Deneen Is A Bone In David Brooks's Throat

And: NPR Comes To Budapest; Church Leavers Of Our Time

Patrick Deneen and David Brooks, in happier times (2018)

I’m sending out a second newsletter today because … well, you’ll see.

David Brooks wrote an odd but clearly heartfelt piece condemning J.D. Vance and Patrick Deneen. (I’ve unlocked it for non-NYT subscribers). Headline: “I’m Normally A Mild Guy. Here’s What Pushed Me Over The Edge”. Excerpts:

Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”

This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth.

In fact, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, JD Vance used his precious time to make a point similar to Deneen’s. Vance said, “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”

Elite snobbery has a tendency to set me off, and here are two guys with advanced degrees telling us that regular soldiers never fight partly out of some sense of moral purpose, some commitment to a larger cause — the men who froze at Valley Forge, the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy and Guadalcanal.

But that’s not what really made me angry. It was that these little statements point to the moral rot at the core of Trumpism, which every day disgraces our country, which we are proud of and love. Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

More:

There are two forms of nationalism. There is the aspirational nationalism of people, ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, who emphasize that America is not only a land but was founded to embody and spread the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. Then there is the ancestors and homeland nationalism, traditionally more common in Europe, of Donald Trump and Vance, the belief that America is just another collection of people whose job is to take care of our own. In his Republican National Convention acceptance speech Vance did acknowledge that America is partly a set of ideas (though he talked about religious liberty and pointedly not the Declaration). But then when it came time to define America, he talked about a cemetery in Kentucky where his ancestors have been buried for generations. That invocation is the dictionary definition of ancestors and homeland nationalism.

Trump and Vance have to rebut the idea that America is the embodiment of universal ideals. If America is an idea, then Black and brown people from all over the world can become Americans by coming here and believing that idea. If America is an idea, then Americans have a responsibility to promote democracy. We can’t betray democratic Ukraine in order to kowtow to a dictator like Vladimir Putin. If America is an idea, we have to care about human dignity and human rights. You can’t have a president go to Saudi Arabia, as Trump did this month, and effectively tell them we don’t care how you treat your people. If you want to dismember journalists you don’t like, we’re not going to worry about it.

So you get the idea. Here’s my response — be sure to read to the very end, for a surprise:

David, I love you, but once again you are arguing from inside a worldview that no longer describes the moral and cultural conditions of the actual country we live in. You keep appealing to a kind of classical liberal decency—a moral consensus rooted in Enlightenment rationality and Christian-infused civic virtue—that is largely gone.

The people who fought the Civil War were shaped by a shared cultural inheritance—white, overwhelmingly Protestant, and deeply familiar with Biblical moral language. That cultural consensus allowed for the kind of national self-sacrifice, moral appeal, and belief in universal ideals that you want to resurrect. But that America no longer exists.

We are a fragmented, post-Christian, multicultural empire. The ruling class—coastal, secular, managerial—speaks of diversity and equity, but governs through procedural technocracy and corporate alignment. The working class, meanwhile, is alienated, atomized, and often medicated—struggling to find meaning in a society that has stripped away their traditions, their dignity, and even their ability to form coherent communities.

Trump didn’t cause this. Trump is the price of ignoring it.

Your attempt to place figures like J.D. Vance in a moral framework shaped by the Founders or Lincoln is admirable—but it misses the point. Postliberals like Patrick Deneen aren’t endorsing Trump because they think he’s a moral exemplar. They’re endorsing him—or tolerating him—because they believe the liberal consensus itself has become exhausted, brittle, and incapable of defending anything other than personal autonomy and consumer choice.

What are you conserving, David? A political philosophy that can’t even tell a child what a man or a woman is? A liberalism that bends the knee to every corporate DEI commissar but can’t preserve a common culture or a stable family structure?

You keep appealing to Lincoln. I get it—I revere him too. But Lincoln stood atop a religious and moral culture that doesn’t exist anymore. The future will not be decided by appeals to a shared moral tradition that has been hollowed out by decades of liberal individualism. It will be decided by which vision can offer rootedness, purpose, and meaning in the ruins of a post-Christian West. Brooksian liberalism cannot do that.

I still hope for a peaceful Benedict Option—a faithful remnant, quietly rebuilding the moral order from below. But I understand why so many on the right are no longer satisfied with retreat. They’ve seen too much. And they’re not wrong to think we’re in a civilizational crisis, not just a political one.

Here’s the thing: I did not write that!

One of this newsletter’s readers asked ChatGPT to come up with a Rod Dreher response to the Brooks column. That’s what it produced. It is eerily like what I would have written, had I set out to do so.

This is more than a little unnerving to me.

On the other hand, when I go on vacation, maybe I should just ask ChatGPT to write this newsletter daily, while I sit on the veranda sipping cocktails and reading P.G. Wodehouse. Heh.

NPR Comes To Budapest

A couple of weeks ago, I received a polite request from NPR asking for an interview when they arrived in town to cover CPAC Hungary, which took place this week. I thought about it — I don’t like missing an opportunity to defend Hungary to hostile western media — but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, given how biased NPR is. It’s not that I would have thought they would misquote me, but rather that I didn’t want to be tacked on to a report that I suspected would be unfair.

I don’t expect any media outlet to do pro-Hungary pieces, but I do expect them to be fair. I was badly burned two years ago at CPAC Hungary, when I went out on a limb to convince Hungarians I know to speak to a writer for the New Yorker. I told them I didn’t know the guy, but New Yorker writers had been fair to me in the past, and I had spent hours on the phone with this guy giving him background, and he sounded to me like he intended to be fair and balanced. I told them that we couldn’t expect a favorable piece from the New Yorker, but if the guy simply gives a balanced picture of what Hungary is like, that will be better than what Americans usually get.

They agreed to talk to him — and he wrote a hatchet job that he could have written without ever leaving his desk in Manhattan. A Hungarian-British friend who moved here a decade or more ago from his native Britain, and finds life here so much more appealing as a place to raise his kids, spent three hours at dinner with the reporter, explaining his decision. He shows up nowhere in the piece. I was so ashamed that I had convinced my Hungarian contacts to abandon their skepticism of the Western media to talk to this guy. Never again, I resolved.

I do talk to potentially hostile foreign reporters from time to time, but selectively, and I usually do so only in writing, to make sure I have a record of what I said, and that I have made myself clear. Mostly it works out, but not always. This time, even though I didn’t go to CPAC, I granted interviews to a French TV journalist, and a Danish newspaper one. We’ll see. The Magyar organizers of CPAC Hungary won’t accredit foreign journalists to cover it, because they believe that all these people come here with an agenda, and won’t be fair. When CPAC Hungary was first getting started in 2022, I told them that was a bad idea. Now I don’t criticize.

Anyway, here’s NPR’s report from Hungary.

It’s more balanced than I expected — they quote my friends Dave Reaboi, a pro-Orban Hungarian-American, and Boris Kálnoky, a prominent German journalist who is also Hungarian (his family descends from Transylvanian nobility; Boris is too modest to say so, but someone told me that he is a kinsman of King Charles). Excerpts:

The person who came up with this strategy to reach beyond Hungary's borders, was the head of MCC and the prime minister's political director, Balazs Orbán.

"He said, 'look to the left, they are globally allied.' They have their networks, they have conferences, they meet, and they have an ideology which unites them," Kálnoky said.

So Hungary began reaching out to other like-minded political groups including conservatives in the U.S. and inviting them to Budapest around 2014. They liked what they saw – a populist conservative government that was elected and re-elected using the resources of the state to support that goal.

Kálnoky said the pushback from the European Union against what it deems anti-democratic practices from the Fidesz party is its way of controlling a member state that won't fall in line with the majority.

He sees what critics point to as gerrymandering and taking control of the media and the courts as an elected party using its mandate to implement reforms and its program. Hungary, he said, is not falling into autocracy.

"There is only one thing that is needed to separate Fidesz and Viktor Orbán from power, and that is that a relative majority of Hungarians vote for someone else than him," he said. "That's all that's needed. And as long as that is the case, how can you speak of an autocracy?"

Yep. A dictatorship in which the dictator is afraid of the next election? That’s some autocracy. And, as the NPR report makes clear (accurately), Viktor Orban’s ruling party faces its greatest challenge yet in the elections coming up next year, when Orban faces off with Peter Magyar, a former Fidesz elite who left the party. I can tell you from what I see and hear every week that Fidesz members are greatly concerned. This is not the reaction you would expect from members of a party that was assured of its hold on power.

We finally get to the agenda part of the NPR report:

In the three years after he was elected in 2010, [Kim Scheppele] said he transformed Hungary from a post-communist democratic success story to an autocracy.

Now she said she recognizes the Orbán playbook in Project 2025, a blueprint for a Republican president written by a conservative think tank of Trump allies and loyalists, some of whom are now in the government. Trump's decisions in his first few months back in office mirror some of the decisions Orbán made in his early days back in power.

"The first thing [Orbán] did was to suspend the civil service law and fire huge numbers of public employees, particularly those in the public broadcast media, because they were the ones who, you know, were committed to truthful news," [emphasis mine — RD] she said. "And the second move was that he weaponized the state budget."

He weaponized it, she said, by starving dissent economically, cutting state advertising to neutral and opposition media and cancelling subsidies to non-profits that would oppose him. Orbán's party, Fidesz, controlling a two-thirds majority in the parliament, pushed through election laws that gerrymandered districts so that Fidesz could control more seats with fewer votes with each election.

Pre-Orban Hungary as a “post-communist democratic success story”? That’s rich. Orban was voted into power in 2010 by Hungarians disgusted by the Socialist government of Ferenc Gyurcsány, who was a Communist youth leader at the time of the dictatorship’s collapse, and who, within the decade, was one of Hungary’s wealthiest men. In 2006, with NPR’s Post-Communist Democratic Success Story mired in economic crisis, Gyurcsány delivered a blistering address to a closed party meeting. Here’s how Wikipedia describes the speech:

The Őszöd speech (Hungarian: Őszödi beszéd) was a speech Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány delivered to the 2006 Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) congress in Balatonőszöd. Though the May congress was confidential, Gyurcsány's address was leaked and broadcast by Magyar Rádió on Sunday, 17 September 2006, igniting a nationwide political crisis.

Liberally using vulgar language, Gyurcsány criticized MSZP for misleading the electorate and said that its coalition government had enacted no significant measures over its tenure. The mass protests the speech's release precipitated are considered a major turning point in Hungary's post-communist political history. MSZP's inability to contain the speech's political fallout led to the popular collapse of MSZP and, more broadly considered, of the Hungarian political left, paving the way for Fidesz's supermajority victory in the 2010 Hungarian parliamentary elections.

Here are excerpts from the extremely vulgar speech. I remind you, the speaker is the Socialist prime minister:

"You cannot name any significant government measures that we can be proud of except pulling our administration out of the shit at the end. Nothing!"

"If there is a scandal in the society, then it's the fact that the upper ten thousand are building themselves up again using public money."

"No European country has done something as boneheaded as we have. Obviously, we lied throughout the last year-and-a-half, two years.""

"And meanwhile, by the way, we've done nothing for four years. Nothing."

"I almost perished because I had to pretend for 18 months that we were governing. Instead, we lied morning, night, and evening."

That, dear readers, in the words of the prime minister deposed in the 2010 election by Viktor Orban, is what NPR describes as the post-communist democratic success story ruined by Orban. Gyurcsány remained as the godfather of the Hungarian left-wing opposition over most of Orban’s leadership. You will not be surprised, then, that the Left has never been able to get its act together to mount a serious challenge to Orban’s rule. Its best chance was in 2022, but it nominated the Peter Marki-Zay, a small-town mayor, who was hapless on the campaign trail. To be fair to him, the Russia-Ukraine war broke out around the start of the campaign, and Hungarians trusted Orban to keep their country out of the war. I remember being in a wine cellar (in Germany, they have beer halls, but Hungary is a wine country, so they have wine cellars) during the election, talking to a middle-aged woman who was bitching endlessly about Fidesz. She concluded with something like, “But in the end, I’m going to vote for Orban. Have you seen this opposition? We can’t trust them with the country.”

Look, I won’t pretend that Orban’s governance has been without problems, and that Hungarians have no valid grievances against it. I’m only saying that its achievements are a hell of a lot better than media like NPR will ever give it credit for. You will never see US, UK, and western European media doing a deep dive about why most Hungarians like Orban enough to vote for him again and again, despite their misgivings. For these reporters, it can only be explained through the malicious manipulation of the electorate.

They did not and do not get Trump either.

Like I said, this NPR report is fairer than I expected — not a high bar to clear — but I still think I was right to refrain from talking to them.

I had to smile when I saw this sidebar alongside the NPR report on Hungary:

This is, of course, exactly the genesis of my book Live Not By Lies, but with people who fled Communist totalitarian countries, and who were seeing in woke America things that reminded them of the places from which they fled. Though my book became a bestseller, and to date has sold over 210,000 copies in the US, and has been translated into at least ten foreign languages, NPR devoted not one second of airtime to its claims. Funny how that happens.

Church-Leavers Of Our Time

I didn’t go to CPAC Hungary, but I did attend a couple of side events, at which I met attendees from all over Europe. Yesterday I saw a man in his late thirties who recognized me, and approached to say he is a fellow convert to Orthodox Christianity. I asked him for his story. He said he was raised in a Protestant church (he didn’t specify which kind), but it left him cold. It was cold, formal, and devoid of any passion for the faith. He drifted away.

“When I attended my first Divine Liturgy, it was — I don’t know how to describe it,” he said, with tears coming to his eyes. “This was ten years ago, and I still get shivers. I didn’t understand the Old Church Slavonic language, but it didn’t matter. It was like I didn’t have to think of anything — God was so present.”

I mentioned to him a story of mine familiar to you readers: that during Covid, we began to see at my old parish an influx of younger people — married couples and single men, most of them from Evangelical megachurch backgrounds. They all had more or less the same stories: that Covid shook them to the core about the fragility of our civilization, and they concluded that their normie middle-class suburban churches were not forming them as Christians with the kind of spiritual depth that would allow them to endure a severe social crisis. They showed up seeking more.

He then said something profound: “In the old days, people left their churches because they didn’t believe in God. Now they leave them because they do.”