When I received the latest issue of The American Conservative the other day one article in particular caught my attention, an interview with Nebraska congressman Jeff Fortenberry. It caught my eye because I had been friends with the congressman’s wife, Celeste, when I lived in 
Virginia. I had heard through the grapevine that she had married a man who had been elected to Congress, but had heard nothing since.
I had last seen her in 1994, when I first moved to Ohio and visited her in Steubenville, where she was living and working as a nanny to the children of Scott and Kimberly Hahn. After going out for lunch with her that was also the occasion of my only lengthy conversation with Dr Hahn. He is a likeable guy, and at that time he was sound on Catholic social teaching, which I had never heard him address publicly. I was disappointed to learn recently that his wife was deeply involved in the Republican Party in their county, and that they had supported Rick Santorum for president.
Anyway I read Rod Dreher’s interview with Congressman Fortenberry, which he of course titled “Crunchy Congressman”. Mr Dreher has been milking that term for ten years now, sounding, to 
switch metaphors, like a one-note Neil Young guitar solo, only without the imagination and passion that Mr Young brings to his craft.
But as I read the interview I was impressed; Mr Fortenberry seemed like the first Catholic politician I had ever seen who had more than a superficial acquaintance with the Church’s social teaching, and the only Republican one who used the word “subsidiarity” not as a cloak for individualistic market ideology but as it was meant to be used: to mean localism, smallness, and an ethos of freedom within a broader framework of solidarity. He favored policies that encouraged small farms and ones that helped aspiring farmers to buy land and get started, and otherwise seemed to have a genuine vision of a well ordered society.
I was pretty inspired by his words, and found him on Facebook. I sent a message complimenting him on the interview and asking him about foreign policy and immigration, which Mr Dreher did not touch on and which are the two issues where a Republican Catholic is likely to allow nationalism to trump faith.
He didn’t respond.
I googled his name and found a site that chronicles the votes and positions of elected officials.
And was I disappointed.
He voted for the Ryan budget, which slashes social programs and leaves military spending untouched, and which cuts taxes for the wealthy while raising them for the poorest Americans. He voted for the war in Iraq and for the Patriot Act. He voted for warrantless wiretapping and other post 9/11 assaults on our freedoms. He rated a perfect rating by an anti-immigration organization and voted for fences along the Mexican border. (To his credit, he also has a perfect antiabortion voting record).
In other words, however eloquent and visionary he sounded in the interview, when it came down to voting his record was pure Right Republican, and pure nationalist.
Why did this surprise me? I long ago concluded that Rod Dreher’s “crunchy” was a con, a superficial cover for a neoconservative core. So why would I expect anything more from someone he publicly praises?
Or perhaps in spite of his record Congressman Fortenberry is evolving, growing more into harmony with the teachings of the Church?
I certainly hope and pray this is the case.
It doesn’t matter now, as Rick Santorum dropped out of the race- but you might be interested to know that your friend isn’t all bad- and is in fact in quite good company. According to Santorum’s own website, Dale Ahlquist, President of the American Chesterton Society and *active* speaker on distributism, which is the economic system born of Catholic Social Teaching, endorsed Rick Santorum.
I don’t know where the idea that Rick is your typical Libertarian Atheist Randroid Republican comes from, but it isn’t true.
I don’t know where that idea came from either. Certainly not from me; I always said that his piety is genuine, and I never said that nothing in his policies were influenced by CST. What I did say was that he was the sort of Catholic Republican for whom nationalism eclipses faith; thus he supports the illegal assassination of perceived enemies, torture, preemptive war, and other things that the Church condemns.
Apparently Ahlquist is cut from the same cloth, the sort I call a Right Distributist and Tom Storck calls a false Distributist.
I would also point out that Solidarity, Subsidiarity, and Nationalism all go together.
I totally agree viz a via Dreher. i began to suspect him when he converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. How can one claim to be for rootedness and then radically change sects every few years? A very inidvidualist mindset.
@Ted- In what sense do you mean nationalism?
I knew Dale Ahlquist when he lived in a suburb of Minneapolis. His son, still a teenager then, designed the website for the Catholic bookstore I worked at in the late 90s, and business took me to the Ahlquist house. They lived a through and through typical American suburban lifestyle, and at that time Dale made his money by being the legal representative of some uberrich rancher out West who was suing the U.S. Air Force for flying training flights over his ranch and spooking his livestock. There was nothing truly localist, or agrarian, or subsidiarian, or distributist about the Ahlquist life. Like Chesterton, the man didn’t give any indication of knowing a damn thing about the actual working conditions of typical workers. It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that Ahlquist endorsed Santorum – I’d have guessed as much if I had had reason to think about it. That set is localist in the way that many Christian Tolkien fans think they know and love the shire when their actual conception of shireness is formed more by Disney than by actual human traditions and customs and practices. So long as you use a little bit of third way language and present yourself as one of their own you’ll keep that set happy. At heart they are movement conservatives who prefer superficial changes in rhetoric and posture but don’t really care that much about actual policy. Ahlquist style distributism is a lifestylization, feel good about yourself show, it’s not even a lifestyle, let alone an actually meaningful way to live a human life. It’s all pretty predictable and rote: read Gilbert Magazine and/or Dreher and/or Touchstone, go to Whole Foods weekly, pick up your CSA once a month, maybe have a tomato plant in your back yard, talk about distributism as the answer our society needs when smoking cigars and drinking scotch with your other pretty comfortable white 40something buddies, but otherwise live a typical upper middle class American suburban life substantially indistinguishable from other white middle class conservatives, and vote Republican. Some third way.
a superficial cover for a neoconservative core
Geez, what does a guy gotta do to prove he’s not a neo-con anymore? The guy basically gets kicked out of National Review, repents of his support for the Iraq war, goes to work for the premier paleo-con magazine, and because he’s still using “crunchy” as his trademark he gets tagged as a crypto-neo-con.
And lay off of Dreher for converting to Orthodoxy, already. Give a little thought to the possibility that he approached Orthodoxy with an open mind, was honestly charmed by Archbishop Dmitri (who, by all accounts, really was a good and possibly even saintly man), and was genuinely persuaded that Orthodoxy is the truth. For all the nay-sayers who claimed, when he converted, that he would be off to his next sect in a year or two, it’s six years on and he shows no signs of moving on — even though he has learned first-hand that moving from Catholicism to Orthodoxy was only trading one kind of scandal for another kind of scandal. It is not as if lots of people don’t have religious conversions that don’t ultimately “take”, as Rod’s Catholicism didn’t. There are at least three people on this thread who had a conversion that didn’t “take.” Are we all to be condemned for being spiritually “rootless”?
It’s true that Dreher is a bit of an intellectual dilettante. He gets intrigued by an idea or a set of ideas, examines them in not a great deal of depth, and then goes on to something else. But he is not, and does not claim to be, a guru, philosopher, scholar, or public intellectual. He’s a journalist, for Pete’s sake, and a writer of middle-brow non-fiction. He’s actually pretty good at it, but I don’t see that what he does is worth all of this anti-Dreher animus.
which he of course titled “Crunchy Congressman”
You do know, of course, that journalists don’t always (or even usually) get to choose the title or headline under which their articles run?
First, I never criticized him for his conversion to Orthodoxy; indeed I am sympathetic to it. The only thing that keeps me from it at times is the sort of intrigue that Dreher enmeshed himself in in the OCA….
As for his neocon core, just wait until Iran is attacked and then we’ll see. Every time Israel has brutalized its neighbors Mr Dreher has cheered. When Israel attacked the Gaza Strip a few years ago Dreher was arguing that proportionalism did not apply; a scary contention when one considers that violations of proportionality are precisely what makes the idea of a just modern war problematic.
As for choosing the words for the title, maybe you missed the fact that Dreher is now listed as senior editor at TAC.
I never criticized him for his conversion to Orthodoxy
I realize that. That part of my rant was directed at Ryan, not you. Sorry — I probably should have made two separate comments.
just wait until Iran is attacked and then we’ll see
Fair enough. Dreher has left behind the American Exceptionalism and the readiness to go to war at the drop of a pin, but the Israel-can-do-no-wrong attitude is the last part of neoconnery to go, and he hasn’t got that far yet. If I had to guess, I’d say that if Israel attacks Iran Dreher will be all for it, but if we attack Iran he’ll be agin it. But as you say, we’ll see.
Dreher is now listed as senior editor at TAC
I did miss that; but it doesn’t mean anything to me. I can’t figure out the job titles at newspapers and magazines. I mean, everybody is an editor of one sort or another: contributing editor, senior editor, managing editor, editor-in-chief, or just plain editor. How can you publish something if all you have is editors and no actual writers? In my line of work, the only difference between being a software engineer and being a senior software engineer is that you make a little more money. Is it different in the journalism business?
See Dreher’s latest:
How is the GOP like the Bourbons
Not exactly like an unreconstructed neo-con.
I should add that the Israel-first attitude that Dreher has exhibited in the past is hardly unique to the neo-cons, but is conventional wisdom for the entire US foreign-policy establishment including conservatives and liberals alike. For the neo-cons it is the engine that drives their foreign policy, but it’s not absent in other groups.
Thanks, Chris, for the reality check. Really – sacrificing a top spot in National Review to wind up at The American Conservative is no small personal and professional sacrifice. It should at least be credited as some testimony to the man’s sincerity. As for crunchy tag-lines, it may be annoying but its not a sin and the guy does get paid by the word – he has to move them somehow.
Well and good, but are you taking bets on his reaction when Israel attacks Iran? Maybe the cooler heads at TAC have influenced him; I hope so, but he has a lot to answer for in my book. Here is what I wrote a few years back, when Israel was attacking Lebanon and Dreher was cheering (he was Catholic at the time, right before doxing):
However, it is when his attention turns to foreign affairs, especially in light of the recent conflict in Lebanon, that my annoyance turned to alarm.
To Dreher, the situation is stark: Israel is good, Muslims are evil.
In his manichean world there is no mention of Israel’s abysmal human rights record, no acknowledgement of the suffering of the Palestinians, no nod to the idea that the thing is other than high melodrama. All nuance is lost, and in Dreher’s words, “the terrorist fanatics of Hezbollah launched a war that is destroying Lebanon.”
To give some feel for his tendency to demonize Muslims, I note a recent post entitled “How do you say ‘Sieg Heil’ in Arabic?”
This post was a reaction to a photo in Time magazine last week that showed a group of young Hezbollah recruits extending their hands in an open-palmed salute.
Now when I saw this photo my first reaction was “Geez; that looks like the Nazi salute.” Unlike Dreher, who took that initial reaction and created an inflammatory post, I had a second thought:”Wait a minute; I really don’t have enough knowledge to draw any conclusion”. Perhaps the young Arabs in the photo did mean to emulate a fascist salute- itself an adaptation of the Imperial Roman salute- or perhaps not. I rather doubt a Muslim would consider himself a Nazi,
with that ideology’s weird mix of pseudo-scientific racialism and Nordic myth. Perhaps the gesture had a different meaning within Shi’ia culture. I once saw a commentator, after all, who described a group of charismatic Christians, their arms outstretched in blessing, as offering a fascist salute!
Or take another example: if I saw a photo of a man holding up two fingers in a “V” shape how do I know if he is giving the Churchillian “victory” sign, the sixties “peace” sign, or merely indicating the number “two”? I don’t, if I don’t know the context.
I have googled “Hezbollah salute” and found a lot of people jumping to conclusions and precisely no one offering information about the actual intentions of the militants in the photo. In fact, it turns out that this is how Shi’a pray, just like penecostals raise their hands.
But no matter, it is grist for the mill, fuel for the fire.
But it gets worse.
While most of the debate over Israel’s recent attack on Lebanon revolves around the question of whether or not bombing cities and killing civilians by the hundreds- so far- is a disproportionate response to Hezbollah’s capturing and killing a few Israeli soldiers, Dreher will have none of that: “I see a disproportionate response from Israel as justifiable in principle.”
He links to an article by Washington Post writer Richard Cohen, which he captions “Proportionality is Madness”, where Cohen argues that the idea of proportionality should be scrapped, that total war is justified. (Cohen, who seems to me the epitome of the dumb ugly wing of the Left, might seem an unlikely presence on a conservative blog, crunchy or no, but then war makes
strange bedfellows.)
Dreher links, too, to Charles Krauthammer, who argues the same, justifying indiscriminate killing by invoking Hiroshima: “That’s what it took with Japan.”
And Dreher quotes neoconservative bigshot John Podhoretz at length on the lesson of the Second World War: “Didn’t the willingness of [American and British] leaders to inflict mass casualties on civilians indicate a cold-eyed singleness of purpose that helped break the will and back of their enemies?
“What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of sectarian violence now?”
Allow, for a moment, the ramifications of that last sentence to sink in.
God spare us from cold-eyed singleness of purpose.
And God spare us the sight of Jewish pundits constructing a rationale for genocide.
That Rod Dreher, who only recently, in article 7 of his “manifesto” stated “Beauty is more important than efficiency” now invokes the efficiency of indiscriminate slaughter, of total war, reveals the shallowness of his crunchy conversion.
That the guy who not so long ago invoked Dorothy Day and Wendall Berry and who writes for the antiwar American Conservative now beats the drums of war and death and oils the engine of Empire with such glee shows a density of soul that is stunning.
Mr. Dreher: you may eat your vegetables, wear funny shoes, and live in a bungalow, but if your critique of the mainstream you claim to eschew does not go beyond such superficialities you are part of the problem.
In one recent post you criticized the Holy See’s measured response to the crisis in the Middle East; in others, you, a Catholic, want to jettison the Just War principles, at a time when the Church is trying to tighten them. If such moral heresy is not a justification for terrorism and genocide I don’t know what
is. To espouse such a thing is what a Thomist would call formal participation in mortal sin.
You claim to have second thoughts about Iraq and regrets for your support of that War, but you are apparently no wiser; indeed you seem to have grown in folly.
I have long thought that “crunchy con” sounded like some sort of swindle, a scam. Now I know it: when it comes to moral principle and foreign policy a crunchy con is just a neocon in sandals.
Perhaps he is driving the 40 miles to the other side of Baton Rouge for church. I wouldn’t be shocked that our ‘localist’ was doing that, but I also wouldn’t be shocked if he moved on from that. It is quite frankly his business. I just would be wary of making any assumptions.
fyi, headlines are written by the editors, not the authors of the articles.
headlines are written by the editors
I tried that already, and Mr Nichols effectively answered it. Mr Dreher is an editor, so he probably wrote his own headline.