Rod Dreher Defends Marion Maréchal-Le Pen
Rod Dreher has been fascist-lite curious for a long time. He has long endorsed a form of blood and soil conservatism in America (which he often conceals behind the conflation of religion and culture) and most especially in Europe, where he maintains that accepting refugees is tantamount to cultural suicide. He often refers to an explicitly racist French book The Camp of the Saints that works as a better written French version of The Turner Diaries. He has approvingly linked to VDARE, Gates of Vienna, Steve Sailer and other proponents of blood and soil ideology. He explicitly condemns all liberal and progressive protests, both online and in real space, generally accusing them of being mobs that will be suppressed by right wing counter reaction.
Last week, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen spoke at CPAC. We all know who her grandfather was, and what the National Front is. But her speech was really good, defending the nation as a historical and cultural inheritance, and denouncing the commodification of children, and gender ideology, under the technocratic consumerist paradigm. American conservatives don’t talk like this. We are so constrained by liberal-libertarian categories that we can’t seem to think outside of them. As a friend put it to me, it’s quite a commentary on the imaginative poverty of American conservatism that so many could only receive Le Pen’s speech as a manifestation of dark blood-and-soil nationalism.
Again, I do not know enough about MMLP’s politics and personal background to say that I endorse them, or her. It seems to me, though, that the Never Trumpers may be replaying their mistake in confronting Trump early in his campaign. On February 17, 2016, I wrote a post called “A Social Conservative Case For Trump,” in which I made an attempt to understand why a social conservative GOP primary voter could justify a vote for the least socially conservative in the GOP primary field. A number of conservatives on social media jumped on me hard, accusing me of legitimizing Trump.
The only surprise I suppose is that it took this long for him to say it.