Rod Dreher comes home
by Sebastian Milbank, The Critic:
The conscience of the New World is here in the Old.
The American writer Rod Dreher is an unfamiliar figure in Britain, where his diagnoses of the problems ‘“liquid modernity” presents for moral living are incomprehensibly alien to most Tories. Conservative electoral success, allied to the natural Blair-style social liberalism of its parliamentary leadership, has seen conservatism fade away here as an explicitly creedal enterprise. Since the death of Roger Scruton, no one figure writes in a language Tory politicians want to or can speak. But abroad these conversations are happening, and Rod Dreher has been at the centre — or in front of them — for most of this century.
These ructions are often labelled “populism” (or worse) by many British commentators, who dismiss or demonise them and move on. But what is actually going on is far more complex, with parallel revivals of religious conservatism, communitarianism and nationalism. The Reagan-Thatcher consensus on economics is under serious question, and it is now the right, not the left, that is seeking to offer a serious challenge to globalisation.
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