Rod Dreher's Blog, page 615

Liquid Parenting

Writing on the smartphones-as-hand-grenades thread,  “Teen Love In The Ruins” thread, reader Irenist said:

What troubles me most here is the commenters on this very thread who seem to think it’s laughable to want to prevent teens from having pre-marital sex, and who take umbrage at being told that it is “barbaric” not to object to such fornication.

First, not all teens have sex. If 70% of 19 year olds have had sex, then 30% haven’t. And so forth for whatever the numbers are. So as a factual matter, it is in fact possible for temptation to be resisted.

Second, the entire Western world until very, very recently would have held that it was simply obvious that civilized people ought to object to the sort of thing Rod says the book is about. We have gone from “of course fornication is wrong, even if it happens” to “of course teen pre-marital sex is healthy and it’s going to happen anyway” in a VERY short time, historically.

What worries me isn’t smut like this book: that has indeed been around for ages. What worries me is that my version of the BenOp does NOT involve running off to some Catholic commune somewhere, but instead trying to live among neighbors of many faiths and none. And what this thread is telling me is that if I want my children not to sleep around as teens, that secular and liberal parents, if they hear that, will scoff at me for being unrealistic, and take umbrage at my presumed judgmentalism toward their more laissez faire attitudes. Worse, they will happily let their kids sleep with my kids under their own roof. What this thread indicates is that liberals and secularists are not my allies in trying to keep my kids chaste, but instead enemies who will happily subvert my supposedly outmoded attitudes. And that’s a lot more worrisome for a parent surrounded by liberal, secular parents than any silly YA novel. A lot more.

I have met the problem, and it is you guys.

This is true, but it’s not the whole truth. I was just on the phone talking to a friend who lives in another state. He and his wife have decided to homeschool their children next year. They are taking their kids out of Catholic school. Among the reasons? One of their daughters, age 10, has been socially isolated by her friends there. The girls told this kid — whom I’ve met, and who is the most vivacious, gregarious little girl — that because she doesn’t watch the same TV shows as they do (e.g., “Modern Family”) and listen to the same pop music that they do, that they can’t be friends with her. For the last three weeks, his daughter has been eating lunch at school alone, reading a book.

This is not the only reason they’re bailing on Catholic school. But it does seem to have been a last straw.

Now, do you suppose the parents who send their kids to this Catholic school are secular liberals? I very much doubt it. What they are is conformists. They are more afraid of telling their kids “no,” and of their kids not being popular, than anything else. My friend and his wife put their kids in Catholic school in part to form them in a community of faith. But that community is a façade. The children within it come from homes where they are exposed to the same garbage as everybody else’s kids are.

I completely agree with Irenist that “liberal, secular” parents of our kids’ friends are a problem when they actively or passively subvert traditional Christian virtue, e.g., by letting kids who come over watch something sexually explicit. But “conservative, religious” parents are scarcely better when they have the same “whatever” stance towards popular culture, social media, and so forth as everybody else, but think somehow that, magically, holding the correct opinions about God, cultural politics, and the like will protect their kids.

It is astonishing how quickly this has passed. When I was a kid, it was easy to count on the moms and dads of your kids’ friends to hold particular lines on what was acceptable and unacceptable in terms of behavior, cultural consumption, and everything else. Of course there were far fewer opportunities to be transgressive, but most parents believed that the lines were pretty clear, and worth defending. About 15 years ago, I was talking to a group of New York City police detectives for a project I was working on, and listened with fascination as all of them recalled their childhoods in the 1960s, in which their parents relied on the same thing. It was the parents’ code.

It’s all gone. And if you think it’s only gone among secular liberal parents, you’d better wake up. There is no solidarity parenting anymore. It’s all liquid now, as in Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of “liquid modernity”:

[I]ts characteristics are about the individual, namely increasing feelings of uncertainty and the privatization of ambivalence. It is a kind of chaotic continuation of modernity, where a person can shift from one social position to another in a fluid manner. Nomadism becomes a general trait of the ‘liquid modern’ man as he flows through his own life like a tourist, changing places, jobs, spouses, values and sometimes more—such as political or sexual orientation—excluding himself from traditional networks of support.

Bauman stressed the new burden of responsibility that fluid modernism placed on the individual—traditional patterns would be replaced by self-chosen ones.

The responsibility of parenting has become much more difficult with the collapse of the code of parental solidarity. One way of coping with the pressure is pretending that this is not actually a problem at all, that everything is going to be fine if we just do what everybody else is doing, and hope for the best.

We want to be sure. We want to be able to count on each other, as parents. But how do we do it? We are all treading water in the liquid.

The most difficult part of the Benedict Option project will be convincing people that you cannot live this way, not if you want your kids to hold on to the faith, or even moral sanity. In the age of liquid parenting, every family is an island.

UPDATE: Here is a comment by James C., on the smartphones thread. It applies here too, so I’m going to share it with you:

People are complacent and lackadaisical about it until it happens to them. And it will.

My niece doesn’t have a smart phone, but other kids at school do. She uses my sister’s smart phone from time to time to play games.

Well, last year we discovered her looking at hardcore pornography on it. She was barely 7 years old.

Who taught her to do that? Other parents’ kids, of course. And when my sister put a search filter on the phone, she still was able to do searches to view some pretty risqué stuff. Afraid some other kids would teach her how to get around the filters, my sister banned the phone. Period. How important is a smartphone? Enough to risk poisoning your kid’s mind and destroying his/her innocence? I don’t think so.

Smartphones As Hand Grenades

Petula Dvorak, writing in the Washington Post, comments on the horrifying tale of the 13-year-old Virginia girl who left home to meet someone she met on a dating app, and whose body was subsequently found. Two Virginia Tech students are in custody in connection with the murder. Dvorak:

Police told Nicole’s mom, Tammy Weeks, that they think the sweet-faced girl met Eisenhauer online.

The details of that are still unclear, but here’s what we know for sure: Nicole led an active, imaginary life online, meeting people on Kik, a messaging app that has been the bane of law enforcement officials for the past couple of years.

The app grants users anonymity, it allows searches by age and lets users send photos that aren’t stored on phones.

It’s popular with tweens and teens — and predators.

“Unfortunately, we see it every day,” said Lt. James Bacon, head of the Fairfax County Police Department’s child exploitation unit.

Every day. More:

This shadow world may be where Eisenhauer met Nicole, police told her mother. “It was some off-the-wall site I never heard of,” Weeks said in an interview with The Washington Post.

In the digital age, any parent can be Tammy Weeks. Smartphones have made it easier to keep tabs on our children — and much, much harder.

Teens have been outmaneuvering their mothers and fathers for decades. Back in my day, we told our parents we were spending the night at Melanie’s house when we were really at the Echo and the Bunnymen show an hour away, Ferris Buellering our way through adolescence.

But a lot of times, our parents won, because they caught us sneaking out. Or they called Melanie’s mom.

This world? The predators aren’t just hiding behind the Galaga machine at the arcade. They’re in our kids’ pockets, in their backpacks, in their bedrooms.

Whole thing here.  Dvorak says “it’s not okay to play the Luddite.” Oh? Why not? How have we managed to convince ourselves that our children need smartphones? It’s a lie. You know what it is? Parents don’t want to go against the flow. Every other parent is letting their kids have smartphones, and parents don’t want to be thought poorly of by their kids or the other parents. It really is hard to tell your kids “no” about this stuff, and to keep telling them no, every damn day. Believe me, I know this firsthand. I’m no model parent in this regard. But I’ll tell you this: our younger kids do not have smartphones, and will not have them, even though a lot of kids their age — 9 and 12 — have them. You can install things to protect your kids, and you should. But I cannot see any good reason why a child that young should have a smartphone.

Some dear friends are going through hell right now because of some social media mess their adolescent got mixed up in. It scares the crap out of me, to be honest. Everybody thinks it won’t happen to them. But it can, and it does. A lawyer friend, a mom, was telling me not long ago that she tried to show a relative of hers who lets his young kids have smartphones how easy it is for them to google extremely harmful content online. It did no good. Me, I think people like me, well-meaning parents, live in denial, telling ourselves that our kids aren’t going to misuse their smartphones, because we find it too hard to say no to them. (The same is true with television too, by the way.)

I don’t have the time or the skills to monitor everything my kids would get into on their smartphones, if they had them, and access to social media. But you know what? Why should I. They are nine and 12 years old. They have no business with smartphones, Instagram accounts, Facebook, Snapchat, and all the rest. They are not ready for those things. I certainly would not have been at that age. You give your kids a smartphone with access to the Internet and social media, you are handing them grenades.

It is hard as hell to be a countercultural parent. But what else is there?

UPDATE: I made a funny mistake here — read “Petula Dvorak” and wrote it as “Petula Clark.” Thanks to the reader who corrected me.

UPDATE.2: Reader B. Minich writes:

To be fair, what the author seems to mean by “it’s not OK to play the Luddite” seems to be more aimed at the baffling attitude some parents have that they’ll just let their kids have this technology they don’t understand, and all will be fine!

After all, not long afterwards, she encourages parents to be like the dad who took his daughter’s phone away, and stuck to his guns when charged with a crime for it. (Which is INSANE, btw.)

Though the story doesn’t seem to even address the idea of holding off on giving your kids smartphones, just knowing what’s happening and restricting them somewhat. So it does still fall short a bit.

I think this is fair, and I apologize for misreading Dvorak. Still, as you say, the assumption seems to be that the pressure to give your kid a smartphone is irresistible. When did we as a culture decide this? Yes, I am more than a little panicked about this, because I’m watching my poor friends go through something just short of catastrophic, and it all blew up so quickly.

UPDATE.3: James C. writes:

People are complacent and lackadaisical about it until it happens to them. And it will.

My niece doesn’t have a smart phone, but other kids at school do. She uses my sister’s smart phone from time to time to play games.

Well, last year we discovered her looking at hardcore pornography on it. She was barely 7 years old.

Who taught her to do that? Other parents’ kids, of course. And when my sister put a search filter on the phone, she still was able to do searches to view some pretty risqué stuff. Afraid some other kids would teach her how to get around the filters, my sister banned the phone. Period. How important is a smartphone? Enough to risk poisoning your kid’s mind and destroying his/her innocence? I don’t think so.

UPDATE.4: Reader Andrea, who is a professional journalist, writes:

I have spent the past eight months covering court cases and reading graphic and disturbing criminal affidavits, some about cases like these. After that, I would advise any parent I knew to strictly monitor their child’s phone and Internet use. If they don’t know how, it’s time to learn. Even more importantly, they should know where their teenagers are at and what they’re doing. It amazes me how many 12 to 14-year-olds are unsupervised and getting into trouble (late at night) that their parents apparently either didn’t care about or didn’t make an effort to prevent.

If I had kids, they would not have smart phones until they were in the late teens. If they did, I’d make sure they had a very detailed and graphic course ahead of time in the potential hazards and in how easily they could be charged with a crime for sexting or uploading photos of themselves, etc. I worry about what my 9-year-old nephew might have seen online.

UPDATE.5: I don’t want to leave the impression that I’m some model of perfection on this. I certainly am not! I’m thinking now of ways that I, as a father, fall short. I am thinking of ways that I tell myself everything is fine, that I don’t need to monitor this or that, that I should just trust because … I am too lazy and distracted to verify. I accuse myself of this, because it’s true. Just wanted to get that out there.

Teen Love In The Ruins 2016

New in the Young Adult section, a novel called Firsts. From the publisher MacMillan’s description:

Seventeen-year-old Mercedes Ayres has an open-door policy when it comes to her bedroom, but only if the guy fulfills a specific criteria: he has to be a virgin. Mercedes lets the boys get their awkward fumbling first times over with, and all she asks in return is that they give their girlfriends the perfect first time-the kind Mercedes never had herself.

Keeping what goes on in her bedroom a secret has been easy – so far. Her mother isn’t home nearly enough to know about Mercedes’ extracurricular activities, and her uber-religious best friend, Angela, won’t even say the word “sex” until she gets married. But Mercedes doesn’t bank on Angela’s boyfriend finding out about her services and wanting a turn – or on Zach, who likes her for who she is instead of what she can do in bed.

When Mercedes’ perfect system falls apart, she has to find a way to salvage her own reputation -and figure out where her heart really belongs in the process. Funny, smart, and true-to-life, Laurie Elizabeth Flynn‘s Firsts is a one-of-a-kind young adult novel about growing up.

You can read the book’s first chapter here. It’s soft-core porn. Here’s more, from inside the book. I’m going to put this below the jump, to spare those who would rather not see it. I think it’s important that you see it to know what’s out there. Keep in mind that this does not come from a pornographer, but from a major publishing house — and it is recommended from girls as young as 14:

“The kitchen?” he says when I press him against the stainless steel refrigerator. “I never did it in a kitchen before.” He grabs me around the waist and lifts me onto the granite counter, where he puts his hand up my skirt and pulls my panties off. The counter happens to be the perfect height for sex, a fact I never noticed until yesterday morning, when I bent over it to paint my nails and purposely mess up Kim’s [her mother’s] daily ritual of polishing the granite. This has been on my mind ever since, taunting me in prayer group and distracting me all through chemistry. This is a regular occurrence for me, using Zach to play out my little fantasies. Somehow I don’t think he minds being a guinea pig.

“These are my favorite,” he says, clutching my pink lace panties in his hand. All of my panties are either lace or satin or sheer — no dingy whites or high-waisted monstrosities. I don’t even want to know what those would do to my reputation. Lucky for me, Kim tossed out all my childish floral panties back in elementary school, the day I got my period and she decided I needed something more grown-up.

Zach lets his own pants fall to the floor and abruptly closes the gap between us. He stands right between my legs, ready to go — until I reach out and slap him in the face.

“Condom, Zach,” I say, snapping my fingers. “You didn’t want to make it upstairs, so you should be ready.”

“Come on,” he says, leaning in to bite my lip. “I’m clean, you’re clean. I got tested six months ago. And we’re not sleeping with other people. It would feel so good without it.”

Ah, young love.

I’ve been sitting here staring at my screen for a while, trying to figure out what to say about this. I’m at a loss. I suppose the thing that gets to me the most is the idea that what was not too long ago the kind of thing that appeared in smutty adult novels is now packaged and sold by mainstream publishers for eighth grade girls. The culture wants to make whores of its daughters, and to debauch its sons.

Well, this Weimar America culture can go to hell if it wants to, but it’s not going to take my children with it, if I can help it. The author of this book and its publisher are barbarians. Philip Rieff called this kind of thing “anti-culture.” Culture, as he saw it, was a process through which people learned to bind and to loose, to form their souls to a higher order — a “sacred” one, he called it, though he was not a religious believer. This sacred order allows life to continue. It is generative, and regenerative. An “anti-culture,” then, is one that destroys all possibility of order, and of the generation of life.

We live in an anti-culture. It’s killing itself. Firsts is a small thing, but its importance lies in its banality. This is the poison we feed our children as their daily bread.

The ancient Hebrews knew the truth, and that truth endures forever. From the book of Deuteronomy, Chapter 30:

15 See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. 16 For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

17 But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, 18 I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.

19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

 

 

I have a friend who, many years ago, was badly strung out on cocaine. One day, when he was out driving around Los Angeles, he heard a voice say, “If you want to live, stop it.” Just like that. He stopped it. He lived, and now he thrives. I feel like that when I come across filth like Firsts. If we want to live, we have to stop it, turn away from this darkness, and go to the light.

Iowa Winners, Iowa Losers

WINNERS

Ted Cruz, who not only did what he had to do to stay alive, but also, by winning outright, embarrassed Trump mightily.
Marco Rubio, whose surprisingly strong third place finish — a whisker behind Trump! — makes him the undisputed establishment candidate, and delivered a massive shot in the arm to his campaign. There is now no reason for candidates who polled behind him to stay in the race. Their supporters reasonably ought to coalesce around Rubio (except Carson voters, many of whom will probably drift Cruzward).

LOSERS

Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State, dynast, and the presumptive Democratic nominee since forever, was very nearly knocked off by an elderly New England socialist. (And may yet be, but it’s late, and I’m not going to wait for that last five percent of Democratic votes to come in.) It’s impossible to see how she loses the nomination, but my gosh, even if she pulls this out tonight, what an incredible humiliation for someone of her stature within the Democratic Party. This:

Blowing a 53.8 lead in 12 months is a loss, no matter how you try to spin it.https://t.co/G22WyGfSqu

— Connor Walsh (@wconnorwalsh) February 2, 2016

Donald Trump, who got his nose bloodied. He’s still got the most momentum going into the next primary states, and he was always expected to do less well in Iowa, a caucus state that rewards ground organization (of which Trump had bupkis; if you think about it, it’s still something else that he came in 2nd). But he has lost the psychological advantage over his rivals that he’s held for months. He looks vulnerable. Had Trump won Iowa, it would have been possibly a mortal wound for Cruz.
Jeb Bush, who polled a miserable 3 percent in Iowa, spent a reported $25,000 per caucus vote. Hey, he’s still got $59 million to burn through, but they don’t have trailer hitches on hearses. The Bush political dynasty died tonight on the Midwestern plains.

UPDATE: Six months ago, if you had said that the Iowa caucus would end with 1) Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders tied with Hillary Clinton, 2) Donald J. Trump coming in second on the GOP side, and 3) Jeb Bush bottoming out with 2.8 percent of the vote, who would have believed you?

Matt Yglesias is not happy with the Democratic establishment tonight. Excerpt:

The Clinton campaign’s strategy will, of course, be second-guessed as stumbling front-runners always are. But the larger problem is the way that party as a whole — elected officials, operatives, leaders of allied interest groups, major donors, greybeard elder statespersons, etc. — decided to cajole all viable non-Clinton candidates out of the race. This had the effect of making a Clinton victory much more likely than it would have been in a scenario when she was facing off against Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, and Deval Patrick. But it also means that the only alternative to Clinton is a candidate the party leaders don’t regard as viable.

Trying to coordinate your efforts to prevent something crazy from happening is smart, otherwise you might wind up with Donald Trump. But trying to foreclose any kind of meaningful contact with the voters or debate about party priorities, strategy, and direction was arrogant and based on a level of self-confidence about Democratic leaders’ political judgment that does not seem borne out by the evidence. This is a party that has no viable plan for winning the House of Representatives, that’s been pushed to a historic lowpoint in terms of state legislative seats, and that somehow lost the governors mansions in New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Illinois.

It’s a party, in other words, that was clearly in need of some dialogue, debate, and contestation over what went wrong and how to fix it. But instead of encouraging such a dialogue the party tried to cut it off. That leaves them with Sanders’ Political Revolutiontheory. It doesn’t seem very plausible to me, but at least it’s something.

A lot of us have been focused for the past week or two on what the Trump phenomenon says about the intellectual bankruptcy of the GOP. The Sanders phenomenon is not nearly as colorful or as fun to think about, but Bernie is quietly making a very similar point to Donald Trump’s, on his own side. Yglesias gets it.

Ted Cruz Is Not What He Seems

Here’s a really interesting piece by Erica Grieder, a writer for Texas Monthly magazine, in which she gives Ten Things You Ned To Know About Ted Cruz. Fascinating stuff. Among them:

1) Ted Cruz is not a fire-breathing extremist.

Cruz, obviously, is a polarizing figure, for several reasons. One is that he is perceived as a hard-line conservative, if not a genuine extremist. This is a misconception that he has encouraged, by casting himself as someone outside the party establishment, to the right of his colleagues. He campaigned in 2012 as a Tea Party insurgent and has staged numerous fights in Congress, in opposition to the so-called conciliators of the surrender caucus. He is now stumping around Iowa, denouncing the “Washington cartel.”

There’s no question that Cruz is a conservative. On constitutional issues, I’d say he’s the gold standard. But he’s not as extreme or ideological as people often assume. Maggie Wright, a Texan who has traveled to Iowa to volunteer, gave journalist (and Texas Monthly contributor) Robert Draper an admirably concise summary: “He’s for states’ rights, for all the Constitution, he will not allow us to bash the gays but won’t let anybody do jihad on the Christians.” Similarly, though Cruz is one of the few Republicans in Congress who passes muster with the right wing’s self-appointed purity czars, and he is contemptuous of conservatives who assert principled convictions they do nothing to advance, he is ecumenical about disagreement. “In any two-party system you welcome people with a variety of views,” he told me in 2013, after I asked if the Republican coalition could include leaders who support gay marriage, or even abortion rights. And Cruz is not the kind of partisan who casts his opponents as evil or stupid; his provocations are more subtle. In 2013, having described Barack Obama as an “honest-to-god socialist,” he added that he was using the word in its literal sense: “It describes a means of structuring an economy. Socialism is government ownership or control of the means of production or distribution.”

Because Cruz is currently running for the Republican nomination, the perception that he is a ferocious hard-liner serves his interests, and he’s not likely to dispute it. But even on the campaign trail, fielding questions from the grassroots, his answers are more nuanced than his reputation would suggest. As the campaign goes on he is likely to devote more attention to issues such as economic opportunity, which he emphasized in a January 2013 speech, shortly after being sworn in to the Senate.

Another one:

4) Cruz is smarter than us.

I’m not ideological about intelligence. In my view, it comes in many forms and none of them have a moral valence. So when I say that Cruz is smarter than us, I don’t mean it to imply a value judgment or even a contrast with other politicians. What I mean is that Cruz has the particular form of intelligence that is universally recognized as such, and he has it in abundance. This is just how it is. I feel no need to deny it, and I see no purpose to doing so.

Instead, I proceed on the assumption that Cruz is smarter than me—not that he’s a superior human who Americans should follow blindly, and not that he’s always right. Just that he’s smarter than me. In practice, that means when Cruz says or does something that doesn’t make sense to me, I ask myself what I’m missing. I take a step back and slowly puzzle through why a very smart person with certain well-documented strategic objectives would do that. Lord knows this is not my usual practice with politicians, but it has turned out to be a surprisingly effective technique for analyzing Cruz. I highly recommend it.

Read the whole thing. It changed the way I see Cruz. Didn’t make me care for him any more than I do, but it did make me take him a lot more seriously. Grieder concludes:

The day he announced his campaign, I learned two things. Cruz sees a path to the presidency. And the path exists.

Readers who can’t see it yet shouldn’t feel bad. It took a lot of people in Texas a while to see Cruz’s path to the Senate, too. Whether his risky bet pays off this time is yet to be determined and subject to circumstances, some of which can’t yet be anticipated, and some of which are unavoidably out of his control. But he’s already come much further than his critics thought he could. He clearly has a chance. Cruz, I have no doubt, knew that long ago.

 

Vote Like Jesus Would, Sez Ted

In church news:

Cruz’s stump speech is by far the most religious one of all the Republican candidates, in which he tells his supporters to pray “each and every day” until the November election.

At a campaign stop in Hamlin, Iowa, before the caucus, he told supporters that it’s time to, “awaken the body of Christ that we may pull back from the abyss.”

For non-Christians in the readership “the body of Christ” here refers to the church universal. He’s telling his Christian supporters that the country is going to hell in a handbasket, but if they wake up and “vote [their] values,” they might turn things around.

CBN’s Brody File has a clip of a recent private Cruz address to Iowa pastors. He’s really good on the stump. At just past the one minute mark, Cruz admonishes his audience to caucus for the candidate who “defends Biblical values. … The people who burn us tell us they agree with us. So don’t listen to what they say or what I say. Don’t listen to what I say! Hold us to the test. Hold us accountable.”

You might have missed this Politico report from December 23, based on a recording of a meeting Cruz had with some wealthy Manhattan donors. Politico reported:

During the question period, one of the donors told Cruz that gay marriage was one of the few issues on which the two disagreed. Then the donor asked: “So would you say it’s like a top-three priority for you — fighting gay marriage?”

“No,” Cruz replied. “I would say defending the Constitution is a top priority. And that cuts across the whole spectrum — whether it’s defending [the] First Amendment, defending religious liberty.”

Soothing the attendee without contradicting what he has said elsewhere, Cruz added: “People of New York may well resolve the marriage question differently than the people of Florida or Texas or Ohio. … That’s why we have 50 states — to allow a diversity of views. And so that is a core commitment.”

The donor was satisfied, ending his colloquy with Cruz with a friendly: “Thanks. Good luck.”

A well-known Republican operative not affiliated with a 2016 campaign said by email when sent Cruz’s quote: “Wow. Does this not undermine all of his positions? Abortion, Common Core — all to the states? … Worse, he sounds like a slick D.C. politician — says one thing on the campaign trail and trims his sails with NYC elites. Not supposed to be like that.”

Cruz’s campaign responded that the candidate is not dissembling here, that the “leave it to the states” view has always been his this cycle. Mike Huckabee has accused him of talking out of both sides of his mouth, but the truth is, neither of them are being straightforward with voters. You’d think that the Obergefell ruling had never come down. What they’re doing is virtue-signaling to Evangelical voters. It doesn’t matter if they would “leave it to the states” or not; SCOTUS has made same-sex marriage a constitutional right. I don’t like it any more than Ted Cruz does, but it has happened, and there’s no realistic prospect of overturning that ruling, which, alas for us all, is popular. 

Same-sex marriage is here to stay. The question now is what happens to the religious liberties of institutions and individuals who dissent from the new orthodoxy. That is something that the president and Congress do have some say over, if they have the vision and the courage to act, and act with strategic intelligence.

Yesterday in Iowa, Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame warmed up a Cruz crowd:

Robertson said Cruz was the only candidate who could restore the constitutional and biblical foundation of government.

“When a fellow like me looks at the landscape and sees the depravity, the perversion — redefining marriage and telling us that marriage is not between a man and a woman? Come on Iowa!” Robertson said.

“It is nonsense. It is evil. It’s wicked. It’s sinful,” he said to applause. “They want us to swallow it, you say. We have to run this bunch out of Washington, D.C. We have to rid the earth of them. Get them out of there.”

“Ted Cruz loves God, he loves James Madison and he’s a strict constitutionalist. You know what Ted Cruz understands,” Robertson said. “God raises these empires up. It is God who brings them down.”

It’s all so easy, isn’t it? Vote Ted, rid the earth of evil, and all will be well. Why does anybody believe this stuff anymore?

“The people who burn us tell us they agree with us,” Cruz told those pastors. The implication is that they’re lying, that they really don’t agree with the Evangelicals. I don’t believe that’s what Cruz is guilty of. What he’s guilty of is misleading Evangelicals into thinking that by electing him, they will be casting a vote for getting rid of same-sex marriage. I wish that were possible, but it’s not — and Scott Shackford, the gay libertarian, explained very well why the GOP candidates running on this issue are blowing an opportunity to defend religious liberty. So what we have here is the same old Religious Right song-and-dance. Vote for me and I’ll re-moralize America. 

It’s untrue. Politics cannot do the work of culture.

UPDATE: Here’s a column by Francis Beckwith criticizing Evangelicals who have jumped on the Trump bandwagon. Great final graf:

And Trump is a damn good preacher. So much so that many evangelicals don’t seem to notice the un-Christian personal insults, slurs, arrogance, mendacity, and incoherence. Which just goes to show you that not only is a sucker born every minute; sometimes he’s born again.

UPDATE.2: I can’t decide if it’s more unnerving to think that Ted Cruz doesn’t really believe what he’s saying … or that he does.

Character Is Destiny, But Not Straightforwardly

Michael Gerson writes in the Washington Post:

Leadership is often evidenced in relatively small things. Shortly after his election in 2000, I was with President George W. Bush in the family theater at the White House where he was practicing his first address to Congress. For whatever reason, the military is charged with teleprompter operation, and the operator had messed up his job. An angry Bush said, “Call me when you get your act together” and stalked out of the room. The young man was distraught. But a few minutes later, Bush returned and apologized to the operator, saying: “That is not the way the president of the United States should act.”

A small thing, but I remember it. The office confers an awesome power to elevate the lives of those around a president, or to destroy them.

And therefore, we shouldn’t vote for Donald Trump, who is a total jerk.

This is what’s so frustrating about the Trump thing. I think George W. Bush is exactly the decent man Gerson says he is. And I think Trump is just as piggish as Gerson says he is. What’s more, I agree with Gerson that temperament in high office matters.

And yet, all of Bush’s personal decency did not stop him from making colossal errors in judgment, most of all with Iraq, but not only with Iraq. That honorable gentleman, George W. Bush — and I’m not calling him that snarkily, note well — blundered the nation into its worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. And all his personal decency did not stay his hand as a torturer. Jimmy Carter was probably one of the most decent men ever to hold the office, but it availed him nothing as a leader. Gerson cites Richard Nixon’s paranoia as an example of how a president’s temperament can affect his performance in office. He’s right: character really is destiny.

But it’s not always destiny in predictable ways, is it? The people who back Trump know he’s a jackass — and that’s what they like about him. They see it as a character strength, as in, “this guy is not going to let himself be taken advantage of, and he’s not going to let America be taken advantage of.” I think it’s a pretty serious risk to take, going with Trump, but holding up George W. Bush’s admirable gentlemanliness as a counterargument to Trump’s low character does nothing to bolster the case against Trump. Ronald Reagan was a famously nice guy, but by the end of the woeful Carter years, the American people were ready for an SOB, as long as he was a competent SOB.

 

Bunga Bunga Billionaire Nation

Ladies and gentlemen, from the Howard Stern Show, the odds-on favorite to be your Republican Party nominee for president, Donald Trump, in a long 1997 interview with shock-jock Howard Stern, in which he discusses, among other things, how he avoided sexually transmitted diseases, how he could have had Princess Diana, whether or not he masturbates and … well, watch the whole thing, but beware, it’s very NSFW.

Prior to Trump, it was impossible to imagine a presidential contender with this kind of thing in his past. [UPDATE: I mean a video of this kind of trashy discussion. — RD] Can you imagine the fun Democrats would have mining Trump’s endless vulgar statements for attack ads? As we now know, though, this is not a bug with Trump, but a feature. People either don’t mind it, or they appreciate how Trump just doesn’t give a rat’s rear end what people think of him. Watch that Howard Stern interview, and it’s easy to see Trump as an American version of Silvio Berlusconi, elected to office in Italy, in part because all his traditional party opponents were seen as weak and ineffectual. A friend and reader of this blog e-mails:

In one of your articles you ask if Trump ever loses.

Depends on what you call losing.

To some, he loses huge, but  they don’t notice it really.

For most people, they don’t take the big risks because the big thing they are afraid to lose is popularity. They are afraid of losing the pats on the backs, the flattery, and the crap of human sentiment, and when I say “crap” of human sentiment, I do not mean human sentiment is crap. I mean, human sentiment that runs on emotion of whether I like you today because you kissed my a*s or not and gave me what I wanted and told me what I wanted to hear is crap. It’s nothing, and, yet, people are afraid to lose it. They are afraid of being criticized, not getting enough “likes” on their Facebook page, and being the bad guy. They are afraid to rock the boat because someone might suggest tossing  them overboard. And if we are honest about it, those people are pandering to the populace because they have neither a solid moral compass or any real idea of who the hell they really are. They need the populace to talk to them because they need the populace to dictate identity.

Trump does not give a rat’s rear end about any of the above  because he is none of the above.

He knows who he is. He knows what he stands for. He has a clear compass point for where he is and where he wants to go, and he doesn’t need anyone telling him he is right. And, if he gets tossed overboard, he’ll find another way to swim. He simply does not need the populace to be himself, and because of that, he bets big, and he wins big.

Does he ever lose? Actually, he loses big, too. He loses popularity because people don’t like his drive, his disinterest in others’ opinions, his unwillingness to bend to cater to others’ emotions or insecurities. The thing is, Trump doesn’t care because that isn’t a loss to him. He is looking beyond that. To other people, that is the greatest loss they can imagine, and it becomes their prison.

You and I both know a person cannot do great things without pissing off the general masses and their opinions. For most people, that is too much risk to take. For Trump, it never crosses his mind.

Look at the people shaping our world right now and think of how many think like Trump. How many are willing to rock the boat because they believe they are here for bigger purposes than popularity? Look at Franklin Graham and how outspoken he has become on hot topics. Is he Trump? Not yet, but politics is Trump’s realm, and we all know politics, not God, is America’s foremost religion now.

Rod, there is a lot to learn from Trump, not just in business or politics, but in the drive for what is worthy losing and what cannot afford to be lost…and fiercely we must be willing to battle for what we cannot afford to lose.

Now, we’ve all been talking about how almost nobody saw Trump coming. We’ve been talking about why people are drawn to Trump, and what the GOP Establishment failed to understand about itself. There are lots of theories going around, but I have not seen a Unified Theory Of Trump emerge yet — one that gets to the core of the Trump phenomenon.

Trump’s missing the final Fox debate before Monday’s Iowa caucuses seems to have paid off for him, as he has increased his lead over Ted Cruz, his nearest rival. Unless Trump can’t get his people to the caucuses on Monday night, he’s going to win Iowa, and he’s well ahead in the next two primary states, New Hampshire and South Carolina. If he wins all three, that will be an unprecedented feat.

Ron Brownstein says polling reveals the big new divide in the GOP: class. More:

The most consistent dividing line in responses to Trump is education. That was a telling differentiator in 2012, too: Romney won voters with at least a four-year college degree in 14 of the 20 states, but he carried most non-college voters in just ten of them. But this time the class divide has widened to become the race’s central fissure.

From the start, Trump has performed better in polling among Republicans without a college degree than among those who hold a four-year or post-graduate degree. Across the broad range of recent national and early state surveys, Trump consistently attracts about 40 percent of Republicans without a college degree—a remarkable number in a field this large. (The three latest Marist polls put him at 42 percent with them in Iowa, 41 percent in South Carolina and 36 percent in New Hampshire.) His performance among those with degrees is usually more modest: around 25 to 30 percent in most surveys.

Trump’s success at connecting with the economic and cultural anxieties of blue-collar whites largely explains why he hasn’t been damaged more by his disputes with groups that usually function as the gatekeepers for conservative support, from the Fox News Channel to National Review. Voters at Trump rallies are often quick to acknowledge he isn’t a typical Republican, or a classic conservative. Yet they don’t see his deviations from party orthodoxy as disqualifying because they view him as championing them against forces they view as threatening—from special interest influence in Washington to rapid demographic change. “I come out of a traditional Republican household,” said Tom Cotton, a retired law enforcement officer from Grinnell, Iowa, who attended a Trump rally in Marshalltown last week. “And let’s face it—he’s not a traditional Republican. But I truly believe he will give it everything he’s got to get things going again.”

Remember that line of populist Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards I posted not long ago? The one in which Edwards explained the mystery of why certain social and religious conservatives in Louisiana voted for him, despite his reputation as a womanizer and a crook?

“With me, the people know the butter might be rancid, but it’s going to be spread on their side of the bread.”

There you go.

New York magazine has a passage from its reporting on Iowa and New Hampshire voters that really resonates. Emphases below are mine:

This attraction to strength seems to be connected to an inchoate sense that the world is falling apart. The voters we spoke to were concerned about a lot of potential threats — terrorist, economic, and cultural — and hoped that a strong president would protect them from dangers within as well as from abroad. Voters said they no longer felt free to be themselves in their own country — policed in their speech, unable to pray publicly or even say “God bless you” when someone sneezes. “Everything’s so p.c.,” said Priscilla Mills, a 33-year-old hospital coordinator from Manchester. “And then the second you do say something, you’re a racist.” Trump, who had 21 percent of the vote in our small sample, has capitalized the most on the political-correctness grievance, which is likely to surface in the general election no matter who becomes the nominee.

The culture wars clearly aren’t defined along the same lines that they used to be. Almost everyone we spoke with said they were pro-life, but few talked about restricting abortion as their main issue. And gay marriage barely even registered as a cause for concern. “I feel like I don’t wear a black robe, so I don’t have the right to judge anybody,” said Tina Vondran, 49, of Monticello, Iowa.

Certainly, there were voters turned off by the polemical style of the more extreme candidates. And 48 percent were still undecided as of late January. But their leanings, which crisscrossed ideological positions, seemed to confirm the conventional wisdom that the GOP-primary voter is more motivated by mood than by policy. “Donald Trump has the best tagline of all, ‘Make America great again,’ ” said Rubio backer Russell Fuhrman of Dubuque, Iowa. “The country just seems to be in a severe decline. Insecurity’s so high; pessimism and political correctness are running rampant. It’s sad.”

More motivated by mood than policy. That’s an important insight. The people can’t really put their finger on what’s wrong, but they sense — correctly, in my view — that something is very seriously wrong. Trump gives them a sense that the problem is the Other (Wall Street, immigrants, et alia), and that by force of will, he will set things aright. It is way, way too easy to explain Trump away by saying he’s a scapegoater. He may well be that, but he’s not entirely wrong about how the architects of our economy in finance, industry, and in government, have worked against the interests of very many Americans just like them.

And this reaction against political correctness? Don’t you think these people know perfectly well that they and their values are despised by the cosmopolitans who run media, academia, the political parties, and so on? Boston University professor Stephen Prothero had an insightful remark on Facebook:

[The] Democratic Party also to blame, by ignoring the cultural concerns of working-class white voters. Bernie Sanders addresses their economic concerns, but he and HRC ignore their cultural concerns–their worry about losing their jobs to undocumented immigrants; their fear of terrorism. Trump addresses their economic concerns also by pledging to tax Wall Street traders (as Bernie has promised). But he speaks to their fears and their sense of not being heard or “protected.” Those of us who live in our white liberal bubbles in Boston or the Bay Area don’t see these people. They are like “dark matter” to us, pulling on the gravitational force of US politics but largely invisible. But now not so much.

All of this is true. But what’s also true, I think, is that people are fooling themselves if they think electing a strongman is going to save us. Dante Alighieri fantasized about a strongman coming to sort out the godawful mess that was Italy in the 14th century, but I think he told truer than he knew in Purgatorio XVI, on the terrace of Wrath. When the pilgrim Dante asked Marco the Lombard why the world back on earth is in such a mess, Marco answered him by saying, in effect, If you want to fix the world, first fix your own heart.

It sounds like a greeting card sentiment, but it’s not. Did you hear this story on NPR this morning, about the “collapse of parenting”? A psychiatrist and family physician has a new book out talking about how parents today are setting our kids up for failure by catering to them, giving them what they want, not what they need. And we have created a culture in which we tear down parents who try to do the right thing. Dr. Leonard Sax, the author, told NPR:

So, for example, one mom took the cell phone away because her daughter’s spending all her time texting and Snapchatting. And the daughter didn’t push back. And her friends were like “Oh, you know her mom’s the weird mom who took her phone away.” The real push back — and this is what surprised this mom — came from the parents of her daughter’s friends, who really got on her case and said, “How can you do this?” and this mom told me that she thinks the other parents are uncertain, unsure of what they should be doing and so that’s why they’re lashing out at her — the one mom who has the strength to take a stand.

Why would moms do that to the disciplinarian mom? Sounds like they’re doing it to assuage their own bad consciences. This is the kind of thing that politics cannot fix, this degraded parenting culture. Years ago, a friend of mine who worked as an elementary school teacher in a school filled with impoverished kids used to go to these kids’ houses after school to meet with their parents (or rather, almost always, the parent; there were no dads in these houses). He said over and over, it was the same thing: the TV was on all the time, blaring loud, and the mother was completely checked out. It was chaos externally, and (therefore) chaos inside these kids. My friend finally became so overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem, and the unwillingness of the parents to lift a finger to change the course of their children’s lives, that he quit teaching and went into another line of work. He saw no hope there.

Look, I’m not saying that policy (economic and otherwise) has nothing to do with this “things fall apart” situation we find ourselves in. It does. But there’s a lot more going on here, at every level of our society, from top to bottom. The center is not holding. Trump is not the cause; Trump is the effect. If he becomes president, maybe some things will change for the better, but if he threw out every illegal immigrant, built a wall between the US and Mexico, reformed the financial system and did everything he promised to do, We The People would still have massive problems governing ourselves, in our private lives.

From Brad Gregory’s history The Unintended Reformation, this reflection on what happens to us when we give up, or only pay lip service to, the religious beliefs undergirding the foundation of our democracy. Emphasis below is the author’s:

Overwhelmingly, through [churches] and their families [early Americans] learned their moral values and behaviors. Tocqueville saw this clearly in the early 1830s, and the most prominent nineteenth-century American Catholic intellectual, too, the convert Orestes Brownson, was from the mid-1850s keen on the way in which such remarkably empty rights could be filled with Catholic content. The American founding fathers intuited, for their own time, how a novel ethics of rights could assume without having to spell out or justify the widespread beliefs that socially divided Christians continued to share notwithstanding their divergent convictions. What they could not have foreseen was what would happen to an ethics of rights when large numbers of people came to reject the shared beliefs that made it intellectually viable and socially workable. They could not have imagined what would happen when instead, intertwined with new historical realities and related behaviors, millions of people exercised their rights to convert to substantially different beliefs, choosing different good s and living accordingly. Only then, especially after World War II and even more since the 1960s, would the emptiness of the United States’ formal ethics of rights start to become visible, the fragility of its citizens’ social relationships begin to be exposed, and its lack of any substantive moral community be gradually revealed through the sociological reality of its subjectivized ethics. Civil society and democratic government depended on more than deliberately contentless formal rights. But what would or could that “more” be, and where would it come from, if religion no longer provided shared moral content as it had during much of the nineteenth century?

We are living out the answer to that question, and will be living out for the foreseeable future.The American people are right to sense that things are falling apart, but they misunderstand the ultimate sources of the disorder. This country needs new and better political leadership; that is undeniably true. But at best, it would only solve part of the problem, and not even the most important part.  More than anything right now, this country needs a new and quite different St. Benedict.

How Dante Can Make Your Lent

Image by Michael Hogue/Photo by Rod Dreher

I hear from time to time from people who say they liked my book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, but they didn’t pick up How Dante Can Save Your Life because they don’t really care about poetry or literary analysis.

Well, I’m not much on poetry or literary analysis either. And How Dante is not the book they think it is.

You might call it “literary self-help” for people who don’t buy self-help books. I was (am) that kind of person. And I rarely buy books of poetry. I consider that a character flaw, but that’s how I am. Yet I stumbled into The Divine Comedy when I was lost, depressed, and sick as a dog. I believe that God used that incomparable poem to heal me. Through it, the poet Dante systematically led me on an examination of conscience, and revealed to me sins, and patterns of sinfulness, that I had concealed from myself. Through prayer, confession, therapy, and plain old repentance (the hardest thing!), I slowly found my way back to the straight path, and was restored. Dante, in his poem, showed me the way out of the dark wood into which my own failures, disappointments, and passions had led me. How Dante is a story about hard-won victory.

With Lent almost upon the Christian West, it occurs to me this morning that some of you might want to take up How Dante as part of your Lenten reading. There’s a little bit of literary analysis in it, of course, but the overwhelming thrust of the book is about how to apply the insights in the poem to your own life struggles. In my own case, there wasn’t a lot I discovered in the Commedia that I didn’t already know at some level — that is, in terms of right and wrong — but because Dante embedded these moral and theological truths, and truths about human nature — in a fantastic story, that made all the difference in the world. In the book, I take Dante’s story and graft my own story onto it, and in so doing hope to inspire the reader to see his or her own life story, and struggles, in light of Dante’s adventure in the afterlife.

If you want a book that explores the literary qualities of the Commedia, mine is not a book for you. This is a book that shows you how to use the Commedia to achieve what the poet himself said he wanted his masterpiece to achieve: to bring the reader from a state of despair to a state of bliss.

There is no better time than Lent to read How Dante Can Save Your Life. You do not have to be Catholic, nor you do not have to have read the Commedia to get into the book. It is written for people who know the Commedia, and for people who have never cracked its covers. Dante’s Commedia, written in the early 14th century, is one of the greatest works ever produced by Western civilization. T.S. Eliot said, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.”

I never studied Dante in school, and you know, I’m glad of it, because I was able to first encounter him not as a Great Man Of Literature, and his poem as a cultural Mount Everest that I was too daunted to climb. I met him in a dark wood, when he came to me as an emissary from heaven, and said, “You are lost. I know the way out. Trust me — and follow me.” That’s what How Dante Can Save Your Life is about: introducing readers to the guide who can take them out of the darkness and into the light, because in his own life, he walked that treacherous path back to God, and wrote his poem to rescue others the way God rescued him. It’s a good book for Lent, and I hope you’ll give it a try.

Plus, the design of this book — man, it’s a real art object. Look at this endpaper below. I still can’t get over that a book so beautifully designed has my name on it:

Hey Louisiana, What’s For Dinner?

So I went to the grocery store tonight…