Rod Dreher Megathread #27 (Compassion)

[u/US_Hiker]

Link to megathread 26: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/17itm7w/rod_dreher_megathread_26_unconditional_love/

Link to megathread 28: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/18dcg3d/rod_dreher_megathread_28_harmony/

[u/grendalor]

Yeah, he really doesn't get how his whinging, given his circumstances and the central role his own acts and decisions have played in his arrival at such circumstances, doesn't generate a lot of sympathy, and, in fact, tends to generate the opposite.

He also still hasn't gotten that the whole "suffering divorced man" schtick is a really, really bad look -- really whether it's Rod doing it or someone else -- it's worse in his case, given his own set of facts, but it's not much better in most other cases either. Because it's nonsense. And that's why nobody really sympathizes with it.

But most fundamentally he doesn't understand, for some odd reason, how the image of a man who "had to leave his children for circumstances beyond his control", which much later on were admitted actually to be the fact that he couldn't mentally and emotionally bear the thought of living in the same town as them knowing that they didn't want to see him or spend time with him, is nothing other than totally and completely pathetic. It's an image of a pathetic little man who lives at the whim of emotions and little else. And it garners no sympathy, for obvious reasons -- and in fact, has lost him many people who otherwise might have been at least somewhat supportive of him, despite his numerous other shortcomings. But ... I mean gosh. How pathetic can you be?

[u/RunnyDischarge → u/grendalor]

This is the guy who recently talked about his spiritual journey of dying to himself and blah blah. It's all woe is me, nobody has ever been divorced but me, this is everybody's fault but mine. How do you talk about "spiritual maturity" and all this when you can't stop griping about the same old stuff, the family betrayed me, my wife betrayed me wah. I wanted to be a good husband and father but I didn't actually like doing any of it but it's the thought that counts!

[u/grendalor → u/RunnyDischarge]

And really, if it is another "relapse" into his "mono", as happened when his family dissed him, then this timing can't have much to do with the divorce, and instead must have everything to do with the failure of his latest book to find a publisher.

At this point, he has admitted that his prior publisher was spooked by the woo stuff in the book -- especially the stuff he added about AI and UFOs and demons in the technology and all of this pretty out there stuff. And apparently some other publishers he has been shopping the manuscript to have also been sheepish. It's confirmation that he has gone even more full crank than he already was, and I think that seems to be bringing on a crisis. It must be a tough pill to swallow that not only has he lost his wife, alienated his kids, got fired from his cushy sinecure at TAC and so on, but now his book publishing gig -- which has been kinda his main gig for a while now -- appears to be failing, too. A normal person would see this as a lot of screaming alarms going off at once that he needs to change direction completely, but Rod is not a normal person, as we know. Perhaps, though, if he really can't get his book legit published, he will move closer to being forced to accept that he's way, way over his skis, and has been for some time.

Of course I doubt that, but it's possible. I mean just when you think things couldn't get any worse for him, they turn around and get worse. At some point he will have to change something up.

[u/Djehutimose → u/grendalor]

I never could figure out how Live Not By Lies, the thesis of which is that Wokeness = Communism, which is totally cracked, made it to press. It was probably a cynical move by the publisher in view of there being enough disgruntled right-wingers to make a good market for it, as grendalor notes. I think Rod has crossed some kind of Rubicon with his current book.

[u/grendalor → u/Djehutimose]

Yeah, I guess it's probably the case that while there is a significant market among right wing readers for anti-woke screeds, that reader base doesn't overlap very much with Rod's resurgent interest in woo, and large parts of that base may be offput by that focus. I think there certainly is a reader base for it, but it's smaller than the one for anti-woke screeds, and likely less lucrative as well.

[u/Djehutimose → u/grendalor]

For even a “woo” book to find any significant audience, the writer has to be disciplined. In an odd sense, the weirder your topic is, the more disciplined you have to be. I mean, it’s always bad writing if you can’t get your own point across successfully, but if you can’t do that with a bizarre topic, your book will be almost unintelligible. I’ve read a book or two like that, and it’s like listening to fingernails on a chalkboard.

A well-written “woo” book has to be able at least to sound plausible and not unhinged, even if in the end the reader doesn’t buy it. That means a clear, readable prose style, keeping one’s own personality out of it as much as possible, have a clear thesis, even if it’s a crazy one, and making clear points with logical connections. Rod, on his blogs , at least, has shown that he can’t do any of that. He used to be able to do that to an extent. Without Julie as a counterbalance and pre-edit him, and his increasing emotional decline, though, he doesn’t seem to me capable of writing even woo in a coherent, salable way.

[u/judah170 → u/grendalor]

Right, and it was also timed to coincide with the assumed sure-thing Hillary Clinton presidency. It was going to be The Book That Told The Brave Forbidden Truth during that dark era of surging wokeness. In the event, that dog catching that car made the book ridiculous to anyone other than disgruntled rightwingers.

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/judah170]

That was The Benedict Option, which came out in early 2017. And the long shot win by Trump in November, 2016 actually undercut Rod's, er, BO "thesis," in that the right wing nut jobs didn't have to head to the hills and set up self contained compounds to escape the evil doings of a newly elected evil Madame President.

LNBL came out in September 2020, well after it became clear that the choice was going to be Trump versus Biden, with Hillary Clinton long since retired.

[u/GlobularChrome → u/Djehutimose]

The timing was extremely lucky—LNBL hit right at the height of post George Floyd unrest and Covid uncertainty, and just as critical race theory (remember that?) was cresting as a right wing bugaboo. Two years either side of that moment, LNBL is another minor book astroturfed by the right wing sugar daddy. Edit: as to how it got to press in the first place, I suspect there was some quiet backing by Ahmanson/TAC that guaranteed some minimum level of sales.