Rod Dreher is evidently getting nasty email.
Some misguided soul told him that his attacks on Palin make him a bad man and a bad Christian.
This is a stupid thing to say. Rod Dreher (as I have said many times) is an excellent writer, an interesting thinker, and (so far as I can tell) works hard to be a good Christian. We need more of this sort in the new media not less.
However, Dreher has made bad arguments about Palin. He has made a very, very harsh judgment about her based on very little evidence. His argument is, in fact, based on superficial qualities. He has allowed two media interviews to trump her record as governor of Alaska. He never quite describes why he believes failure in two interviews should trump this record. Yesterday he linked to a piece on Palin which claimed that the writer knew Palin was dim because of his experience on a college debate team!
This is an uncharitable take on Palin, in my opinion, but (given politics) hardly a Crime Against Humanity.
In fact, a focus on extreme or foolish reactions to his opinion may be (just a bit) self-serving on Dreher’s part. It reminds me (a little) of this Kathleen Parker column where she is shocked to discover that conservatives who like Palin may not want to pay her to speak to them. Having received national exposure for attacking Palin (actually suggesting she leave the ticket!), Parker received piles of noxious email.
As someone who has been on the receiving end of such email, I can sympathize. As I have argued in New Media Frontier and in at God Blog Convention, such discourse (as Parker says) is bad for the Republic, hurtful, and wrong. This is an important point and Parker should make it.
I think, however, that Parker takes her point too far.
She writes:
Such extreme partisanship has a crippling effect on government, which may be desirable at times, but not now. More important in the long term is the less tangible effect of stifling free speech. My mail paints an ugly picture and a bleak future if we do not soon correct ourselves.
The picture is this: Anyone who dares express an opinion that runs counter to the party line will be silenced. That doesn’t sound American to me, but Stalin would approve.
Readers have every right to reject my opinion. But when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one’s own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk. (I hear you, Dixie Chicks.)
I’m sure it is coincidence that, upon the Palin column’s publication, a conservative organization canceled a speech I was scheduled to deliver in a few days. If I were as paranoid as the conspiracy theorists are, I might wonder whether I was being punished for speaking incorrectly.
Comparisons to Stalin seem more than a bit strong . . . and the entire column mostly ignores the constructive criticisms she has received (to her actual arguments). I am pretty sure that we need no conspiracy or extreme partisanship to say that when you write things that people don’t like they are not happy with it and may not want to pay to hear you in the white heat of a presidential campaign.
Your right to disagree inside a movement does not equal a right to have the people you castigate applaud you. Perhaps we should do so, but it would be easier if Parker’s arguments hadn’t been so bad and her prose so condescending to those who disagree.
Nothing she wrote (or could write) could justify hate mail or threats, however. There is a fringe to conservatives and to Christianity that has forgotten the law of love and the importance of some intellectual diversity to the health of any movement. Saying this is wrong is obvious, but it must be said.
Where does that leave us?
Dreher obviously is a fine conservative, but that is not the issue and should never be the issue.
(I don’t know enough about Parker to comment, but she certainly has a right to her opinions.)
People who make support for Governor Palin a litmus test for his crunchy goodness or Christianity are wrong. Dreher wrote an excellent and moving piece on the Great Depression yesterday that everybody should read.
Learning to have strong disagreements without going too far is important . . . and hopefully my own work can model that however imperfectly.
The issue is not even to discuss Dreher’s personal psychology. Why did he come to such a tough opinion on Governor Palin with so little evidence? Has he over learned his (putative) lessons of the Bush years?
That is not the important thing.
What does matter is whether his arguments about Palin work. They do not and Dreher has yet to define his assumptions (”What is the knowledge that history shows a leader needs in America?”) or defend his thesis that interview skills are more telling than governing accomplishments. Why value words over deeds?