Rod Dreher: The Left Is Making Us Racist

 Rod Dreher is what passes for a sane voice on the right these days: an arch Catholic, he is anti-gay and anti-trans--but what he is, mostly, is anti-SJW. For those who don't know what that means, the literal translation is "Anti-Social Justice Warrior" and the literal implication is thus: "The left is helmed by those who wish to use the umbrella / language of 'social justice' to attack Christian and Conservative values and people in ways such as cancel culture and forced race-sensitivity 'reeducation' classes.' These people are our bloodthirsty enemies who will come for us no matter how inoffensive we are with the intent of eradicating our way of life."

The real meaning of being anti-SJW, however, is two steps:

1. Paint everyone not on the Trump Train as far left.
2. Use the most egregious examples of far left bare-knuckle politics as a stand in for everything on the left (i.e. Biden is really planning on implementing Karl Marx's blood-in-the-streets revolution).

As this involves studiously ignoring things like the QAnon toxicity in your own party--not to mention the, uh, racism, it's a pretty bankrupt political moral philosophy. Wrapping it with scripture and moderated language doesn't make it any better and might even make it worse.

But there's a particular point we should talk about here since we're almost certainly destined to see more of it. The Omnivore is speaking of this:

You don’t erase the effects of centuries of white supremacy overnight, yet the idea that people should not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, was the only reasonable way out of that morass. My children, all 21st century kids, cannot fathom in their imaginations the world into which their father was born, and how much progress has been made in improving racial understanding. The world is far from perfect, but under the liberal principles of the King era, America made immense progress.(emphasis added)

This is the "we were doing so well until those nasty SJWs started agitating" argument and brother, are we about to be given a deluge of it (it's already been happening--but in a post-2020 world, almost no matter the electoral outcome, we are destined to get more).

The Professed Argument

What the Dreher-like speaker thinks he is saying is this: "I believe we should live in a colorblind society where people are gauged by their character--but more and more loudly we have angry people calling for special status for people of a specific skin color or ethnicity and the result of these loud, angry calls mean fewer rights for white people--it's literally an attack on us for no reason other than a power grab enabled by the media and Hollywood and, of course, Democrats, who promote it for reasons of money and power."

That's sort of the argument that Dreher says he is making.  It's not the argument he's actually making. How do we know? As always, there's a 'tell.'

The Actual Argument

The tell is that he acknowledges the problem (centuries of white supremacy) but refuses to actually address what has to happen to get rid of that--actions against, yes, systemic racism. 

The right rejected the idea that homosexuality could be a result of birth-conditions because it's harder to condemn someone  for the way they were born than for making a choice. For a lot of the public, if it turned out gays were born-that-way then we shouldn't deny them marriage, right?

It turned out that was actually how it played out.

Same for racism: The Right denies the existence of "systemic racism" because if it really exists then you should do something about it--and that "something" looks a lot like attacking the bulwarks of systemic racism such as police unions and qualified immunity. 

Once  you give the inch of acknowledging the concept might exist, logic takes your mile and dunks on you--so you wind up with pretzel logic at best and rank hypocrisy at worst (example: In the George Floyd killing, there were four cops. Were they all dirty? If so then either most cops are dirty or Floyd got lottery-winning-unlucky. Or, what if, hear The Omnivore out there was a system that means you back up your training officer against the black people even if he's kneeling on a guy's neck as that guy begs for his mother and you need to do something about the system.)

"No," says the Dreher-like, "look at how that guy resisted arrest before. Neck-kneeling was totally justified." 

The actual argument is that we must NOT take action against systemic Racism (or sexism or whatever) because doing that will have wide reaching implications for people like Rod who can shake their heads sadly at a woman who was killed in her bed by a no-knock-raid without repercussion because her boyfriend had a history with the law so what-are-you-gonna-do?

TL;DR: The anti-SJW position, which is the one we're going to be showered with, is really the speaker saying: "look, man, you can go after those out-and-out Nazis--but don't you come for my pull-up-you-damn-pants-boy stance. Do that and I'll end you. I'll have no choice but to become a 1488 Nazi. It'll be your fault."