The Romance of Rod Dreher

In his travails we see life in all its harshness, the reality that people with normal desires for recognition can be warped by its absence.

A few years ago I was in the basement of a grungy bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I had repaired after a book talk with a group of academic-public intellectual types. The second Bernie campaign was getting under way, but everyone was most eager to talk about Rod Dreher. “Did everybody read the latest Rod?” someone asked, and others huddled in, as if preparing to imbibe salacious gossip. I said something like, “If only Twitter knew all the socialist intellectuals are this obsessed with Rod Dreher.”

That obsession is outlined in Phil Christman’s recent Slate essay on Rod’s leftist “anti-fandom.” (If you’ve never heard of Rod Dreher, Christman’s piece provides a succinct overview.) The cult of Rod was fueled to a large extent by the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House, which mined his lurid, bewildering posts for comic material, spinning something like a Rod Dreher Extended Universe. His unhinged-but-completely-straight-faced posts on the demonic possession and exorcism of a friend’s wife, for example, or the infamous “primitive root wiener” post that eventually turned off the rich patron who sponsored Rod’s blog at the American Conservative. Christman is not unsympathetic to Dreher’s messy life and the unsettling, revealing way he has lived it in public. But to the extent he offers any explanation for why so many leftists find Rod so compelling, it’s something like this: the fact that a right-wing writer with such abhorrent views, such reactionary paranoias, painted himself only quasi-intentionally as an epic train wreck. As Christman writes, Rod “combined a Dostoevskyan obsessive introspection with a seemingly total inability to understand how he sounded.”

This schadenfreude theory no doubt accounts for much of the Rod anti-fandom. Even for someone like me, who has a longer and more peculiar history with Rod that I’m about to explain, a good part of the drama of his blog was to witness the core of social-conservative reaction put on such naked display. Rod’s writing, especially from the last few years, reveals the extent to which conservatism itself is composed of nasty impulses, petty hatreds, and prurient obsession—all of the things the myth of the “conservative intellectual tradition” attempts to launder into something cerebral and dignified. His political writing, like his latest book, Live Not By Lies, is almost uniformly execrable—portentous, self-pitying, historically and philosophically illiterate in the extreme. It’s hard not to respond viciously to Rod’s politics, as I have many times, because they are simultaneously so stupid and so dangerous. As a gay person, his hysterics about queer people, which occasionally approach exterminationist violence, are chilling in spite of their comic absurdity.

It might seem impossible a “but” could follow such a paragraph, but. Somehow, in spite of it all, some longtime Rod-watchers have always been unable to shake the feeling that he is a fundamentally decent human being. Liberal-media profiles of Rod, like Joshua Rothman’s 2017 one in the New Yorker, often end up sympathetic in spite of their obligatory caveats. In response to Rod’s lacerating posts about the recent collapse of his marriage, Christman writes, “I felt that this man, my political enemy, whose ideas are bad and need to be defeated, was also someone sincerely searching after God, truth, beauty.” This insight, which Christman reports only as a personal reaction and not central to the broader Rod anti-fandom, is worth exploring further: the degree to which Rod’s compulsive self-exposure enables a reading of him as something other, or deeper, than his politics—something harder to dismiss. To put it another way, if he was always throwing out the rope to hang himself, he was also giving us a lens to see the story behind the story.

My own journey with Rod Dreher began long before his rise to unlikely leftist antihero, when he was already a popular blogger and I was a much younger and less important one, but one who processed my own escape from religion and political transitions through blogging. At least in retrospect, back then Rod seemed more willing to turn over ideas, less dogmatic and paranoid. He occasionally responded, thoughtfully and generously, to my autobiographical posts about faith and politics. The first book I read of his was The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, his memoir about the death of his cancer-stricken sister, Ruthie, and his own quest to be accepted by his stubborn, closed-minded Louisiana family who had rejected him for leaving his hometown. I found it so moving and so close to home that I wept several times. Partly because it resonated with my own painful struggle to define myself apart from my conservative evangelical family and partly because Rod rendered his own quest for recognition and acceptance so poignantly. Unlike the incensed carnival-barker of his future political writing, the Rod of his memoirs was a sensitive soul alive to his own anguish and need, capable of inhabiting the minds of people who were hostile to him, most notably his own family.

Rod’s good and his evil are intertwined in the fact that he is, above all, a romantic. He is not an intellectual but a feeler, an enthusiast who careens from obsession to obsession, constructing ephemeral bubbles of passion around his fixations. He has a tendency to overdramatize, to load people, events, and discoveries with more significance than they can bear. In Little Way, for example, readers could see that, whatever her positive qualities, his sister was also a cold-hearted, narrow-minded person even as Rod transfigured her as a saint. He narrates almost every turning point in his life breathlessly, from his conversion to Christianity at the cathedral in Chartres to his discovery of Dante in the midst of a personal breakdown, as a miraculous, bolt-from-the-blue experience, a cataclysm that sends him down a new path of enlightenment. As Rod’s life failures have piled up, adding darker, more tragic shadings to his marriage and his pursuit of his family’s acceptance, his personal writing has grown ever more powerful. Gut-wrenching, dark-night-of-the-soul posts like “Goodbye Louisiana, I Tried” and his reckoning with his father’s KKK membership exemplify the unity of his pathologies and virtues as a writer: rambling and incoherent, but also struggling to feel everything, to capture every nuance, at least when it comes to his own life and those of his loved ones.

The very same tendencies that make Rod an effective memoirist make him ill-suited to political analysis. His mind buzzes with drama, with angels and demons; his fancies get blown up into cartoonish theories of everything, like his treatment of nominalism in The Benedict Option and his more recent obsession with wokeness as neo-totalitarianism. Against the grain of his own sensitivity to personal experience, he turns his political enemies into fleshless abstractions, and politics itself into epic struggles between dark and light rather than more prosaic clashes between interests. This internal conflict is always on display when Rod speaks candidly about his beliefs, as he did recently in a long podcast interview with Andrew Sullivan. He comes off as affable, curious, and generous, even hesitant to hold views that might be regarded as painful to others, like gay people. At the same time, he clings to his prejudices, linked unthinkingly to his road-to-Damascus life experiences and unexposed to thorough reading or rational analysis. It’s clear, for example, that his fundamentalist position on LGBT relationships cannot withstand any type of scrutiny—that it is a passionate commitment beyond the reach of reason or responsibility.

It would be reductive, I think, to limit Rod’s appeal to mere political schadenfreude. The fusion of his two personas—Rod the hysterical political reactionary, and Rod the broken human on a relentless quest for meaning—is central to his anti-fandom. I suspect that it’s the second Rod that has made him such a fascination in the current intellectual landscape: the fact that reading him holds up such an unsettling mirror to our own psychic burdens. I’ll speak for myself, but I wonder if the the average academic or journalist, constrained by the constant demand not only to perform all-knowing expertise but to do so in a perfectly-calibrated way that avoids contravening ever-shifting politically correct shibboleths, doesn’t look at Rod with a kind of wonder, even envy. A guy who posts that much cringe and is rewarded for it, who is so thoroughly and completely offensive and gets away with it—or at least did until he was no longer able to contain his reflections on big black cocks. A guy who lets all the seams of his thinking show. Beneath all the gaseous political toxins, there’s someone who is unrelentingly honest and authentic, who manifests a kind of purity precisely in the fact that he is so unable to “hear how he sounds.”

And, for people who are wrapped up in analyzing and writing about politics, there is also the suspicion that there’s something deeper in all of our existences that matters more. In Rod’s travails, we see life in all its harshness and tragedy, the fact that people with perfectly normal and healthy desires for recognition can be warped and deformed by its absence. Thank god I went to grad school, I’ve sometimes thought, that I didn’t remain an undisciplined, un-self-aware thinker, thank god I don’t embarrass myself like that. But that can be a cold comfort. We all know, deep down, that we are really no better, no saner, that we’ve also failed and that we too have holes we’ve been trying to fill our entire lives and may never succeed. Maybe when we look at Rod, we sometimes think, what if I could just say it, what if I could tell the truth.