Rod Dreher: Prisoners Of Narrative

[Kamaji]

Prisoners Of Narrative

By Rod Dreher
March 7, 2022

I met today with an American journalist who is here trying to understand the appeal of Viktor Orban for a certain kind of American conservative. We ended up talking about the war, mostly; though his project began before the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, the war has emerged as an important part of the narrative.

I told him that being here in Hungary has given me a valuable perspective on all this. Even before the war broke out, I had come to see how narrow, moralistic, and all-consuming the US establishment narrative about liberal democracy was. It is impossible for most Americans, both left and right, to understand how much of their way of regarding the world is fixed by that rigid framework. This is why even some American conservatives stupidly think of Orban as “fascist”: they are prisoners of their own narrative.

I told my American interlocutor that I strongly oppose Russia’s war on Ukraine, and hope Putin loses, but that I also deplore how the US has exonerated itself of all sin and failing in the matter of this war. An American foreign policy analyst I know tells me that it is absolutely impossible right now, in the information climate in the US, to understand the Russian point of view. You have to do that if you are going to try to figure out the best way forward, but any attempt to understand why Russians think and feel the way they do is shouted down as carrying Putin’s water. I mentioned to the journalist that this is a vivid version of the way Americans think about Orban’s Hungary. We — and Western Europeans involved with the EU bureaucracy — are so convinced of our own righteousness that we refuse to grant any legitimacy to other ways of seeing the world.

I told the journalist that this is something that social and religious conservatives back home in the US are accustomed to. We almost never get a fair shake from the media, because the people who tell the stories and set the narrative have decided that trying to see the world through our eyes is in some sense to collaborate with evil. The shrill and total moralizing and politicizing of every question makes achieving real understanding impossible.

Right now, the United States is not at war with Russia. Yet according to what I see, and according to what I’m hearing from friends back home who are watching US cable news, there is absolutely zero space for dissent from the hysterically anti-Russian narrative. This is how it goes with our establishment, both of the left and the right. Most American journalism, I have come to believe, is not about trying to understand the world, but about imposing a narrative on the world. Remember how, in the months before the Iraq War started, the British ambassador to the US sent a note back to PM Tony Blair telling him this:

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Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/ukraine-russia-prisoners-of-narrative-viktor-orban/

[Kamaji]

Advantage: China. God help us all.

Last point: Peter Savodnik writes, of the post-Cold War period:

Everyone who had not grown up on the winning side of history got that Obama, like W., like Clinton, was blinkered, incapable of seeing outside the narrowing parameters of our politics. Trump got this instinctively, because, for all his riches, his victim complex and the Queens-born social outsider status he tried so bitterly to overcome had taught him what the American power elite looks like from the outside. So he went to war against the old institutions. But he had nothing to replace them with. He was blundering and polarizing. He made things worse.

He did. The answer, though, is not to stand up the American power elite. The answer is to stand up to the American power elite, but to do so constructively. This is where Viktor Orban comes in for us American national conservative types.

Another thought-provoking article from Mr. Dreher, whether one agrees with it all or not.

[goatprairie]

Let me see. Putin is an ex KGB man. He has publicly stated that the dissolution of the SU was the worst catastrophe of the 20th century.
He is an autocrat/dictator who has amassed by some estimates over 100 billion dollars in personal wealth while average Russians still struggle in a developing semi-capitalist economy. He has had  opponents, including journalists, assassinated.
Putin has ruthlessly slaughtered people in Chechnya, invaded Georgia, and has previously carved out pieces of Ukraine. He has stated that Ukraine is not a real country.
But now we are supposed to consider the Russian point of view about things and how they've been wronged by the U.S. and Ukraine.
Up yours Dreher, Carlson, and all other Russian apologists.

[Kamaji]

Let me see. Putin is an ex KGB man. He has publicly stated that the dissolution of the SU was the worst catastrophe of the 20th century.
He is an autocrat/dictator who has amassed by some estimates over 100 billion dollars in personal wealth while average Russians still struggle in a developing semi-capitalist economy. He has had  opponents, including journalists, assassinated.
Putin has ruthlessly slaughtered people in Chechnya, invaded Georgia, and has previously carved out pieces of Ukraine. He has stated that Ukraine is not a real country.
But now we are supposed to consider the Russian point of view about things and how they've been wronged by the U.S. and Ukraine.
Up yours Dreher, Carlson, and all other Russian apologists.