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.