America: The Chernenko Years

And: Eric Weinstein On The Left; Charles Taylor Explores Re-Enchantment

Konstantin Chernenko and Joe Biden

A US friend of mine and I have this joke in which we send each other links to news stories of American decrepitude, with the subject line: “America: The Chernenko Years”. The reference is to Konstantin Chernenko, the elderly Bolshevik invalid who was the final old-guard leader of the dying Soviet Union, before Gorbachev took over. The joke is that America is starting to look like the Soviet Union. You will not be surprised that many of these jibes passing between my friend and me have to do with our senile Commander in Chief.

Well, Niall Ferguson has now gone and done it, writing a banger of a column asking, “Is America the Soviet Union?” You start the piece curious as to what he’s going to say, and you read further with growing horror. For example:

And yet, you insist, the Soviet Union was a sick man more than it was a superpower, whereas the United States has no equal in the realm of military technology and firepower. 

Actually, no. 

We have a military that is simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts, as Senator Roger Wicker’s newly published report makes clear. As I read Wicker’s report—and I recommend you do the same—I kept thinking of what successive Soviet leaders said until the bitter end: that the Red Army was the biggest and therefore most lethal military in the world.

On paper, it was. But paper was what the Soviet bear turned out to be made of. It could not even win a war in Afghanistan, despite ten years of death and destruction. (Now, why does that sound familiar?)

On paper, the U.S. defense budget does indeed exceed those of all the other members of NATO put together. But what does that defense budget actually buy us? As Wicker argues, not nearly enough to contend with the “Coalition Against Democracy” that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have been aggressively building. 

In Wicker’s words, “America’s military has a lack of modern equipment, a paucity of training and maintenance funding, and a massive infrastructure backlog. . . . it is stretched too thin and outfitted too poorly to meet all the missions assigned to it at a reasonable level of risk. Our adversaries recognize this, and it makes them more adventurous and aggressive.”

And, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the federal government will almost certainly spend more on debt service than on defense this year. 

It gets worse. 

Indeed it do. More:

Another notable feature of late Soviet life was total public cynicism about nearly all institutions. Leon Aron’s brilliant book Roads to the Temple shows just how wretched life in the 1980s had become. 

In the great “return to truth” unleashed by Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, Soviet citizens were able to pour forth their discontents in letters to a suddenly free press. Some of what they wrote about was specific to the Soviet context—in particular, the revelations about the realities of Soviet history, especially the crimes of the Stalin era. But to reread Russians’ complaints about their lives in the 1980s is to come across more than a few eerie foreshadowings of the American present.

In a letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda from 1990, for example, a reader decried the “ghastly and tragic. . . loss of morality by a huge number of people living within the borders of the USSR.” Symptoms of moral debility included apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching. The entire country, he wrote, was suffocating in a “miasma of bare-faced and ceaseless public lies and demagoguery.” By July 1988, 44 percent of people polled by Moskovskie novosti felt that theirs was an “unjust society.”

Look at the most recent Gallup surveys of American opinion and one finds a similar disillusionment. The share of the public that has confidence in the Supreme Court, the banks, public schools, the presidency, large technology companies, and organized labor is somewhere between 25 percent and 27 percent. For newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress, it’s below 20 percent. For Congress, it’s 8 percent. Average confidence in major institutions is roughly half what it was in 1979.

I could go on, but you should just read the whole thing. There is so much more. Wait till you get to the part where he compares the Soviet nomenklatura — the insiders who benefited from a system that crushed everybody else — to our own Ivy Leaguers and others in their class.

Having read the Ferguson column last night, in my morning prayers I asked God to protect and restore America. Because a Sovietized America would not only be a catastrophe for us Americans, but for the whole world. Live Not By Lies was a warning from refugees from Soviet communism to the West, about how we are Sovietizing ourselves. Turns out there’s a hell of a lot more to the case.

Why Does Eric Weinstein Focus On The Left?

Along those lines, one of you sent me this from Eric Weinstein, the mathematician, former hedge funder, and man of the Left:

One question I get a lot is "What explains your asymmetric focus on Democrats and the Left?" The short answer, after some soul searching and introspection, is simply this: "The Gaslighting of Experts." I see the Republican party fighting the experts they oppose. I don't see them trying to gaslight them much.

Let's say you are an economist who believes that higher taxes spent on infrastructure would be good for the nation. The right may fight you. They may call you a name like "Libtard" or "Commie". And that is absolutely awful behavior to me. Truly.

But they aren't nearly as likely to coordinate behind the scenes in emails to be discovered later and all agree to pretend, seemingly independently, that as a former expert you have committed some unclear moral crime that means you can never be empaneled or invited onto a commission.

They aren't immediately going to treat you like a mental patient, a con-artist, or threat to society. They are just going to be asses. That's the dopey game they love: "Happy Warriors" is what they call it.

And the subjects I focus on most tend to be the places where I think dissenting experts are being gaslit:

COVID ORIGINS, SOUTHERN BORDER, STRING THEORY, POTUS COGNITIVE STATE AND AGE, EPSTEIN'S INTELLIGENCE CONNECTION, COVID MANAGEMENT, QUESTIONING UKRAINE NATO STRATEGY, INFLATION/GROWTH MEASUREMENT, MONETARY AGGREGATES AND FED INTERVENTION, VP COMPETENCY, ASYMMETRIC TREATMENT OF CONTESTING ELECTIONS and VIOLENT CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, VACCINE INJURY DISCUSSION, SEX AND GENDER REDEFINITION, ANDREW YANG / TULSI GABBARD / RON PAUL / ETC., PRIMARY MANIPULATION, SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANY INTERFERENCE, DENIED LEGACY UAP PROGRAMS, HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY, DIRTY TRICKS CAMPAIGNS / DOMESTIC SPYING, NON-CONSENSUAL HUMAN TESTING (infectious agents, radioactivity), BAILOUTS, MAXIMALIST STRUCTURAL BIGOTRY CLAIMS, LABOR MARKET FLOODING VIA IMMIGRATION, RELIGIOUS TERRORISM Etc.

In all cases above, there is some absolutely *MASSIVE* long-term lying and obfuscation. Not small. Not excusable. I am talking about massive lies. Lies that last decades. Lies too large to choke a blue whale. And they incinerate dissenting experts as pretend ne’er-do-wells for the crime of dissenting from consensus.

What is the point of becoming an expert Stanford or Harvard professor if you can be turned into a "Fringe Epidemiologist" like @DrJBhattacharya was overnight by some Washington insiders like Collins and Fauci? To an academic: it makes life pointless. Everything we are becomes pointless if that is allowed to stand.

So, this is what I have to say: I appear to be focused on gaslighting of dissenting experts more than politics. It's not that I don't have political opinions. I do. It's that I haven't been able to focus on them for years. All we seem to do these days is deal with gaslighting on our top line issues above.

And the formula is quite simple. An expert can have:

A) Reach.

B) Reputation.

C) Independence.

… but no more than 2 out of 3. This is a terrible rule. And whoever attempts to enforce that rule, is who I fight.

Unfortunately, that group has been my own historic political party as transformed over 30 years. And, in my opinion, they deserve to continue to hemorrhage credibility for that crime against their own until they end this tactic. It's a crime against everything I believe with all my soul.

We need *DISSENTING* experts to right our listing ship on all of the above and more. Check the above list. That's no small thing. It's about the destruction of a country that I dearly love and which the world needs desperately to come back at this moment.

Charles Taylor On Enchantment

Charles Taylor

Had a Zoom meeting with Zondervan, the publisher of Living In Wonder, this week, to discuss marketing. The book’s release is just over three months away. Hard to believe it. This week I finished answering the final copy editor’s questions, including adding about fifty end notes. That ain’t easy! It’s the most tedious part of any book, and every time I start a book, I think, “Remember how awful the end-noting process is. Do it differently this time.” But I never do.

Still, it’s done now, and re-reading the manuscript after a while, I have to say that I think this book is going to be a hit. It really seems to meet the moment. Either my literary agent (who was on the call) or my editor, can’t remember which, told the marketers that Dreher has a knack for understanding what everybody’s going to be talking about next.

I was a little early with The Benedict Option, though it is gratifying to hear many more Christians today — who, since 2017’s publication, have seen the fragility of our system, the decline of Christian faith, the demonization of the Christian faith, and the weakness of churches — talking about, “So, what do we do?” Live Not By Lies was right on target, having received a huge boost from the Summer of Floyd and Covid, which shook Americans out of their complacency.

And now comes the non-political Living In Wonder (pre-order from Amazon here, or, if you want a signed copy, pre-order exclusively from Eighth Day Books here). I have noticed in these past few months more and more people discussing the subject of enchantment, and re-enchantment. Imagine my shock and delight yesterday to learn that the great contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor has a new book out about just this thing! Here is the review in the New Yorker. Excerpts:

As a social and political theorist, Taylor emphasized the primacy of shared experience—the idea that identity resides within communities rather than inside brains—without succumbing to nostalgia for some lost organic society. What matters most in life to actual people, he has argued, is not the standard liberal question “Who am I?” but the richer humanist question “Where am I going?” In expansive volumes such as “Sources of the Self” and “A Secular Age,” he has stalked, like a soft-footed cat, a “naturalist” view of humanity which assimilates our minds and morals to a purely materialist and empirical program of study. We are not atoms in a mindless universe, he argues, but agents in a metaphysically alert one, embodied and embedded in meanings we jointly create. Art is not an accessory to pleasure but the means of our connection to the cosmos.

In the book, Taylor focuses on Romantic poetry as a vector to re-enchantment. More from the review:

Art isn’t absolute, but it isn’t at all arbitrary. Taylor escapes from the divide between subjectivity and objectivity through a concept he calls the “interspace”—not the inner space where I perceive and enjoy but some resonant atmosphere that exists between me and the world. The sound of the cello in a Schubert trio isn’t entirely in the cello, where the sound begins, or entirely between my listening ears, where the experience of structured sound as music happens, but somewhere between the two, where the creation of meaning takes place. The interspace is the phenomenal field of the arts. When we listen to sublime music, then, our experience is not of pleasure but of an overwhelming feeling of encountering and exploring some truth. The music sculpts us, we sculpt the music, and to reduce this to mood misses the cosmic connection that the experience proposes and, quite often, provides.

This will sound familiar to readers of this newsletter who recall my writing about the thought of Iain McGilchrist, Patrick Curry, and Hartmut Rosa. (If you haven’t seen these, or have forgotten them, use the “search” function of Substack). One more quote from the review, where Taylor goes into politics:

The link Taylor wants to make between his readings of poetry and his civics lessons has affinities to the proposals made by a number of writers—many of them Catholic, significantly—throughout the modern period: the meticulous remaking of ritual (which you find in Chesterton and Tolkien alike), the love of the local, the revaluing of ceremony and communal spirit as things essential in themselves rather than leftovers from a barbaric past. The wrong kind of politics, Taylor implies, arises from the loss of a cosmic connection which the Romantics first sensed, and which now is part of the unhappy inheritance of our civilization.

Taylor is not a conservative, but it seems that in his book, he arrives at the conservative insight that all political conflict is ultimately a religious conflict, because it has to do with ultimate values. Liberalism may protest that it is based on secular reason, but it proffers a way of regarding reality that is as fundamentally religious as any other, in the sense that it cannot be supported by reason alone (as MacIntyre has famously shown). I’ve not read Cosmic Connections, the Taylor book (though I ordered the Kindle version as soon as I finished the review), but it seems clear from the above passage that he is on to the idea that a people who have lost their religion will seek re-enchantment through politics — an ultimately doomed effort. Indeed, if you read the great long history of the Russian Revolution, The House Of Government, one of the most impressive sections is author Yuri Slezkine’s comparison of Bolshevism to the most radical, apocalyptic elements of the Reformation. I used this in LNBL to explain that wokeness is a pseudo-religion, an attempt by disenchanted fanatics to build a Tower of Babel to reach heaven.

So, as I said, I bought the Taylor book. Here, in the second paragraph, is its thesis:

“Cosmic connection” is his word for “re-enchantment.” It sounds too hippy-dippy, but then, so does “re-enchantment.” I wish we had a better term.

If you know anything at all about Taylor, you probably know his concepts of the “buffered self” versus the “porous self.” In this short clip, Jonathan Pageau and Michael Legaspi talk about it, and about why re-enchantment requires letting go of the buffered self:

You’ll remember Yuval Noah Harari’s neat insight into why Western man — which is to say, modern man — became so dominant: because the West exchanged meaning for power. That is, we decided, around 500 years ago, that there is no ultimate meaning beyond that which we choose, and that because there is no ultimate meaning embedded in the natural world, we can do whatever we want with it. You might respond that everyone who claims there is a such thing as ultimate meaning is really making nothing more than a statement about their personal beliefs. Maybe so, but people who act as if their beliefs are really real, are objectively true, will behave differently from those who believe that what they believe is mere personal conviction, nothing more.

Ultimately, if you believe that there is no objective truth, only an infinite variety of subjective truths, you are a nihilist. Liberalism is built on this nihilism. Wait, that’s not quite right. Liberalism emerged out of Christian civilization, but it does not incorporate Christianity into its structure. We are living through the fact that liberalism without a basis in religion (the Bockenforde Dilemma, recall) cannot sustain itself. We are living through the end stages of the fateful Faustian deal our early modern ancestors made: choosing the buffered self does give us great power, but ultimately we can’t sustain it.

I’ll be writing about the Taylor book in this space as I go along, so stay tuned. One thing that I’m sure distinguishes the book I’ve written from Taylor’s is that I tell lots of stories about people intersecting with the “enchanted” — that is, miracles, encounters with the sacred and the demonic, that sort of thing. This is going to cause respectable reviewers to sneer. Fine, I don’t care. I’m like Yale historian Carlos Eire with They Flew: A History of the Impossible, his book about the historical records of levitating saints of the early modern period, in that I’m too old to give a damn what respectable opinion thinks. These things are real, and we have to talk about them.

The other day, for a footnote, I revisited my copy of Jeffrey Kripal’s 2011 book Authors Of The Impossible, and read the religious studies professor saying that the evidence for the existence of things that get slotted into the category “paranormal” is strong, and then asking just how much longer are we going to be able to persist in pretending it doesn’t exist?

Eire, Taylor, and Kripal are academics who write for a more rarefied audience (though they are all excellent prose stylists, and their writing is clear). I write for a popular audience. I am hopeful that Living In Wonder will knock a big hole in the wall that makes talking about the paranormal off-limits, even for many Christians. I hope you will pre-order it, so the book will have a shot at making the bestseller list upon publication.

By the way, the big launch around October 22, the publication date, will happen at an event in Birmingham, Alabama, featuring Paul Kingsnorth, about whom I write in the book. I’ll give you more details when they’re available. I really hope to see you there! I’m told by Zondervan that we will have electronic copies of the galleys any day now. If you, reader, are a person in the media, or an “influencer,” as the kids say, and would like a copy, let me know at roddreher@substack.com (put “Review” in the subject line), and I’ll send your contact info along to Zondervan publicity.

Please be aware that I am not enabled to decide who gets review copies. That is a call for the publicity department. They have a responsibility to make sure that copies of the book don’t get out into general circulation before publication. Therefore, they’re only going to send out advance copies to those who have established a track record of being responsible with advanced reader’s editions. If you’re just a guy with a website, I’m happy to send your info along to Zondervan, but I’m pretty sure they’re not going to be able to trust you with a galley. It’s nothing personal; it’s just that all it takes is one of these things to get out into the world to cause real damage to sales, so they have to operate with suspicion. I suspect that if you are a pastor or religious leader with a big audience, they’ll send you the electronic galley, but I really don’t know. I am just a conduit. Those decisions are made elsewhere.

PaPa Pete, Cajun Patriarch

I love this essay from my fellow Louisianan Kevin Roberts, who now runs the Heritage Foundation. In it he pays homage to his Cajun grandfather. I suspect the word “PaPa” here is pronounced “pawpaw,” in the Southern way. He writes about how his Papa Pete, a working-class Cajun from the Greatest Generation, took care of the family when everything fell apart in the 1980s, when Kevin was a kid, and his folks divorced. Excerpt:

He worked as a roughneck at Esso, later Exxon Mobil. He’d hitchhike to the coast for a boat ride out to the rig, working seven days on, seven off. It was some of the physically toughest work there is, but he took pride in his job and in supporting his family. PaPa Pete was a man’s man. He had strong, gnarled hands, and was a genius at fixing anything mechanical. He was not stoic, but not especially expressive either. He liked to work hard and to enjoy the company of friends, a cold beer, and a baseball game. We wiled away afternoons together watching the Atlanta Braves on TV. And he took full advantage of living in “the Sportsmen’s Paradise,” fishing with the best of them.

But he was also gentle and faithful. He was an old-fashioned gentleman who believed in taking care of women, my own grandmother first of all. And I remember many a time working in the yard with him on a Saturday afternoon and being ordered to wash up: We were going to Confession. The family never had much, but my grandfather always had an envelope for the offering plate at Mass, which the whole family went to every Sunday. Like many Cajun men, PaPa Pete also had a special devotion to the Virgin Mary. He always had his rosary at his bedside. And he remained devoted to his own widowed mother (my great-grandmother), visiting her almost every day of her long life.

For me, PaPa Pete was a role model, a man in my life I could count on. He gave me stability, normalcy, and constant love. As my community fell apart, I clung to him, the way you might lash yourself to a bald cypress in a hurricane. Back then, I didn’t appreciate how deep his roots went, how much I owed the stability I desperately needed to a tradition and a faith that stretched back centuries. PaPa Pete gave me that. 

Another word for what PaPa Pete’s patriarchy gave me is “piety.” The left likes to describe patriarchy as a system of male power that is obsessed with controlling women, like in The Handmaid’s Tale or Barbie. But outside their ivory towers, patriarchy looks a lot more like Little House on the Prairie and It’s a Wonderful Life. In small towns like Lafayette, patriarchy simply means patrimony. It looks like fathers and grandfathers passing down family traditions to their sons and grandsons, teaching them to take pride in where they come from, to steward their family name, and to pass on that tradition to the next generation. Central to patriarchy is piety.

Piety is a weight. It is a sense of responsibility. It is knowing what we owe to others on account of what we have been given. It is gratitude for what we inherited. It is “the wise man” who “knows himself as debtor” and is “inspired by a deep sense of obligation,” in the words of Bertrand de Jouvenel. It is what the Romans called pietas and considered chief of the virtues—the most essential to their republic.

Piety is the principal fruit of patriarchy, and it is the heart of conservatism. Conservatives acknowledge that our lives depend on what we have been given: by God, by our country, by our forebears, by our communities and families. In gratitude, our hearts move us to defend, improve, and pass on what we inherited. We experience gratitude to our parents as a glad calling of duty to our posterity.

Read it all. This is fantastic. It really resonated with me. This is what, growing up in south Louisiana like Kevin did, I was taught it meant to be a man. This is the kind of patriarchy we desperately need today. The fact that certain aspects of a divorce I did not choose has sent me far away from my younger children grieves me more than I can say. I dreamed about it last night, in fact. I dream about it most nights. It torments me. Without Jesus, bitterness would consume me. May God help the fathers who want to be fathers, but who have no control over the matter.

Subscription Update

Thank you all for your patience as I try to resolve this problem. Some of you are reporting that following the Substack instructions, which I posted in a newsletter earlier this week (see below), has resolved the problem for you. I’m going to send today’s newsletter to the entire list again, including non-subscribers, to make sure subscribers see this. I did make contact with the Substack Mothership, so I hope things will be totally sorted soon. One of you e-mailed overnight:

I stopped receiving your emails about 10 days ago (along with my other Substack subscriptions). The support link you posted told me why:

Check your Settings on the Substack App
If you have the Substack app installed, head to the Notifications section in your Settings.

If you have "Smart Notifications" selected, this means that you'll primarily receive push notifications about new posts in the app and may receive email newsletters if you haven't opened the Substack app in a while.

Prefer to receive new posts via email and the Substack app?  Select the "In email and app" option. 

If you'd prefer to only receive posts via email, select "Only in email". 

With these two options, your email newsletters should resume.

I had indeed recently changed to the cryptic “Smart Notifications” after receiving some kind of notice from Substack about it. I didn’t connect the switch to the ensuing silence in my email box until I followed the link you posted.  Switching the setting to “via email” took care of the problem. 

Hope that’s helpful to someone.

Another of you said that getting the Substack app is a lifesaver in this respect.

I really appreciate your loyalty to me and this newsletter during this period.