This content was created by Dennis Prager. This content was uploaded by Dennis Prager. This is a YouTube interview titled "Rod Dreher: Today's Totalitarianism is Based on Access to Comfort" (created 2021-06-02). It features a conversation between host Dennis Prager and guest Rod Dreher (senior editor at The American Conservative and author of Live Not by Lies). They discuss Dreher's new book, its reception among conservative intellectuals in Europe, the threat of modern totalitarianism built on comfort rather than overt terror, lessons from Eastern European dissidents about suffering and resistance, and related cultural and religious/political concerns (including reactions to COVID lockdowns). The excerpt appears to come from Prager's program (Ultimate Issues Hour / PragerU context).
Chapters
Rod Dreher is a major thinker and writer, senior editor of American Conservative, the book that he's just written. I am astoundedly happy for you at the sales of your book, given the mainstream media ignoring it, but it doesn't even matter. Mainstream media are irrelevant to many of our books.
They really are, Dennis.
Go on.
Can I tell you, I think you'll find this hopeful. When you're at a party, a garden party in Budapest with a bunch of conservative writers and intellectuals, and I had to excuse myself to tell them I was going to do an interview with Dennis Prager, eyes lit up all around the room. They said, we love him, we listen to him. And what they were telling you, Dennis, is that they listen to you because they know that what happens in America first will ultimately come here to Hungary, and they need to know how to be prepared for it. I found that really wonderful. I wanted to pass that on to you because the work that people like you, people like I do confronting these things, they make a big difference overseas.
Well, I'm very, I'm very touched by your story, and, uh, I look forward to being there. By the way, in light of that, are you going to be there when I'm there at the beginning of August? Second week.
I, I might stay. I might stay to see you. I'm planning to go to Italy after my fellowship ends on July 31st, but if I can stay and see you, I'll do it. We've never met.
Well, between me and Italy, I would do Italy.
Well, uh, you know, I, but I, I have met so many good people here who are fighting the good fight.
That's right.
That's right. Encouragement that we can give them. I spoke—
exactly, I spoke in Romania years ago, and it's exactly what I felt. And by the way, I like your reaction. I said to them, and it was clear that they had not heard this often, if ever, Western Europe will not save the West. Eastern Europe will. I said that to them.
You know, I went on Polish television today and said exactly the same thing. That's the I'm serious. I've been over here for about 6 or 7 weeks, and they've got lots of problems over here, but they, maybe because they have the memory, the cultural memory of communism, they understand what they're facing, and they're willing to make this last stand. But I was just talking to this young man here. He's a defense correspondent for a magazine, and he said, "Oh, you're from America. I gotta tell you how much it hurts me to see what's happened to America. America's destroying itself." We looked to America for help and for hope for so long. And now it's just unbelievable what's happening. And I told him like, look, not all of us are down with this. We're mounting a resistance and we need your help too. And that's what I did with this book, Dennis. I wanted the testimonies of people who dealt with communism, who fought communism and who successfully resisted it to give us advice and to give us hope that we can resist successfully this scourge that has come upon us.
That's right, that's what we have to do. On my Fireside Chat, a weekly podcast, a videocast that I have for PragerU, I had a pastor on last week who stayed open during the lockdowns in California. And you have to pinch yourself to even say those words. You, you, your church couldn't be opened. That was it. Nobody was being forced to go, but your church was not allowed to be open because of a virus. And my conclusion is very much, I think, in keeping with yours. And if it's not, please feel free to say so. But if, if people are not prepared to resist draconian laws over a virus, they're certainly not going to be prepared to do it if there is a KGB or Gestapo.
Now, they, they won't. And this is one of the big lessons that I try to tell in my book, that we have got to be prepared to suffer. This is the most important lesson I learned from interviewing dissidents, that the— this new totalitarianism that we're dealing with, it is based on comfort. They're not trying, like the KGB, to to force us to conform by wielding terror and pain against us. Rather, they try to take away our pleasures and our access to consumer comforts and professional success and all that. If we are not prepared to suffer for the truth, including the truth of our faith, then we're not going to make it. It's as simple as that. And this really puts into perspective, Dennis, the way that American religion— Christianity, Judaism, all religions— has been for the past 50 years. It's been about bourgeois comfort. And that's the sort of thing that is going to get us wiped out. If we can't learn how to suffer for our faith as these dissidents did, then we're done for.
Well, I, I happen to agree with you. I have been begging people, whatever their religion or no religion, to come out of the closet. But what did you say earlier? People learned on the communism just as on fascism, to lay low, let it pass. That's not the lesson, certainly not the lesson a religious person should draw. Live Not by Lies is the book. Rod Dreher is the author. We will return. Ultimate Issues Hour, 1-800-PRAGER-776.
