A reader points me to this review of Live Not By Lies.  The reviewer seems to believe the book is good and useful, but he’s sour about it because:

No, these are not the problems with Dreher’s book. Instead, the problem lies in his bitter opposition to former President Donald Trump and many of his supporters.

The guy spends the rest of the column bitching about my complaints in this space about Donald Trump and his post-election behavior. Which, okay, fine — he thinks Trump is awesome, I don’t. He’s one of those people who thinks that the awfulness of Joe Biden somehow obviates the awfulness of Donald Trump. I don’t get these people. It’s as if they can’t understand that two things can be true at the same time.

The piece exemplifies a weird strain of magical thinking among a certain kind of Trump supporter. For example, he seems to blame me for Trump’s loss — this, even though in my pre-election writing, I encouraged people who live in purple states to hold their nose, think of the judges, and vote for Trump. (To be fair, after Trump’s post-election behavior, I stated my regret for that exhortation.) What’s strange and annoying is that Trump supporters like that guy seem to believe that Trump lost because of a failure of will on the part of the people who should have been supporting him. The conservative reader who tipped me off to the review remarks:

It concerns me that people still think Trump would’ve saved us. At best, he would’ve delayed the inevitable. The only way to convince people of the existential threat the Left poses to this country is by giving them power and letting the people see for themselves what they’re capable of.

Trump’s defenders don’t see just how off-putting he really was. They never once ask, “Why should anyone who isn’t a conservative vote for Trump?” We can say that Biden is a terrible person to lead this country while also saying that Trump was the last person we should ever be putting our hopes in. If people think we can’t do better than Trump, then I’m all out of words.

What worries me about the future is that there are still a lot of voters on the Right who believe that Trump is the answer. They are so locked into their own heads that they can’t imagine why any sane, decent person would not want to see Trump run again in 2024. This would be handing the White House over to Kamala Harris. As long as this fixation on Trump stays alive on the Right, it will not be possible for a more palatable figure to arise on the Right, one who believes in the things Trump said he believed in, but who doesn’t have Trump’s baggage.

Again: if you want to hand the White House to the Democrats for four more years in 2024, keep flying the Trump flag in your heart.

Moreover, re: the reviewer throwing Live Not By Lies out, even though he seems to think it’s a very good book, because he’s mad at me for not being all aboard the Trump Train, this kind of crack-brained factionalism is cutting off your nose to spite your face. A reader of this blog put up a nasty comment (which I spiked) today, accusing me of being the sort of person who would betray Mideast Christians — this, because I praised something Ben Shapiro said, and Ben Shapiro is, says this reader, “anti-Palestinian.” That reader also said I was a traitor and a sellout for defending Evangelicals. Apparently this guy is so fixated on Middle Eastern politics that he believes all American political discourse and strategizing should be carried out according to one’s felt loyalties there.

Look, if you are headed into the city for a job interview, and find yourself stuck on the side of the road with a flat tire, you had better be glad that somebody stops to help you out, no matter what that person’s politics are. If you really do prefer to miss the job interview and stay on the side of the road because you don’t want to accept help from someone you regard as a Bad Person, that’s on you — but then don’t complain when somebody else gets the job, and you are left behind.

Because the reviewer seemed to like Live Not By Lies, if not its author, I suggest that he go back to the parts where the former anti-communist dissidents advise us all that we need to learn how to work with people with whom we disagree, putting the broader interests of our mission first. The Bendas were the only Christians (they are Catholics) in the inner circle of the Prague dissidents around Vaclav Havel. Kamila Bendova told me that they were close to hippies and even a Trotskyist (Petr Uhl), because it was so rare to find people who had the courage to dissent publicly that you needed all the help you can get.

Similarly with us: if that cat can’t find it within himself to work with me because I am not a MAGAdox conservative, he’s never going to be able to work with brave people like the anti-woke center-left writer Bari Weiss, or the anti-woke secular leftists Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian. Purity tests do nothing for us except help the enemy. And believing, against all evidence, that there is a viable future for the Right in a resurrected Trump presidency is self-sabotage. The reviewer’s headline is:

Living the MAGA dream today is to dwell in fantasy. It is to mistake tweeting and emotion for reality. How bonkers do you have to be to think that after the events of January 6, Donald Trump could be re-elected? There are a lot of people in this country who are not liberal Democrats, but who saw what happened that day with abject horror and disgust. It happened because of Donald Trump. The crowds chanted, “Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!” It’s all on video. In the presentation from the House impeachment managers, there were clips of the protesters shouting at cops, “F–k the blue! F–k the blue!” That, to men who were standing there to protect the Capitol from the mob. A hardcore Trumpist friend of mine insists to this day that it was really Antifa. That’s how far into the dream world you have to go in order to believe that Trump offers the Right any future. Peggy Noonan writes in her column today:

Watching all the videotape, seeing all the posing of the rioters and holding up phones and live-streaming the event—there was something about it all that made you wonder if something about this age of hypermedia has made people less human, less natural, more like actors who operate at a remove from themselves, even in a passionate moment of insurrection. They acted as if the Senate was a movie set, and they took videos because they’re actors in a story called “Storming the Capitol.”

They dressed up in costumes, as if they’d ordered them up from Wardrobe for the big scene. They live-streamed like they were doing the long tracking shot from “Goodfellas.” There was a feeling of profound unreality about all this.

We are removing ourselves from ourselves. It’s all the image before your eyes and what you feel. There is no emphasis on thought, on reflection, on the meaning of things.

Amen.

UPDATE: A reader e-mails:

This review was published by a blog run by the same people who own Chronicles Magazine.  Some of the best paleoconservative thinkers in the country seriously thought that, because you dislike Trump, they should run a negative review of your book.  That was the sole grounds of the critique.

 

Man, just when you think it couldn’t get more petty, more insane…!  They always find a way.