've previously expressed my feelings about Rod Dreher in this space, but dammit I can't quit him. So of course I read the latest New Yorker profile of Dreher and his dalliance with Hungary's right-illiberal Orbanistas. 

He mounted his usual defense of Viktor Orban:

Quite quickly, in the course of his dinners and meetings and observational trips on Budapest’s convenient public-transit system, Dreher began to form a dissenting opinion of the political situation in Hungary. “I was there about ten days before I realized that eighty, ninety per cent of the American narrative about the country just isn’t true,” he told me recently. He had heard Hungary described as an authoritarian state, but in Budapest he saw everyone seemed free to speak their mind. Dreher noted that he had appeared at a conference with an opponent of Orbán, who was critical of the Prime Minister. What’s more, Orbán, Dreher came to think, had a keener grasp of the “crisis—political, even civilizational” facing traditionalists than nearly any American conservative. Dreher liked how openly nationalist Orbán was, picking fights with his partners in the European Union when it grew too progressive, and how he had often set aside free-market principles in order to promote conservative social values—offering state subsidies to women to stay home and have more Hungarian children.

Needless to say, however, I wasn't surprised when I got to this section: 

When I asked about Orbán’s campaigns against the Roma—his government refused to pay court-ordered compensation to Roma children who had been confined to segregated schools, and his political party blamed George Soros when pressed about it—Dreher, who does not speak Hungarian, told me he had heard that many Roma supported Orbán, but “I don’t know much, to be honest.”

If you follow Dreher's blog at The American Conservative, you'll probably notice this is a fairly frequent thing he does. Americans don't understand what Hungary's really like! It's so much better than you heard! But when pressed on specific critiques about the regime, Dreher suggests he doesn't really understand what Hungary's really like either. I don't know much, to be honest. 

My conclusion: Dreher wants a strongman to punch his enemies in the mouth, but doesn't want to think too much about what happens when people start bleeding as a result. 

The "Live Not By Lies" guy....

...is notably silent about all the lying this president is doing in order to keep his job. 

I guess some lies are more equal than others.

Rod Dreher* is opposed to "woke college football"

 There's never a right way to protest racism, is there? Dreher is warning that Southern football fans won't take well to LSU football players demonstrating for Black Lives Matter. 

It just seems to me that if you are a football player trying to build interest in and sympathy for Black Lives Matter, this is not the way to do it. In fact, it’s the way to energize opponents of BLM. And I have a sense that this is going to have some effect, perhaps not measurable, on the fall election — and beyond.

The end result of this logic is that Black people would never, ever protest racism because it would rile up whites. It's the logic of abuse. But I'm sure the "Camp of the Saints" guy is legitimately concerned with helping Black people effectively fight racism.

* Oh, hell. Maybe this IS a Rod Dreher shitposting blog. Please forgive me my minor obsessions.