Rod Dreher's Blog, page 97

‘Hillbilly Elegy’, Class Conflict, & Mercy

Have you had a chance to watch Hillbilly Elegy yet on Netflix? Friends of mine who have report to me that they had the same experience I did: the movie is much better than the critics say. Two friends in Washington — both of them politically savvy — agreed with me that most critics met the film with such vitriol because they consider it a stand-in for white working-class Trump voters. It’s not at all, but this is what they projected onto the movie. It is now okay to hate Deplorables again, and maybe even mandatory.

One of my DC friends said this the critical gang-up on the movie reminds him of how so many liberal elites jumped down David Brooks’s throat for an observation he made in a 2017 column about the cultural barriers elites establish that keep a lot of people out. Brooks wrote that he inadvertently made a friend of his feel uncomfortable when he took her to lunch at an upscale sandwich shop, where she did not understand the menu:

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”

Man, the pile-on was massive and vicious. Basically, these were educated liberals bashing Brooks for being condescending. But as my DC friend points out, if you have ever been in the situation of Brooks’s friend (as the reader has), it made perfect sense. The people hating on David Brooks simply could not imagine the deep class anxiety that Brooks’s friend experienced. Similarly, in the only relatively positive review of the Hillbilly Elegy movie that I saw, critic Matt Zoller Seitz observes:

Some of the early screenwriting details lay on the “country man vs. the elites” details rather thick—is it really believable that this guy would’ve gone all the way to Yale Law School without learning which utensil to use for which course, or that there’s more than one type of white wine?—but the actors sell it, and Howard’s subdued yet borderline-mythologizing approach to J.D. is part of a long snobs-vs.-slobs tradition in American film.

Guess what? It all happened exactly like the film depicts. I know this not only because I read Hillbilly Elegy, but I checked just now with J.D. Vance. Not only did he not know about different types of wine and which utensil to use, but he also really did duck out of the Yale meeting to call his then-girlfriend Usha to ask. Matt Zoller Seitz is a sensitive critic, but even he can’t imagine what life really is like for people who grew up outside of the educated middle class.

I grew up in somewhat more sophisticated circumstances than Vance did, but I would have been in the same boat on wine at his age. My people did not drink wine. They do now, but that’s a change that began in the mid-1990s or thereabouts. It affected the menu planning for my wedding reception in 1997. My wife had to explain to her mother, who was planning the reception, that there had to be a non-wine option for drinks, because Rod’s dad and relatives drink only beer or bourbon. It was the culture.

Even now, there are all kinds of class markers attached to craft beers — even craft beers made in Louisiana.  You would think that everybody here would feel a certain pride about being able to drink beer made right here in Louisiana, as opposed to some factory somewhere. Some do, but you’re not going to find a lot of working class folks eager to walk away from Bud Light to drink something they associate with fancy people. It took me a while to learn that. I would bring some new Louisiana craft beer to my dad to try. He was polite about it, and would drink one, then go back to his Schaefer Light. I finally realized that he saw those gift beers from Louisiana as one more opportunity for his uppity son to make him feel bad about what he liked.

That’s not how I saw it at all. For me, it was all about, “Hey, there are some guys over by Lafayette brewing beer now. I think it’s pretty good, so I thought you might like to see what it tastes like.” It was about sharing an experience. It took me a long time to figure out that this was not something I should do. Readers of my book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming will remember how my new wife and I cooked a bouillabaisse for my Louisiana family, as a way of doing something nice for them when we were home visiting. It’s a fish stew in a tomatoey broth. In south Louisiana, Cajuns have a similar dish called courtbouillion (pron. “KOO-bee-yon”), and if I had told them we were going to make a courtbouillion, they would have loved it. Instead, I used an unfamiliar French word, and despite the fact that it was just fish, garlic, onions, and tomatoes in broth, none of them would eat it, and my sister insulted us at the table as fancypants people. Again, what’s so interesting about this to me is that these are south Louisiana people; we suck the fat out of the heads of boiled crawfish. What made the bouillabaisse so offensive was not the ingredients, but the fact that this was something they had never heard of, being forced on them by the city relatives. Even though I had asked for permission to make the dish for them, and they granted it, the understanding was that of course they were just being polite to say yes, and that if I had been a good person I never would have asked in the first place.

What finally brought this into focus for me was this 2012 essay by Will Wilkinson, about country music, openness to experience, and the psychology of culture war. Excerpt:

My conjecture, then, is that country music functions in part to reinforce in low-openness individuals the idea that life’s most powerful, meaningful emotional experiences are precisely those to which conservative personalities living conventional lives are most likely to have access. And it functions as a device to coordinate members of conservative-minded communities on the incomparable emotional weight of traditional milestone experiences.

Yesterday’s Washington Post features a classic “conservatives in the mist” piece on the conservative denizens of Washington, OK, and their sense that their values are under attack. Consider this passage about fellow named Mark Tague:

I want my kids to grow up with values and ways of life that I had and my parents had,” he says, so his youngest son tools around the garage on a Big Wheel, and his oldest daughter keeps her riding horse at the family barn built in 1907, and they buy their drinking milk from Braun’s because he always has. “Why look for change?” he says. “I like to know that what you see is what you get.Country music is for this guy.

But why would you want your kids to grow up with the same way of life as you and your grandparents? My best guess (and let me stress guess) is that those low in openness depend emotionally on a sense of enchantment of the everyday and the profundity of ritual. Even a little change, like your kids playing with different toys than you did, comes as a small reminder of the instability of life over generations and the contingency of our emotional attachments. This is a reminder low-openness conservatives would prefer to avoid, if possible. What high-openness liberals feel as mere nostalgia, low-openness conservatives feel as the baseline emotional tone of a recognizably decent life. If your kids don’t experience the same meaningful things in the same same way that you experienced them, then it may seem that their lives will be deprived of meaning, which would be tragic. And even if you’re able to see that your kids will find plenty of meaning, but in different things and in different ways, you might well worry about the possibility of ever really understanding and relating to them. The inability to bond over profound common experience would itself constitute a grave loss of meaning for both generations. So when the culture redefines a major life milestone, such as marriage, it trivializes one’s own milestone experience by imbuing it was a sense of contingency, threatens to deprive one’s children of the same experience, and thus threatens to make the generations strangers to one another. And what kind of monster would want that?

All of this made perfect sense to me at the time, and still does. I’m a super-weird dude in that I am a conservative who prizes openness to experience. Wilkinson’s piece, though, helped me understand why for a lot of people, being closed to experience is a form of cultural defense. I rolled my eyes at my dad when I told him I was leaving the Methodist church to become Catholic. “But the Drehers have always been Methodist,” he said, genuinely pained. I pointed out that we weren’t actually big churchgoers, and that I had come to love and follow Christ in a much deeper way as a Catholic. None of this made any sense to him. I did not understand that at the time, but now I have a much better sense of why this caused him pain. We didn’t go to church often, and the church we didn’t go to was the Methodist church. But if a Dreher could turn his back on Methodism, what else might he turn his back on? Daddy was right to worry.

I say all this to point out that for a lot of people in this country, not knowing about how the professional class lives — that is, the knowledge that everyone in that class acquires simply by virtue of being part of that class’s life — is not primarily about being obstreperous reverse snobs. It is a form of self-defense. Look, I’m not defending it, but I am saying that middle class and professional people often move through the world with no awareness of how little they know about the lives of others from the outsider social classes. The people who made fun of David Brooks for condescending to his friend at the sandwich shop were the truly condescending ones. David’s was an act of empathy, once he realized that his guest was uncomfortable in a place that is completely ordinary to educated cosmopolitans. Similarly, there are people — Matt Zoller Seitz is one — who really can’t imagine that somebody could have an experience like J.D. Vance really had, and who therefore interpret its depiction as a form of condescension.

It’s not always easy to predict how this is going to land. In the autumn of 1988, I returned from a summer spent traveling in Europe on the super-cheap with my best friend, and took a college internship in DC, working for a political consultant. I had a little basement apartment on Capitol Hill. Everybody was really nice to me, but I was scared to death of doing the wrong thing socially. I was desperate for friends, and heard one day that there was going to be some kind of mixer for young people on the Hill, over at Eastern Market. I was invited. After work, I went over there, hoping to meet some people. After ranging around the entrance to the space for about ten minutes, trying to work up the courage to go in, and finally lost my nerve, and went back home. I sat in the darkness of my basement hating myself for lacking confidence. What was I afraid of? That people would see that I was a fraud. That’s it. I was 21 years old, and afraid.

Mind you, I had just spent the summer bouncing around hostels in Europe, and had been just fine. There was something about being in my own country, though, in that social setting, that paralyzed me. Nobody there treated me badly at all. Heck, I didn’t give them the chance to! This was all a drama playing out inside my head. I wrote to a friend back home, a former teacher, to confess how embarrassed I was by my sense of inadequacy. She told me something in response that stuck with me: “You are a Southerner who has good manners. A person who has good manners can go anywhere with confidence.”

That is true. I have lived long enough to learn it through experience. Now, at the time, I had the sense to realize that nobody had made me feel bad about myself. I didn’t project my own deep sense of inadequacy onto others, and accuse them of aggression, of trying to make me feel bad about myself. But a lot of people do that, and we live in a culture in which one can gain advantage by doing so.

Educated middle class liberals talk a lot about “privilege,” but I believe their discourse — at least among white people — is mostly in bad faith. They keep it to matters of race as a way of avoiding class. Batya Ungar-Sargon made a similar observation in a recent interview:

So why does this view that erases equality and pushes oppression as the root of everything appeal so much to affluent liberals? To me, it seems like the answer is that despite the pieties they espouse, liberal elites don’t really believe in equality, either; no affluent person does. They know their prosperity comes at someone else’s expense, and a worldview that was actually invested in equality would insist they share more of their good fortune.

Still, they want to believe they are good people. They’re liberals! So just imagine the relief when they are told that the inequality that resulted in their having so much while so many Americans have so little is not the result of their failure to pay more taxes or to send their kids to public schools, but that it stems from something as immutable as the color of their skin. It totally relieves them of the responsibility of doing anything about it. All they can do is feel guilty. They get to keep all their money while feeling like heroes! How perfect.

Of course, there are still horrifying pockets of race-based inequality that persist in America, and they deserve our immediate attention. But there’s now bipartisan consensus about this—the need to end mass incarceration, for example, or for police reform. The totalizing view of America as a white supremacy seems to me a displacement exercise that comforts the wealthy, which you know is true because they can’t get enough of it.

Put more bluntly, I think the “privilege” discourse among middle class educated white liberals is mostly about rearranging prejudices to make lower class white people deserving of the scorn of the uppers. J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy powerfully challenged that view, though at the same time refusing to claim victim status for his people. The Left today has no idea what to do about that. After four years of Trump, I believe that the liberal overclass is just thrilled to be able to justify its fear and hatred of poor and working class white people.

What David Brooks wrote in 2017 is still true:

American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”

In her thorough book “The Sum of Small Things,” Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.

As I was writing this, my mother texted me that she just finished watching Hillbilly Elegy, and absolutely loved it, as she did the book (which she read three times). She told me her young life was a lot like J.D.’s, growing up poor, though she did not have a Mamaw to advocate for her and protect her. One thing she really related to was that very scene at Yale, in which J.D. did not know which utensils to use or which wine to drink. This, she said, is the kind of thing that has haunted her all of her life. It’s something that I struggle to understand as her son. She’s my mom, and is beautiful and kind. Everybody who meets her loves her. But she carries within her a profound sense of anxiety about the world beyond what she knew growing up.

She texted to ask me to pass on to J.D. how much it means to her to see people on screen who had the same experiences she did, and who know what it was like. “People can never understand if they never lived in our real world,” she texted. Then she phoned me to say emphatically how much it meant to her to watch Hillbilly Elegy, and feel seen.

I bet a lot of people who don’t write for newspapers and magazines will feel that way about the movie.

It’s so complicated. As I wrote above, I’ve been the victim of reverse snobbery, and it feels like sh*t. It can be self-sabotaging. I do not agree with people who assume that those who are in the less socially privileged position are always correct by virtue of being outsiders. There was no excuse for my family to treat me and my new wife the way they did over that damn soup. The same thing that led them to do that had dramatic repercussions after we moved here, as I recount in the final part of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. Pointless resentment caused terrible destruction. I can’t pretend not to be bitter about that.

Nevertheless, I wish people — including myself — would work harder to be more understanding of why people are the way they are, and why they make the choices that they do. The truth is, all of us are scared of being found out. All of us are scared of failing. Watching the movie, I felt a lot of anger at J.D.’s mother, the drug addict who trashed her children’s lives as she pinballed through life. My mom didn’t see it that way. She had pity on her, and said, “She was just trying to survive.” That right there is a big difference between my mom and me: Mama has never been a drinker, and never has used drugs, but she intuitively recognized how someone from her social class, raised like that, could fall into that particular hole and not be able to get out. I had judgment; my mother had mercy.

The challenge is knowing when mercy is not merciful — that is, when mercy enables self-destructive behavior without offering a way out of it. This, I think, is one of the things that I appreciated so much about my father, who also grew up in poverty, but who knew (as did his parents) that moral self-discipline was the only thing that would keep him from being overcome by the chaos. Still, we do not suffer from too much mercy in this country.

 

The post ‘Hillbilly Elegy’, Class Conflict, & Mercy appeared first on The American Conservative.

Pro-Abortion Biden Kosher With DC Archbishop

Wilton Gregory, the Catholic Archbishop of Washington, will be made a cardinal this weekend. He has said that there will be no problem with the incoming Catholic president, Joe Biden, receiving communion, despite the fact that he is a pro-abortion fanatic. Excerpt:

Archbishop Wilton Gregory’s comment is sure to raise questions about the Church’s pro-life witness. But for some Catholics, the remark might also raise questions about the sincerity of U.S. bishops on the topic of ecclesial reform.

In 2004, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then head of the Church’s doctrinal office, told U.S. bishops in a memo that a Catholic politician “consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws” is engaged in “manifest,” and “formal cooperation” in grave sin.

In such a case, the politician’s “pastor should meet with him, instructing him about the Church’s teaching, informing him that he is not to present himself for Holy Communion until he brings to an end the objective situation of sin, and warning him that he will otherwise be denied the Eucharist,” Ratzinger wrote.

If the Catholic perseveres in grave sin and still presents himself for Holy Communion, “the minister of Holy Communion must refuse to distribute it.”

Ratzinger’s memo was an application of canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law, which says that Catholics “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.”

In short, Ratzinger’s memo gave bishops instruction on how to apply the Church’s law. On Tuesday, Archbishop Gregory said he has no plans to do so.

A reader of this blog who is a Catholic parish priest e-mailed me in response to this news, to say that he believes the Catholic bishops — including the Pope, by his episcopal appointments — continue to trash their moral authority. The priest said that the bishops are demoralizing the most faithful of their flock. He said that Catholics ought to restrict their tithing to ministries restricted to their own parish, and make the bishops feel the financial pinch. That’s the only thing they understand, he figures.

Catholic readers, what do you think? That was the strategy my wife and I followed the last year or two we were Catholic, living in Dallas at the time. We had nothing but distrust for the bishop and the diocese, and had come to distrust the parish too, but as Christians, we were obliged to tithe. We gave our tithe to the St. Vincent de Paul Society (a Catholic relief ministry to help the poor).

The post Pro-Abortion Biden Kosher With DC Archbishop appeared first on The American Conservative.

Jordan Peterson Vs. Crybaby Stalinists

This is a line in the g-ddamn sand:

Several Penguin Random House Canada employees confronted management about the company’s decision to publish a new book by controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson at an emotional town hall Monday, and dozens more have filed anonymous complaints, according to four workers who spoke to VICE World News.

On Monday, Penguin Random House Canada, Canada’s largest book publisher and a subsidiary of Penguin Random House, announced it will be publishing Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Peterson, to be released in March 2021. The book will be published by Portfolio in the U.S. and Penguin Press in the U.K., both part of the Penguin Random House empire.

Four Penguin Random House Canada employees, who did not want to be named due to concerns over their employment, said the company held a town hall about the book Monday, during which executives defended the decision to publish Peterson while employees cited their concerns about platforming someone who is popular in far-right circles.

“He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him,” a junior employee who is a member of the LGBTQ community and who attended the town hall told VICE World News.

Another employee said “people were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives.” They said one co-worker discussed how Peterson had radicalized their father and another, who is talked about how publishing the book will negatively affect their non-binary friend.

Read it all. 

The company should not indulge this bullsh*t for one second. It should tell these people that either they grow up and do their jobs, or they go find another line of work. Publishers publish books. Period. The end. I guarantee you that there are thousands of young men and women who would love to break into publishing, who don’t have thin skins and an enormous sense of entitlement.

Neither publishing, nor journalism, nor universities can do what they are supposed to do if they cater to these wretched whiners. I am sick to death of the veto power they exercise over freedom of thought and expression. What is it going to take for the adults who run these institutions to assert authority, and protect writers from these piss-ant Robespierres?

If you are crying in a meeting at the office because of how you think Jordan Peterson affected your life, then you are not mature enough to work in publishing, and you ought to be sent away. Honest to God, I would be ashamed of myself if that’s how I behaved. What the hell is wrong with these people?! Who failed them?

Excuse me for getting so emotional about this, but I see my own future as a writer at stake here. If they can do this to Jordan Peterson, and get away with it, who can’t they do it to?

This past summer, I wrote a blog post about the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist’s much praised book The Master And His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, about the imbalance between the analytical left brain hemisphere, and the intuitive right brain hemisphere. McGilchrist argues that in the West, we have become stranded in our left brain, and have denied the life-giving connection with the right. In a society in which this has happened, we should expect to see an impulse to control anything that violates the order that the left brain seeks to impose on society. He predicted in 2009 that in such a society:

Resentment would lead to an emphasis on uniformity and equality, not as just one desirable to be balanced with others, but as the ultimate desirable, transcending all others. As a result individualities would be ironed out and identification would be by categories: socioeconomic groups, races, sexes, and so on, which would also feel themselves to be implicitly or explicitly in competition with, resentful of, one another. Paranoia and lack of trust would come to be the pervading stance within society both between individuals, and between such groups, and would be the stance of government towards its people.

This is where the soft totalitarianism I write about in Live Not By Lies comes from. This is what these squalling victims are trying to do: use their weakness to strongarm dissenters into silence. They must not be allowed to succeed! When I wrote this summer to Dr. McGilchrist to share with him my thoughts about his 2009 book and soft totalitarianism, he responded:

Thank you for pointing out the parallels between what I seemed to predict and the current circumstances.  I say ‘seemed to predict’ because, of course, it was already happening.  But the rapidity and totality of the loss of free speech – which means precisely nothing unless it means that you respect the right of people to say things of which you disapprove – is far more serious than I could have anticipated then.  With that falls what we mean by civilisation.  And, to their eternal shame, the great institutions of learning are conniving at, even accelerating, that downfall.

Another problem that I indicated is that the left hemisphere mode of thinking is not only out of touch with reality, but cannot even understand a nuanced position, in which there are degrees of truth.  All context is ignored and only rigid doctrine permitted.  Life however is, and always will remain, complex.  Which is why we must all be allowed to say what we think without fear of bullying and intimidation.  There is much to criticise in modern Western society, and you will know from reading my book that I am hardly blind to it.  But free speech, and a passion for fairness, are two of its most valuable and irreplaceable qualities: almost unique in the history of the world.  If misunderstood, they contain the seeds of their own destruction.

The Dutch have a saying, ‘trust comes on foot and departs on horseback’.  I can hardly see it now for dust.

You may not like Jordan Peterson, but he is not the threat to civilization. These crybaby Stalinists are. They must be resisted without apology or hesitation by all of us — right and left, religious and secular — who cherish freedom of thought and expression. Enough is enough! Live not by lies!

Pre-order Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life for March 2, 2021, delivery.

The post Jordan Peterson Vs. Crybaby Stalinists appeared first on The American Conservative.

Must We Now Hate ‘Hillbilly Elegy’?

Here’s a really punchy interview with Batya Ungar-Sargon, op-ed editor of the liberal-leaning Jewish newspaper The Forward, on the meaning of contemporary liberalism. Ungar-Sargon says that Covid has exposed a class divide:

There’s a huge Covid class divide. The economy has not just bounded back for upper income Americans; it’s given them higher housing values and lower interest rates. Meanwhile, 12 million service industry workers are still out of work. Small businesses are struggling. The affluent see Covid as a health problem, while for the working class it’s about economic survival. And liberals are doing the same thing they did with Trump: Clothing their class privilege as science and facts and morality.

The politicians are even worse. Instead of coming up with a clean Covid bill, Democrats are now trying to pressure Biden into student loan forgiveness. Can you believe it? What kind of society thinks it’s ok to ask 12 million people who lost their jobs to Covid to foot the bill for the student loans of the top 40% of earners? Sure, maybe it will accidentally help someone in a food line who dropped out of college. But college-educated Americans are back at work. The Covid recession is over for them. Why are the Democrats designing legislation to help the people who need it least, in the belief that some of the benefits might trickle down to help those who need it most?

In this passage, she expands on her claim that so much of Trump-hatred is really well-to-do white liberals hating the lower classes, and wishing to think themselves virtuous for it.:

In other words, digital media met an affluent liberal audience desperate to be told that the people they looked down on were evil racists and that we live in a white supremacy. So the New York Times, Vox, MSNBC, and CNN gave them what they wanted. And media companies went from being broke to making bank.

All of this gets to your really smart point about the Democrats, who are supposed to be the party of the people. There was a time when Democrats represented labor, while the Republicans were all about the rich. We’ve seen a reversal of that under Trump. Trump’s economic agenda was protectionist in nature, and very much geared at the working class. (Like many Scandinavian countries, he coupled this with a big corporate tax cut early on.) Meanwhile the Democrats have doubled down on a thirty-year trajectory of going all in on college-educated voters.

After decades of consensus between the two parties about a free market global economy that serves the top 20%, Trump represented the return of the repressed. And there’s nothing elites hate as much as having the masses impose their will. So much of the hatred of Trump is about class. We in the upper classes hate his infantile vocabulary, his needless lies, his gross, undignified brawling, his ignorant conspiracy theorizing. I hate that stuff, too. But a lot of it—not all of it, but a lot of it—is not about morality.

Trump made four or five racist statements throughout his presidency, and about the same number of antisemitic ones. The rest of the opposition to him wasn’t about values at all. It was about taste. Trump is gross. That spray tan, that hair, the golden toilet, the vainglorious pettiness: He didn’t fit with the vision upper class people have of a leader. But we in the media clothed our taste-based objection to Trump, which is of course a stand in for class, in terms of values: He’s anti-truth; he’s racist; he’s a Nazi.

That’s how you end up with an MSNBC host worth $25 million looking down her nose at a person without a college degree and sneering, “You voted for Trump? You racist!” and feeling like a hero.

Read it all. It’s really hot. I remind you that Ungar-Sargon is a liberal.

Gotta say that Ungar-Sargon’s point in that last passage explains to my satisfaction the overwhelmingly negative critical response to Ron Howard’s film of J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. The movie debuts on Tuesday on Netflix, but I was able to see it early, on Sunday night, along with my daughter, who also read and loved the book.

Critics have absolutely savaged the movie. As an early champion of the book, and a personal friend of J.D. Vance’s, I hate to see that. True, having been a professional film critic for years, I know that film critics are strongly to the Left in their politics. But judging from the reviews, I could sense that Howard stripped the story of the political insights Vance brought out in his memoir.  Maybe the movie really is bad, I thought, and worried about watching it.

Well, I finally did, and it’s much better than the critics say. Much, though I confess that I doubt I can separate my affection for the book and for J.D. Vance entirely from my opinion. I turned to my wife a couple of times during the movie and told her that the distance between the movie we were watching and the movie that the reviews told me we were going to watch was massive.

The performances are quite good. The script is the problem. It jumps back and forth in time, breaking storytelling rhythm, and at times confusing the viewer. Character development is seriously underdone. For example, my daughter and I were shocked when Mamaw’s death was treated almost in passing. I realized today, thinking about it, that I fell in love with J.D.’s Mamaw reading the book, but you don’t really sense in the film version why J.D. hero-worshipped that tough old bird. I can understand why Howard and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor decided to blunt the cultural politics implicit in Vance’s memoir (for audience accessibility), but it was a mistake. Without it, you really don’t get a sense of why the book — which sold in the millions — was a pop culture phenomenon. Vance presented the white working class from which he came as both culturally disadvantaged and hard-pressed by structural economic shifts that closed down factories and mills, but also self-sabotaging, as the same cussedness that helped them survive also caused many of them to undermine themselves. Vance wrote an emotionally and culturally complex book, but the film version is simple rags-to-riches melodrama (though with fine performances, especially Glenn Close as Mamaw).

Having said all that, it’s still a pretty good movie, definitely worth watching. Having seen Hillbilly Elegy, and having spent the day thinking about it, I remain genuinely surprised by how much hatred the film has drawn from critics. I can’t read their minds, obviously, but I can’t shake the belief that they are venting their hatred of Donald Trump at the Hillbilly Elegy movie. J.D. Vance’s book came out months before the 2016 election, and though Vance, a Republican, was clear in his publicity interviews that he was not a Donald Trump supporter, he was also insistent that Trump spoke to and for people like the folks back home: those who had been left behind. Here’s what he told NPR’s Terry Gross in August 2016:

A lot of people in my family are going to be voting for Trump, a lot of my neighbors and friends from back home. So it’s definitely a phenomenon I, I think, recognize and frankly saw coming pretty early. You know, it’s interesting that I don’t think the Trump phenomenon is exclusively about the white poor.

I think that it’s more about the white working-class folks who aren’t necessarily economically destitute but in some ways feel very culturally isolated and very pessimistic about the future. That’s one of the biggest predictors of whether someone will support Donald Trump – it may be the biggest predictor – is the belief that America is headed in the wrong direction, the belief that your kids are not going to have a better life than you did.

And that cynicism really breeds frustration at political elites, but, frankly, that frustration needs to find a better outlet than Donald Trump. And that’s why I’ve made some of the analogies that I have because I don’t think that he’s going to make the problem better. I think, like you said, he is in some ways a pain reliever. He’s someone who makes people feel a little bit better about their problems. But whether he’s elected president or not, those problems are still going to be there, and we’ve got to recognize that.

Three months later, Donald Trump was elected president. Back then, some people in the liberal elite said that the Left needed to spend more time and effort trying to understand the white working class. Well, we had four years of Trump, and now those same people want to return to hating the white working class, with whom they associate Trump. That, I’m convinced, explains some of the vehemence with which critics are reacting to this film — even though Trump’s name never comes up, and the filmmakers excised the politics to make it a middle-of-the-road drama.

I do wish Howard had been willing to take the chances that Vance did in his narrative. Here’s something from the book:

Why didn’t our neighbor leave that abusive man? Why did she spend her money on drugs? Why couldn’t she see that her behavior was destroying her daughter? Why were all of these things happening not just to our neighbor but to my mom? It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith. During my junior year of high school, our neighbor Pattie called her landlord to report a leaky roof. The landlord arrived and found Pattie topless, stoned, and unconscious on her living room couch. Upstairs the bathtub was overflowing — hence, the leaking roof. Pattie had apparently drawn herself a bath, taken a few prescription painkillers, and passed out. The top floor of her home and many of her family’s possessions were ruined. This is the reality of our community. It’s about a naked druggie destroying what little of value exists in her life. It’s about children who lose their toys and clothes to a mother’s addiction.

This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we’re upper class. And when the dust clears — when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity — there’s nothing left over. Nothing for the kids’ college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn’t spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway.

More:

Our homes are a chaotic mess. We scream and yell at each other like we’re spectators at a football game. At least one member of the family uses drugs — sometimes the father, sometimes both. At especially stressful times, we’ll hit and punch each other, all in front of the rest of the family, including young children; much of the time, the neighbors hear what’s happening. A bad day is when the neighbors call the police to stop the drama. Our kids go to foster care but never stay for long. We apologize to our kids. The kids believe we’re really sorry, and we are. But then we act just as mean a few days later.

This is the kind of thing that made some left-wing critics furious after the book became popular. Vance dared to hold his own people in part responsible for their fate, by passing on violence and chaos to their kids. In the book, J.D.’s Mamaw, for all her rough edges, took the boy under her wing and away from his drug-addicted, much-married mother, and sheltered him, and nurtured him, until he could get out. When J.D. gets to the Marines, he learns how much farther a man can go if he has structure and discipline in his life. It’s a really interesting story, painfully honest, but hopeful. Unfortunately, Howard took all of the difficult and potent (culturally and politically) stuff out to make it more conventional. (N.B., I’m quoted in a Hollywood Reporter story about the movie and its politics.)

So yeah, it’s a flawed movie, and I understand much of the criticism, even share it. There just seems to be a lot of anger that can’t be explained by the merits or demerits of the movie itself (e.g., a critic for The Independent, a leftist British newspaper, called it “sickeningly irresponsible,” which is just beyond bonkers). And I think it’s class hatred, and maybe even resentment that four years ago, J.D. Vance made them consider that these poor white people might be human beings worthy of their concern, not mere Deplorables.

I’ll leave you with this interesting letter I received today. You newer readers won’t know this, and maybe you older readers have forgotten, but Hillbilly Elegy rocketed to success after a July 22, 2016, TAC interview I did with J.D. for this blog went viral, and suddenly all the media were inviting him on to talk about it. (Funny story: I chose the photo that illustrated the interview because it was the only one I could find at the time that was a good portrait of a Trump rallygoer. I found out later that the woman in the shot is a wealthy Florida donor!) The reason I did the interview was because a week earlier, a liberal reader of this blog said that I should read this new book, Hillbilly Elegy, because I would really enjoy it. She bought me a Kindle copy, and I devoured it on a flight to Boston. I remember sitting in my hotel bed trying to find the author on social media to ask for an interview. The rest is history.

Today I received this letter from that reader:

I know you get inundated and if you missed this excellent piece by Damon Linker I want to call it to your attention.  In all of the writing about how Trump keeps his hold on his followers, nobody has found a better explanation in my opinion than this: Trump is a demonic force in America.

We have lost the cultural ability to recognize and describe wickedness.   Even those who are repelled and offended by him can’t look away.

As you may remember, one year ago my husband and I moved from Seattle to a small city in eastern Washington–which is deeply red and deeply, deeply resentful of Seattle and the “liberal” state government in Olympia.

Living here has really changed my perspective about conservatives.    I have, for the first time in 30 years, voted for Republicans–both at the local and state legislative levels.  Washington had a ballot measure proposing to repeal a new state requirement for “age appropriate sex education instruction” in public schools.  You know what? I am all in favor of it for my own kids, but I voted against it, recognizing that there is NO NEED to needlessly antagonize people who think differently than I do about this matter.  I mean, of all of the important things that the state could be working on–fixing roads and bridges, finding ways to finance health care, etc.–they poke the bear with this kind of thing.  This is why Democrats can’t win in conservative areas–it’s the kind of intrusion into people’s personal lives that they get so angry about when it concerns access to birth control or the right to marry a partner of the same sex.

I wish more liberals would move to the country–rural people do tend to move to cities because that’s where the opportunities are–but there’s very little flow in the opposite direction, and that is unhealthy.  It creates a sense of being “less than”, not listened to, and exclusion on the part of good people who have been born, raised and who live in rural areas.  Living here has opened my eyes and made me see their concerns. Trump doesn’t give a rip about them and has no clue about their concerns, but he has an almost supernatural ability to stir up their feelings of resentment and then lies to them and feeds their worst emotions–just like the Prince of Lies.

This is the same reader who, four years ago, read Hillbilly Elegy, was so moved by it that she shared it with a conservative blogger (me), who also loved it, then reached out to ask its author for an interview, which went viral, and boom, millions of books later, there’s a Hollywood movie. Now she and her husband, urban liberals, are living in the conservative countryside, and starting to see the conservatives’ point of view, even though they remain liberal. 

I guess now it’s okay, and even obligatory, for coastal liberals to hate rural white Deplorables again. Damn shame. Anyway, I hope you give the Hillbilly Elegy movie a shot. This movie is going to do far, far better with audiences than with critics.

The post Must We Now Hate ‘Hillbilly Elegy’? appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Live Not By Lies’ Study Guide

Hello all, I have not been regularly at the keys today, because things. A friend just e-mailed to say she really liked the interview that the great Jonathan Pageau did with me. It occurs to me that I very rarely post interviews others do with me, because I am super self-conscious, and do not like to see myself on video or hear my own voice (something I share with those who troll me, I’m sure). Nevertheless, I do very much like Pageau, so here it is. An explanation about the horizontal bookshelves: those were built as compact disc shelves, but we don’t use CDs anymore, and we had to have an overflow place for all our books.

I said on an interview the other day that you can get the free downloadable Live Not By Lies study guide here on this blog, but it turns out that it’s not posted anywhere easy to find. Maybe if I post it on a blog with study guide in the title, people can find it. Anyway, click here to download it — again, for free.

Some of you have found Daily Dreher, my Substack newsletter. It’s where I write non-polemically about my personal religion, and other softer topics that don’t seem quite right tonally here on this blog. It’s free for now, but at some point I’m going to start charging the minimal five dollars a month that Substack requires. I won’t be blogging here any less.

Here are the last five Daily Drehers:

“Tippi Hedren’d In My Own Backyard”

“The Thin (Chartres) Blue Line”

“The Pity Of The Royal Marriage”

“The Rose Window & The Labyrinth”

“The Sand Pit As Paradise”

The post ‘Live Not By Lies’ Study Guide appeared first on The American Conservative.

Fox Geezer Syndrome

A reader sent me an e-mail about the Rush Limbaugh caller who, near tears, said he was prepared to die for Donald Trump. I wrote about the guy here, and offered a reader’s thesis that the caller was a man who had been disappointed by the church, and looked for a substitute. This reader, a conservative Christian Millennial, has a different thesis:

Man, that guy is exactly like my dad. And he’s like a lot of my friends’ dads, too. We all talk about the “Fox News Dad”: the Baby Boomer who gets sucked into right-wing media the way Millennials get sucked into Minecraft or whatever. They immerse themselves in an alternate reality—part radio, part television, part social media—where their whole world becomes this epic battle between “We the People” against the “Deep State.”


These guys get up at 6am and watch Fox and Friends until 8am. They go to work and watch Outnumbered during their lunch break at 12pm. They get home from work at 6pm and watch Tucker, Hannity, Ingraham, etc. until 11pm. All the while, they’re on their phones or their laptops sharing memes with their buddies and arguing with strangers on social media.


They probably got hooked after 9/11, like my father. The addiction reached a new height during the whole Tea Party thing in 2010, and now the 2020 election is giving them another massive hit.

Right-wing media exists solely to create and exploit these junkies, just as sure as Call of Duty and Valorant do. Force the Rush caller to go two or three days without any media whatsoever, and I believe you’d see signs of withdrawal in his brain activity.

Bastards like Giuliani know that. They exploit them, the way terrorists exploit teenagers who are into FPS games. They give them the opportunity to bring their digital fantasies in the real world.

It’s hard because there’s obviously quite a fair bit of truth to what they’re saying. But the hysteria you hear in the Rush caller’s voice is the voice of an addict. It’s the voice of 14-year-old me when my parents made me turn off the PlayStation because I’d been playing for three days straight. That guy’s done nothing but suck up conspiracy theories about voter fraud since November 3. He’s in the middle of a serious bender.

I don’t find them frightening, or even interesting—just really, really sad. It’s ruining my dad’s life. He’s estranged from one of his brothers because they can’t stop talking about politics. His doctor said Fox was a major contributor to his heart attacks, but he won’t stop! And he’s not the only one.

Our parents’ generation, no less than ours, was totally unprepared for the advent of digital technology and mass media. They’ve been sucked into their screens like the rest of us.

Boy, does that sound familiar. Fifteen years ago or so, my conservative friends and I used to laugh about the same thing with our parents. We were all conservatives, but also were bothered by how monomaniacal our parents had become about politics. The one thing that they all had in common: they were retired, and watched Fox News all day long. This was long before social media was a thing, or a thing that older people did. And it was long before our politics became as toxic as they are today.

(I have mentioned here before that a secular liberal friend of mine has become similarly frustrated with his mother-in-law, who retired from her job and, sitting at home idle, became obsessed with MSNBC and left wing social media, and in turn made progressive politics her substitute religion.)

Anyway, it’s interesting to think of these folks as just as cracked by media as young leftists who have given themselves over to politics as a pseudo-religion. I had a conversation earlier this year with a friend I hadn’t seen in ages, who has become a QAnon supporter. It was like talking to a religious cultist, in that nothing they professed was falsifiable. If you questioned it, that just showed in his mind how naive you were to the way the world really is. And hey, maybe I am! But help me understand what you are seeing, and why you believe what you do. One thing I deeply hate about the woke Left is how they believe that you either accept the entire package, or your failure to accept the entire package shows how sinful racist, sexist, transphobic, etc., are.

The cultists of the Right are like this too, aren’t they? Remember, a totalitarian society is one in which every aspect of life has been politicized. The mentality of people like the reader’s father, who insists on banging away about politics even though it has caused him to have heart attacks, and estranged him from his family, is in this sense totalitarian.

If my reader above is right, then the prospect of Trump’s defeat is a kind of religious crisis for these people. Whether they meant to or not, they have found ultimate meaning in MAGA, and its internal dramas. I think that the woke are ultimately a greater threat, because their delusions are conquering and have conquered the institutional leadership of the country. But the Right wing people who have made a religion of politics are not harmless, heaven knows. Damon Linker wrote a few weeks back that “Trump is a demonic force in American politics.” Here’s how he defines the demonic personality:

What is this something? It’s more precisely a someone — the kind of person who delights in wreaking havoc, who acts entirely from his own interests, and whose interests are incompatible with received norms, standards, restraints, and laws. Someone who actively seeks to inspire anger and animus, who likes nothing more than provoking conflict all around him, both to create advantages for himself and because pulling everyone around him down to his own ignoble level soothes his nagging worry that someone, somewhere might be more widely admired. This is a person who lives for adulation without regard for whether the glory is earned. The louder the cheers, the better. That’s all that counts. And so the only thing that’s a threat is the prospect of the cheers going silent — of someone else rightfully winning the contest for public approval.

Whether or not he’s right about Trump, that demonic spirit is certainly dominant in our culture today, on both sides of the political spectrum. Zealots see nothing more important than politics. We can argue over which side is worse, but if it’s people in your own family or circle of friends who is a political obsessive — of the Left or the Right — then it ceases to be an abstract problem.

I remind you that the reader who wrote me — I know him personally — is a political and religious conservative. But he recognizes addiction when he sees it. Another way to see it is that people who have made politics their idol have invited themselves to be possessed (I speak metaphorically) by a spirit of division and loathing.

It has to be possible to resist the evil we see in others without becoming that which we despise. I’m thinking now of how hard some of the Christians imprisoned and tortured by the Communists had to work to keep themselves from hating those who had done hateful things to them. We live in a culture now that shames as weak and uncommitted those don’t embrace total political war as the ultimate source of meaning and purpose.

If there is no way to disprove your political claims, then you should confront the fact that you have made a religion of your politics.

The post Fox Geezer Syndrome appeared first on The American Conservative.

Inside Head Of Rush’s ‘Die For Trump’ Caller

You may have seen this over the weekend, either on Twitter or this blog. It’s a male caller talking to Rush Limbaugh, and almost in tears over how everybody has betrayed people like him, except for Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump, for whom he would die. Listen at least to the last 45 seconds of the 2m30 clip:

I thought this was bonkers and childish. A reader just sent me this letter (and gives me permission to quote it), which offers a more sympathetic view. He’s not defending the Rush caller on the facts, but trying to help me understand how someone could get to that position in life. Check it out:

I saw your retweet yesterday (and subsequent column today) about the guy who called in to Rush and said he’d die for Trump. The tweet said something to the extent of “if you don’t like conservatives now, wait until they lose their religious faith.” I’d like to take that from the opposite direction, though. I don’t know that man’s story, but I know my own, and I think it’s more likely that religious faith left him.

I don’t know where to start here; I’ve been thinking about this all day and it’s honestly made me a bit depressed the more I think about it. I don’t want to read into the situation things that aren’t there, but I heard desperation in that man’s voice. In all likelihood he wouldn’t actually take a bullet for Trump, but he would die for the things that Trump represents. Trump stands up for men like him in a way that nobody (not just politicians; I’ll get to the church as well) has done in at least a generation. Men can be fiercely loyal when someone has earned it; it’s one of our best qualities. I don’t want to comment on whether Trump earned that loyalty, but I will say that he has to the caller.

Now with that out of the way, let’s not focus on that person in particular, but from the experiences of an Evangelical white male (me) that may drive men in general out of the church and into politics. In short, there’s a shrinking-to-nonexistent place for men in Evangelical churches, especially middle aged men. I’ll use a few examples to hopefully make my point. These all are my experiences in Evangelical churches over the past decade or so:

My father taught Sunday School. In fact, this is where academically-minded men (I would count myself among that group) usually ended up as a way to contribute. He would study and prepare lessons on topics of his choosing, adding his interpretation and exegesis while leading the discussion. That path doesn’t exist anymore. Sunday School is gone, replaced by “small groups.” The only qualifications for being a small group leader are having a semi-clean house and reading the prewritten questions that the pastoral team sends out every week. In an effort to make it easy and accessible, it’s not a role to aspire to. It’s not leadership, and it flexes no spiritual muscles beside showing up.

When I was growing up, our church elected deacons and elders who would, alongside the pastoral staff, make decisions for the church and serve the more corporeal needs of the church. Those roles are largely gone now (speaking from the Evangelical perspective), replaced by committees and the Board of Trustees. If a man isn’t fond of the corporate world, he doesn’t have this avenue open to him anymore either.

I remember growing up, the men of the church made up half of the choir and a good number of the orchestra. I went to a moderately sized Methodist church in Alabama, maybe 300 on a Sunday. I had wanted to play the trumpet in the orchestra in church since elementary school. I have only attended one church with a choir since college; none with an orchestra. I played guitar in the “praise band.” Women outnumbered men 2:1 in the choir, at least.

Churches largely market to and chase after the elusive “young family” demographic, and secondarily women. I looked for men’s groups at a church my wife and I began attending. 70% of the groups are labeled “young family” or “singles.” There are two ladies’ Bible studies. Men’s breakfast meets once a month at the Cracker Barrel. They encourage you to bring an unsaved friend as there will be a short Gospel message. We joined a young families group. I don’t know where we’ll go when we cease to be in the “young families” before we hit “golden years.”

I once emailed the pastor of a church I used to attend with a theological question. I got his assistant. His assistant referred me to another staff member who could meet with me for an hour. He recommended a few books to read on the topic. I never bothered asking a question again. For more therapeutic needs, the “congregational care” team could assist, composed mostly of 20 something psych students trying to get their hours in.

I have more stories, but I’ll stop here for now. The last one I think is telling. For Evangelicals in larger churches especially, the pastor is a manager who teaches. He wouldn’t go to bat for me. If I lost my job; I’d get passed off to the trainees for therapy. I, on a visceral level, understand Trump guy. There but by the grace of God go I. I’ve had enough experiences in the church to get the message “you’re not needed here,” so I get how a person can find the MAGA movement and find belonging. You fight for that sense of belonging, and you get defensive when others try to marginalize you by not sticking up for those you see as fighting for you.

After all, if he was in the Evangelical church, he’s been down that road before.

Thoughts, readers?

I think Trump is no real defender of men like the caller, but that they are projecting their very real pain onto him, wanting to see in Trump someone they need. I’m not making fun of that. I did something similar with Pope John Paul II when I was in my older teens and twenties. I think this is common in human experience.

We have to find some way to channel this valid emotional need by men — a need to feel wanted, and purposeful — into something constructive, or it will express itself as something destructive.

The post Inside Head Of Rush’s ‘Die For Trump’ Caller appeared first on The American Conservative.

A Benedictine Thanksgiving

I went by my son Matt’s place this morning to pick up a book and to bring him coffee. We sat on his stoop talking. I told him that he will be a happy man when he comes home this week for the Thanksgiving holiday, because I ordered a case of Birra Nursia blonde. He was thrilled. Just a few seconds later, literally, my phone buzzed, telling me that FedEx had just that moment delivered the precious nectar to my front door.

It turns out that you can buy happiness after all. Here is a link to the Birra Nursia online store, where you can have 750ml bottles shipped to you in a matter of days (maybe even in time for Thanksgiving). It is not cheap, but if you are a serious beer drinker, it’s worth it. Matt and I prefer the blonde, which is crisper, and lower in alcohol (six percent) than the darker ale (ten percent), but that’s just because neither of us are big fans of dark ales. It’s all completely delicious. I have visited the monastery in Norcia — read more about the monastery here — where the monks make it in small batches. You can feel good about your purchase, because it supports the work of the Benedictines there in St. Benedict’s birthplace. In fact, the last time I visited, Brother Augustine Wilmeth, a South Carolina native, was the brewmaster. Look at that beard. That monk, brethren and sistren, is the man you want to be brewing your holiday ale:

 

The post A Benedictine Thanksgiving appeared first on The American Conservative.

Narrative Yes, Truth No

Here’s a tweet that went out today from the senior art critic at New York magazine, a Manhattan intellectual with over 523,000 followers on Twitter:

Interestingly, yesterday I heard from a DC-area friend who mentioned a conversation he had with a pal of his, a military officer high in the government. The officer said the same thing as Jerry Saltz. My DC friend said that almost all of his educated urban friends and colleagues think the same thing, and cannot imagine thinking otherwise.

These are not Antifa. These are middle and upper middle class professionals.

Meanwhile, in Georgia today, there was a big “Stop The Steal” rally of Trump diehards. You can watch the whole thing here. They cheered for Alex Jones. They chanted “Fox News sucks!” Look at this:

Trump supporters in Georgia vow to destroy the Republican Party if Trump doesn’t win pic.twitter.com/04dPRQFfC0

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) November 21, 2020

And this:

Trump supporter who looks like a small child cries about Fox News being too liberal pic.twitter.com/WHSPXLgvf6

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) November 21, 2020

It’s insane. What did Tucker Carlson do? He introduced doubt into the Narrative. That’s all it took for this mob to denounce him. What is crucial here is that Tucker expressed a fatal lack of confidence in the president’s top lawyer, and asked her to back up her extraordinary claims with evidence. This mob doesn’t care about evidence. It knows what it believes, and anyone who doubts it from the Right is a traitor. A back-stabber, even!

Check out this clip from Limbaugh’s show late this week. Here is a listener who breaks down in tears, saying he will die for Donald Trump if it comes to it:

I FEEL JUST LIKE THIS GUY

pic.twitter.com/7XqoSJylPx

— DrScott (@drscott_atlanta) November 21, 2020

What kind of cultist do you have to be to break down crying, saying that a radio host and Donald Trump are your only hope? A grown man did that. How is this guy any different from those fragile, shrieky leftists who go to pieces when someone violates their Safe Space? It’s pathetic.

By the way, the Georgia Stop The Steal folks are threatening to boycott the January 5 Senate runoff to punish the GOP for stabbing Trump in the back — that is, for not going balls-to-the-wall to advance and defend the conspiracy theories about how Trump had the election stolen from him. Meanwhile, back in the real world, a federal judge in Pennsylvania today threw out the Trump campaign’s request to negate millions of votes there. From his ruling:

In other words, Plaintiffs ask this Court to disenfranchise almost seven million voters. This Court has been unable to find any case in which a plaintiff has sought such a drastic remedy in the contest of an election, in terms of the sheer volume of votes asked to be invalidated. One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with

compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens.

That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more. At bottom, Plaintiffs have failed to meet their burden to state a claim upon which relief may be granted. Therefore, I grant Defendants’ motions and dismiss Plaintiffs’ action with prejudice.

Conservatives have a hell of a fight ahead, but now a significant number of people on the Right would rather see the Senate fall into Democratic hands than surrender their preferred Narrative. Unbelievable, just unbelievable. Trump lost this election. It’s not the end of the world. The GOP can still hold the Senate, and frustrate Biden’s plans. But if the party loses these Senate runoffs in Georgia, there will be nothing standing the way of the Democratic president and a unified Democratic Congress. Donald Trump knows good and well that he has lost this election, but he’s willing to allow the Right to tear itself apart over him, and willing to let the country and its institutions suffer serious damage.

As I have done often, I encourage you to watch the first episode of a 1980s-era British documentary about the Spanish Civil War. It covers the five years leading up to the outbreak of war. It’s only an hour long, but it’s quite informative about how political extremism on both Left and Right destroyed the possibility of democracy, and led to civil war.

And, once again, as Hannah Arendt said of the kind of people who are ripe for totalitarianism:

They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent with itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

Not just masses, as we now know, but also elites.

The post Narrative Yes, Truth No appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Triumph Of The Will Hillbilly’

Sarah Jones is a young left-wing writer with Appalachian roots. She has made it her business these past few years to savage J.D. Vance and his Hillbilly Elegy memoir because, as far as I can tell, he grew up poor, under painful and difficult circumstances, and emerged a conservative (though not a conventional one). Traitor to his class! Jones is out today with a screechy condemnation of the new Hillbilly Elegy movie, which airs on Netflix starting November 24. The excitable Miss Jones seems to think it’s a far-right Riefenstahlian gloss on Appalachian culture — call it Triumph Of The Hillbilly. Here’s how her piece starts:

Five minutes into Hillbilly Elegy, I hit pause and walked out of my living room. In the relative safety of my bedroom, I stared at the wall and then at the ceiling; both suddenly appeared preferable to my television.

Can you imagine? I mean, seriously, can you imagine being so damn fragile? She took to the bed! I hope Miz Sarah was able to get her hoop skirt off before her swoon, and that the maid came up with some quinine water on ice. Sounds like female trouble to me.

Sarah Jones is one of those lefties who is always two tics away from a gran mal seizure. That should have been a sign to her, and to her editor, that she is incapable of writing about this movie. But she has delivered a lengthy indictment of J.D. Vance (again) for his horrible politics, and director Ron Howard for whitewashing the fact that J.D. Vance is deeply problematic, a fascist, and probably tortures kittens.

I have not yet seen the movie. Netflix provided me a copy a couple of days ago. I plan to watch it tonight. I’ve read some of the ghastly reviews. Maybe it’s not a very good movie. I’ll see for myself. What I do know from these reviews is that some of the critics seem to be trashing the movie because it seems to make Trump voters seem like human beings. J.D. is a friend of mine, and I was an early champion of his book. But I’m going to be honest about the movie when I write about it.

That said, imagine my shock when I turned up in Sarah Jones’s screed, as an example of why J.D. Vance is a creep:

Elevated by Yale to dramatic heights, Vance spent years working for Peter Thiel, the libertarian venture capitalist whose links to the anti-democratic right predated his support for Trump. Thiel even blurbed Elegy, and helped bankroll Vance’s new venture-capital fund, which will allegedly bring tech jobs to the forgotten hollers of Atlanta and Raleigh. Following the success of his book, Vance became a frequent Tucker Carlson guest and developed an ally in conservative blogger Rod Dreher, who claimed in 2016 that Elegy “does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor Black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.” He and Vance remain personal friends to this day.

This matters, because Dreher isn’t exactly a Lincoln Project Republican. Like Thiel, Dreher belongs to a further fringe of the right wing. His views deserve some dissection, if only to illustrate how troubling it is that Vance will not disavow him, and that Howard has erased any trace of the politics that drew Dreher to Vance’s work. In his regular column for The American Conservative, Dreher has repeatedly recommended The Camp of the Saints, the openly racist book championed by Steve Bannon. Dreher has praised and even met with Viktor Orban, president of Hungary, dubbing him a champion for Christians. (Orban, if you aren’t familiar, shut Hungary’s borders to migrants in the middle of a humanitarian crisis, arrested critics, and recently assigned himself new, dictatorial emergency powers. Dreher has also said he is “glad” that Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator, won the Spanish Civil War.)

Just FYI, here is the core of Jones’s rant:

But in elevating Vance, however sanitized, Howard also elevates the nativist movement that influences his young hero. Glenn Close and Amy Adams have pinned their Oscar hopes to material penned by a right-wing commentator who keeps company with some of the most anti-democratic figures in the modern conservative movement. 

She criticizes Ron Howard for taking out the political material — the same material that offends her — but hates him for making a movie of J.D. Vance’s book at all, because his friends are awful people. Golly.

Well, for the record, I have said flat-out that The Camp of the Saints is a bad book, and a racist book; I made it clear that my recommendation is to read it to understand our times. Sarah Jones — whose dishonesty I have called out before — seems to be one of these ultrafragile leftists who cannot bear to read something impure, even if it’s important to understanding the world as it is. Viktor Orban actually is a champion for Christians, whether Sarah Jones likes it or not. Her characterization of him and his Covid powers is more lying hysteria; after the Covid emergency passed earlier this year, the law granting him the powers (assigned not by Orban to himself, but by the Parliament to Orban) expired. Like I said she’s a loony. And yes, I am glad that Franco beat the Communists in the Spanish Civil War. That doesn’t mean that I endorse Franco’s dictatorship, but Spain faced two bad choices. I would rather have seen Franco win than the priest-and-nun-murderers aligned with Stalin. 

What interests me about Sarah Jones’s piece, though, is her demand that J.D. Vance “disavow” me as his friend. This is how many on the Left behave. They believe that one should denounce one’s friends if they are revealed to be in some way ideologically problematic. This is morally insane, of course. I have lots of friends with whom I don’t agree, even on important issues. But if I have offered you my friendship, you would have to go very, very far before I would denounce you. Denunciation is monstrous. I can’t even conceive of it. But those who call themselves friends of Sarah Jones had better be on alert for betrayal.

A friend e-mailed me this week a shocking example of the Left defenestrating a man who has done incalculable good for the cause of organic agriculture and small farming. Mother Jones leads the call for the cancellation of Joel Salatin, for a time the most famous small farmer in America. Salatin, about whom I wrote in my 2006 book Crunchy Cons, is a Christian libertarian farmer from rural Virginia. He has a punchy way with words, and established a big name for himself on the small farming/sustainable agriculture circuit, in part as an advocate of a grazing method that maintains soil fertility. The Mother Jones writer Tom Philpott writes:

For nearly two decades, Salatin has been the movement’s most famous farmer. He burst onto the national scene in 2002, when [Michael] Pollan wrote a paean in Gourmet Magazine to his ingenious pasture-based livestock-rearing techniques. Four years later, the self-proclaimed “lunatic farmer” starred in a large section of Pollan’s landmark bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma (excerpted by Mother Jones in 2006). The author summoned prose as lush as a summer prairie to describe Salatin’s operation, Polyface Farm, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley: It was “a scene of almost classical pastoral beauty—the meadows dotted with contented animals, the backdrop of woods, a twisting brook threading through it all—marred only by the fact that I couldn’t just lie here on this springy pasture, admiring it for the rest of the afternoon.”

Pollan’s book helped propel Salatin’s career as a speaker and writer, and the farmer soon emerged as a fixture on the global sustainable-agriculture speaking circuit and authored many popular books. He snagged a starring role in the Oscar-nominated 2008 documentary Food, Inc.; the Guardian called him “America’s most celebrated pioneer of chemical-free farming,” and Time hailed him as the “world’s most innovative farmer.”

So why is Salatin being cancelled now?

In 2019, Chris Newman, a young black farmer, tried to make a go of it using Salatin’s methods, but decided that they didn’t work, and that the small farm movement is not all it’s cracked up to be. Newman wrote a critical essay about it. Whether he was right or wrong, Newman made an actual argument, and deserved to be taken seriously.

Salatin responded with a tossed-off blog post titled “Whining And Entitlement,” dismissing Newman’s critique. He said in the post:

The problem with disagreeing with Chris is that I’ll be called a racist. That’s unfortunate. Is it more racist to play the race card to anybody who dares disagree with you than it is to actually be a racist? I’m bringing this up because all races need to understand that when you use that term, it shuts down all communication. So I’m going out on a limb here in saying anything negative about someone who is not white. For non-whites to assume the default “racist!” accusation fits most circumstances is to stall forward progress. Period.

That was wrong. Newman didn’t make his critique racial. Why did Salatin bring race into it, and in such a defensive way? What Salatin wrote was unfair, dismissive, and kind of jerky. Newman’s post got Salatin’s libertarian back up, and he responded poorly.

But then Chris Newman behaved badly too. Stung by memory of Salatin’s 2019 blog post, after the George Floyd killing, Newman began campaigning in the organic agricultural press for Salatin’s cancellation. Things heated up. Salatin again responded with combative rhetoric. And now it has gone nuclear.

The long Mother Jones piece serves as a justification for why everyone should ignore Joel Salatin because he always was problematic, but journalists didn’t see it. Philpott confesses his error:

For my part, I regret not taking a more skeptical view of Salatin. A self-described “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer,” he has long appealed to journalists’ impulse for counterintuitive stories. We picture political progressives when we think of farmers deploying biodiversity rather than agrichemicals to run their operations. Salatin’s staunch political conservatism breaks that mold, and that makes him a compelling story.

Salatin was always this! But food journalists and others realized that he had interesting and important things to say, even though he held political views they might not like. I featured him in Crunchy Cons because he was a right-wing Christian organic farmer who had some important and prophetic things to say to conservatives about how we need to change the way we think about farming, and caring for Creation.

What Philpott’s story seems to say is that Salatin should be thrown aside because his politics are a problem. I think it’s perfectly right, and even necessary, to subject Salatin’s claims for his farming model to empirical analysis. If it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work. But the fact that Joel Salatin is a pro-lifer, or a Covid denier, or a white man who inherited land from his father (whose politics were also problematic) — it’s just weird and destructive. Surprise! They have no decided that transpeople would make better farmers that old white Christian libertarian males like Joel Salatin. Final graf in the Mother Jones story:

Newman offered a similar explanation for the emerging tendency to question a go-it-alone approach to farming. “I think marginalized people are better equipped to think of more innovative models for how sustainable agriculture can work than most of the white people who are incumbent in agriculture,” Newman told me. “People who are Black or Indigenous or gay, who are trans, are used to having to architect their entire existence around incumbent oppression.” He added: “When you see all these collective movements and cooperatives coming out of communities of color, it’s really not surprising, because people of color who want to get on the landscape don’t usually have the opportunity to go it alone.”

I don’t know Joel Salatin personally — the last time I talked to him was 2005, when I was reporting Crunchy Cons — but this depresses me. Salatin has a big, bumptious personality. His political views are not always my political views, and he definitely went at Chris Newman the wrong way (though Chris Newman took the bait, and reacted just as Salatin predicted he would). But is it really the case that all the good and pioneering work that Joel Salatin has done is now to be trashed because he has offended against leftist sacred cows? Are crotchety white conservative farmers now persona non grata among left-wing types, because they hold non-leftist views?

In Crunchy Cons, I wrote about a large Texas farm family who learned from Salatin’s methods, and who provided delicious meats to customers at the Dallas Farmer’s Market, and to restaurants in the area. The family were all conservatives, and not just conservatives, but fundamentalist Christians. The father, Robert Hutchins, told me that he often felt closer in spirit to his hippie farmer friends than to conventional suburban Republicans. Back then, nobody really seemed to care what the religious beliefs of the Hutchins family were. They knew that I was a Catholic, and an urban Republican type — but they welcomed me to their farm anyway, and made me and my wife and kids feel at home. Once on a big open house at their farm, we saw some secular lefties we knew from Dallas food circles. Everybody was having a good time, sharing in the good of family farming.

Now, though, I wonder if that is possible. The Left is busy cancelling Joel Salatin, who, whatever his sins and failings, has done more to advance a good and noble undertaking than almost anybody. This Mother Jones piece calls all of Salatin’s life’s work into question because of political views the Left considers cranky. It is deeply unjust. Hear me clearly: Salatin is not a sacred cow, and his work should be criticized, and criticized fairly. But that’s not what’s happening here. The Left doesn’t like his political views, so Joel Salatin is done.

This is a pattern with the Left today. Sarah Jones calls J.D. Vance’s entire work into question, and Ron Howard’s movie, because of some of Vance’s political views, and some of his friends and associates. Similarly, Jim Wallis, a patriarch of the Religious Left, was cancelled this year because he declined to publish in Sojourners a hysterical piece accusing the Catholic Church of white supremacy. All of Wallis’s work meant nothing to these zealots. He’s just another old white male who is insufficiently woke.

These people are dangerous. If you are on the Left, you had better watch yourself. They’ll come for you next. A writer who cannot watch five minutes of a movie without taking the to bed, overcome with rage, is not a stable person — or friend, or ally.

The post ‘Triumph Of The Will Hillbilly’ appeared first on The American Conservative.