Rod Dreher is a funny bird. He's a former NY Post columnist, and a rather arch conservative who sometimes makes you want to pull your hair out (like when he's writing about the need to send Dan Savage to jail). But I remember having a back and forth by email with Dreher, probably 7 years ago, about some gay issue, and he was quite a decent fellow. No, that doesn't exonerate some of his meaner writings, but it means he's more nuanced that you might think.
To wit: His article this week on Rush Limbaugh at CPAC, entitled "White kids on dope." It's blistering. It's further evidence that the Republicans, and conservatives more generally, are not of one mind about their future. There are conservatives out there who find Rush Limbaugh, and the dogmatic conservatism he represents, every bit as loathsome as we find both of them. That's interesting. And it's useful. Here's an excerpt, but it's worth clicking through and reading the entire thing:
Anybody who challenges Limbavian orthodoxy is, ipso facto, the Enemy. If you suggest reform, even from the Right, you are a useful idiot for the Media, which are the Enemy, and can never be anything but the Enemy. Limbaughism sounds a lot like Leninism.I loved it when the Soviet Union went down and the wall went down and the liberals in our country said you know they may not be ready for freedom over there. They've been oppressed -- yes, liberals will gladly tell you who can have freedom and who can't.Um, what were the Nineties like in the former Soviet Union? That experiment proved that free markets and liberal democracy can't take hold without the cultural and social preconditions for same. Ditto Iraq. But the Limbavian ideologues, these Right-Wing Rousseauists, see human nature as essentially perfect, except for the corrupting hand of government.
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