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. 

Losing sleep over the pandemic

Photo by Александар Цветановић from Pexels

 Vox:

When the pandemic hit, rates of insomnia spiked around the world, driven by everything from the stress of living during an international public health crisis to the changes in daily life wrought by lockdowns. “People had additional responsibilities, new challenges, much more uncertainty,” Lauren Hale, a professor of family, population, and preventive medicine at Stony Brook University, told Vox.

And as the delta variant continues to spread around the country, that uncertainty and its effects on sleep may not have abated. Some people have just gotten used to disrupted cycles and 3 am anxiety spirals; it’s how life is now.

I've mentioned this before, but my experience has been totally the opposite. After nearly a decade of sleep deprivation -- to the point that work was nearly impossible, depression gripped me, and I expected to die any day -- I finally started sleeping again not long into the pandemic. Some of this, I think, was due to quarantine-induced diet changes: I stopped eating fried food so much, and I stopped drinking caffeinated coffee because anxiety was producing heart palpitations. Within a few months, I was sleeping better than I had in years, with huge results: Less depression, more energy, more hope. Sleep, I've come to believe, is the most important factor in my well-being. 

Are evangelicalism and Trumpism the same thing?

 Interesting news from Pew:

Contrary to what some may have expected, a new analysis of Pew Research Center survey data finds that there has been no large-scale departure from evangelicalism among White Americans. In fact, there is solid evidence that White Americans who viewed Trump favorably and did not identify as evangelicals in 2016 were much more likely than White Trump skeptics to begin identifying as born-again or evangelical Protestants by 2020.

Additionally, the surveys do not clearly show that White evangelicals who opposed Trump were significantly more likely than Trump supporters to drop the evangelical label. The data also shows that Trump’s electoral performance among White evangelicals was even stronger in 2020 than in 2016, partially due to increased support among White voters who described themselves as evangelicals throughout this period.

I'm tempted to think this isn't sustainable, if only for reasons of tactics. Evangelicals tend to be a bit mission-oriented, believing that they're called to share "the good news" of Jesus Christ. Trumpism, on the other hand, is fairly insular -- more interested in cultivating the base than expanding its appeal. Trump and Christ aren't the same thing, of course, but there's a difference in mindsets -- and if evangelicalism and Trumpism become closer to being the same thing, I suspect it's evangelicalism that will lose its character.

Update:

We got our Child Tax Credit check today...

 ...but neither me nor my wife quit our jobs. 

One more thought about the Woodward book

John Adams said we have a government "of laws and not of men." But reporting on the late Trump era suggests that it's both, actually. When lawful governance was teetering under Trump's assaults, it was a few individuals -- a Mark Milley here, a Dan Quayle(!!!) there, a lone Michigan Republican  voting for the truth and not his party's inclinations  -- who provided the nudges needed to preserve the system, and perhaps even the country. Occasionally (as with Milley) they had to do it in ways that -- on the surface, at least -- seemed to contradict the rule of law, and of civilian control of the military. But what was the alternative?

The real villains of the Woodward book? Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell.

It was clear then -- and clearer now -- that Trump should have been removed from office after Jan. 6. Pence could've led the 25th Amendment option. He didn't. McConnell could have sped up the impeachment process. He slow-walked it. That forced a group of people worried for their nation into apparently extra-legal maneuverings to ensure that Trump didn't destroy everything. When the responsible people aren't responsible, bad choices are the only option. 

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.