Bring It On

Dreher, Vance, and the Theology of Resentment

Mar 12, 2026

If I were looking for a guide through the nine circles of hell, I would not choose Rod Dreher as my Virgil. Virgil had no personal stake in Dante’s destination. His guidance was well-informed — without resentment, without agenda. Dreher is not impartial. He considers himself a diagnostician of a personal hell he calls “civilizational collapse.” He is not entirely wrong. There is plenty wrong with Western civilization. Plenty of room for improvement. The problem is that Dreher is more than a guide. He is a fugitive from the very civilization he wants us to indict. When DOGE-bros were tearing down walls in early Trump 2.0, Dreher wrote from Budapest:

“Maybe what’s being born now will be worse, I dunno.
We’ll see. Bring it on. I’ve had it.”

“Had it?”

Had what, exactly? The think tank fellowship in Hungary? The international platform, the book contracts, the Atlantic bylines — all of it underwritten by the pluralistic, cosmopolitan, Enlightenment-descended culture he diagnoses as spiritually terminal? Dreher is free to spend his days in a Budapest café, embracing Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian model of economic kleptocracy, eliminated press freedoms, and targeted non-white populations—while wrapping it all up in the euphemistic phrase—civilizational renewal. But he’s being hypocritical if he denies how he got to where he is.

JD Vance and Rod Dreher are fellow travelers in this respect. Vance has “had it” with Western civilization while climbing every rung of the liberal meritocratic order he now declares corrupt and illegitimate. Vance’s bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy launched him to Yale Law School, into the arms of Silicon Valley capital, the United States Senate, and the Vice Presidency. Vance didn’t succeed despite the system. He succeeded because of it. Then he pulled up the ladder behind him.

Vance and Dreher are no strangers in ideological arms. At a Heritage Foundation event in April 2025, Vance told Dreher directly: “You are a true friend, and I wouldn’t be standing here were it not for Rod Dreher.” Dreher wrote it up on his Substack with evident satisfaction, confirming that Vance told the audience he was vice president because of him. Then Dreher declared: “That man is the future of America.” Dreher, the diagnostician, endorsed Vance, the surgeon, holding the scalpel ready to plunge it like a dagger into the heart of the civilization they both consider on life support.

On closer examination, it is not Western civilization that has forsaken these two adventurers. Both share a missing element that recurs throughout the history of reactionary thought—the absent father. Both men have publicly and repeatedly lamented the absence of paternal approval. Observed across psychology and social theory, the father gap often produces a lifelong search for substitute authority structures like tradition, Christian nationalism, post-liberal ideology, or Orbán-style authoritarianism. Dreher’s serial abandonments are evidence: Catholicism failed him, so he became Orthodox; America failed him, so he moved to Hungary. Each institution eventually reproduces the father—promises approval—and then inevitably withholds it. That is when the intellectual mistakes personal psychological needs for universal truths.

Dreher spends most of his days thinking broadly and writing voluminously. His prolix philosophical forays have been known to passionately argue a point and then change his mind mid-paragraph. All of it made possible by the freedoms he is eager to condemn.

Vance’s serial reinventions are equally telling. Each identity—working class, coastal elite, Republican turned MAGA—failed to offer sufficient power. Each failed to reproduce the missing father. Where Dreher abandons institutions, Vance consumes them. Appalachia gave him story material. Yale gave him credentials. Thiel gave him money. Trump gave him power. His memoir speaks tenderly and convincingly about Appalachian suffering. Then he builds a political career that materially harms that same community — gutting federal programs, healthcare infrastructure, and educational investments that are the only realistic ladders out of exactly the poverty Vance once knew.

Few are familiar with Rod Dreher. JD Vance commands an outsize place on the international stage. Both are dangerous. And we don’t give them enough credit for the damage they can do. These two don’t just advocate a strong traditional community. They want to fill the authority father figure at civilizational scale.

Yes, the unloved child deserves compassion. But the adult intellectual and the adult politician who convert that grief into a program endorsing authoritarianism have made a moral choice. Compassion is no longer the appropriate response. Resistance is.

Gustave Doré, Dante's Inferno, 1857. Public domain.

Dreher bases some of his social theory on the literal existence of demons. Fallen angels, he specifies, are vastly more intelligent than mortals. I heard plenty of that as a kid. A wealthy woman in a lakeshore mansion used to invite the neighborhood children to admire her cathedral-size pipe organ and life-size statue of the Virgin Mary. She claimed the Madonna’s eyes would follow us around the room. My sister stood on one side. I stood on the other. Those ceramic eyes just stared blankly ahead. We were the only ones rolling our eyes. The same woman described a freeway car accident that was so severe it required an angel to physically lift her car from an embankment and place it gently back on the pavement. I didn’t buy it then. I don’t buy it now — regardless of how elaborately Dreher attempts to validate what neurology can more plainly explain. A guide who cannot distinguish between a neurological condition and medieval supernatural possession is not offering us the replacement to the Enlightenment. He is offering us the dark ages dressed in literary prose.

And that, precisely, is his program. Dreher would have us believe that it has all been downhill since the Middle Ages—that the Enlightenment itself was the original catastrophe. That means that most of us would be in to muddy fields somewhere, digging potatoes or harvesting hay. Serfs at best. Slaves at worst. With no agency. Agency would be the exclusive domain of the overlords. Dreher waves this away, reminding us that at least the entire universe would be once again woven into God’s own Being.

The record of who actually benefits from that pre-Enlightenment universe woven into God’s Being is not ambiguous.

Thomas Jefferson wrote:

“All men are created equal.”

Then he wrote this:

“I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances,
are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”

Pericles celebrated Athenian democracy. In 430 BCE, he declared that power belonged to “the whole people”—by which he meant adult male citizens—excluding slaves, women, and foreigners, who together constituted the overwhelming majority of the population. That power pyramid—men on top—has survived millennia. The invocation of civilizational doom has always been the anxiety of male elites who were never actually in danger of erasure. Dreher and Vance did not invent this tradition. They inherited it.

Neither Dreher nor Vance is a conventional conservative. They are architects of a post-liberal theology that treats liberal democracy as a failed experiment. In their framework, the state enforces a single moral order—opposing pluralism, subordinating minority rights, and using democratic mechanisms to dismantle democracy from within. This isn’t Reaganism or Bushism. It has a name: competitive authoritarianism. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is proof of concept.

A Vance presidency would complete what Trump 2.0 is rehearsing—a gutted administrative state restaffed with loyalists; universities, law firms, and media treated as enemy institutions; civil rights organizations dismantled; reproductive choice reframed as a question the state answers for the individual on behalf of a Stepford Wives majority; and the postwar alliance structure abandoned, leaving Europe exposed and authoritarian powers emboldened.

Eric Hoffer warned us in The True Believer that people cling to the erratic behavior of a strongman not just to demonstrate their devotion—but to justify their attacks on those the strongman has given them permission to hurt. Hoffer's warning is exemplified by Christian nationalism—a political, not a religious movement—that consecrates the oppression, exclusion, or elimination of the “other” in the name of a vengeful God. Trump has activated that dynamic at scale. Vance understands it completely and has no ambivalence about exploiting it. He is not a cynical opportunist. Cynical opportunists can be bought off—see Cruz, Graham, and the long parade of MAGA supplicants who exchanged their spines for proximity to power. Vance cannot be managed that way. He is a true believer with a coherent anti-democratic philosophy, a legislative record, and his hand already on the lever.

Dreher calls Vance the future of America. And he is whispering in Vance’s ear:

“Bring it on. I’ve had it.”

On this one point, we must take Rod Dreher with deadly seriousness. The future we can prevent is a President Vance who will once again openly credit Dreher for his ultimate rise to power—and declare to the rest of us:

“I am now in charge of your life.”

Musing

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