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.
Small town roots
DREHER FIRST CAME TO widespread attention in America with the publication of his book, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots, in which he called for a return to an older (and more European) mode of conservatism which questioned the libertarianism of the modern right, and looked to a religiously-informed localism.
Born in 1967, he was brought up in St Francisville, a small town in Louisiana, by conservative Methodist parents. In America, small town origins are either romanticised as pastoral cradles of future greatness or as close-minded hick villages to be transcended
