Rod Dreher is an Orthodox Christian and columnist for the Dallas Morning News. He's also a contributor to the Orthodox Christian Network, where his Just Thinking podcast is one of the network's most popular shows. He was also the target of a critical article recently published on a prominent conservative blog site.

Rod wrote an article for his paper called, A populist prairie fire from the right? which you can read here . It's a good article, and one that I highly recommend. In it, Rod essentially postulates that America is ripe for a populist revival from the Right-wing of the political spectrum.

As he notes:

It's time. A December CNN poll found that three out of four Americans believe mega-fraudster Bernie Madoff is the ethical standard for Wall Street. With the recession forecast to deepen throughout this year, we are going to learn more about how crooked, or at least unethical, corporate and financial bigs drove this country to near-ruin with their reckless avarice. Because of this crisis, President-elect Barack Obama warned last week that the nation faces "trillion-dollar deficits for years to come."

In the piece, he also praises Caleb Stegall, a 37-year old small-town Kansas lawyer, who got fed up with the local Republican Party and won election as the local District Attorney.

In praising Stegall, I think Rod goes a long ways towards laying out his own philosophy:

Stegall believes a conservative populist agenda should focus on decentralizing power and boosting local authority. He thinks America ought to keep its nose out of other countries' business. He believes that the tax code ought to be restructured to favor families and companies that stay put instead of moving offshore. But most of all, he says, neo-populists of the right have to fight the concentration of both corporate and government power.

This is pretty traditional stuff, really. Large, remote institutions tend to dehumanize and produce immoral results. Rod is not the first Christian moralist to note this. He will not be the last.

But Rod's piece was not well-received by representatives of the conservative movement. Noted right-wing blog Redsate.com felt compelled to attack Rod with a front page piece done by a contributing editor.

It isn't often that a conservative commentator finds himself being singled-out for abuse on a Republican-leaning blog. Reading the original piece, one wonders why Redstate.com would bother. What was it that Rod said in his column that singled him out for special treatment by the Conservative commetariat?

I think the primary reason is that he dared question the official reasons for our current economic malaise. Rod points out that large corporations have used their power and influence to loot our economy. To do so, of course, required a partnership with the federal government. The government used its power to favor a circle of politically connected businesses (overwhelmingly in the financial sector). These businesses ran amok, and helped bring our nation to bring of financial ruin.

No one got arrested and charged with any crimes for this. In fact, most perpetrators have stayed in management as the U.S. tax payer began to shovel in bail-out money by the billions.

But big business is totally innocent in the official Republican version of the current economic crisis. Redstate encapsulates this talking point here:

Dreher is wrong in part to say that favoritism to the "Wall Street elite" is what drove this mess. What really drove this mess was wrong-headed federal regulation fueled by campaign donations to Congress.

Officially, all our problems stem from the Community Re-investment Act which forced lenders to give loans to sub-prime borrowers in order to provide affordable housing. There is some truth in this. Government-mandated lending did create part of the problem. But the sub-prime mess is only a small piece of what has gone wrong. Wall Street with its exotic, and ultimately toxic, investment vehicles has played a big part in turning our economy on its head. That is not even to mention cases of outright financial fraud like Bernie Madoff.

But Rod goes off the reservation, mentions moral problems among the business elite, and for that he must be made to pay. To the official right-wing of the Republican Party, executives are always heroes and the only problems in the economy are caused by labor unions and government regulations. The idea that excessive labor union demands and burdensome government regulation (often used to stifle competitors by well-connected companies) could combine with executive avarice to create our current morass seems to have been ruled an impossibility.

Many Americans understand that Rod is on to something. Those of us who have worked in large corporations understand that, at best, many executive teams are bordering on incompetent, even when they are not looting their companies blind. At parties I often start swapping stories with other technology industry survivors just to enjoy a bit of dark humor. The stories sound as if they were straight out of Dilbert cartoons.

For example, a company I was working for once cut 10% of its staff the day before the company Christmas party. The party had been organized by one of the employees that had been cut. She walked out the door and no one had any idea what to do the next day as everything just melted into chaos. It is impossible to describe how low morale was as at that "party."

The entire cut was like that. Resources that had valuable years of experience on hard-to-understand products were cut, only to find out that no one was available to replace them. Resources that had been booked to go onsite were cut, and customers were not notified until after the consultants had simply failed to show up. In one case, a resource was cut that had just gotten singled out for an award as one of our most valuable employees.

Why did all that happen? The cuts were made by the accountants without regard to the operational needs of the company. They wanted to cut head and cut payroll, and if the customer suffered or the operations of the company were upended - hey at least the sales per employee ratio was brought in line with the industry average!

Which of course is a major cause of the insanity. At most large corporations, the management is focused on the balance sheet, not the business. This is not surprising, given the focus on finance in most business schools. So management goes with what it knows, which is how to cut costs and engage in financial operations. The results are badly run corporations that don't produce goods and services for the market, but instead trade paper back and forth and call it profit.

A lot of Americans get this. We understand our major businesses are largely run by incompetent boobs who screw up and then get bailed out by their buddies in Congress. We understand that many Americans work hard, only to get hosed in layoffs so that the CEO can protect his stock options. We aren't in the right country clubs, so we don't count. There are no bailouts for us, which is why the American public opposed the bailouts so vehemently.

The building rage in the heartland isn't about the free market or capitalism. Americans, by and large, are fine with both. This is about Americans losing their jobs while executives run companies into the dirt, lie to shareholders, take government money, and then pocket bonuses for their performance. This is about Wall Street money managers who sold garbage as Triple A-rated securities which then exploded in everyone's 401k. This is about Congress throwing money hand-over-fist into failed corporations at the expense of tax payers.

The Republican establishment either doesn't understand the source of the anger that is building, or just can't afford to admit the truth. Neither can the Democratic establishment, for that matter. The Democrats are busy readying a whole series of new regulations that will end up being co-opted and twisted just as easily as the old set. After all, where was the SEC during the whole Madoff scandal?

The fundamental problem is actually widespread moral failure. Americans are outraged at what they see as a rigged system, and they are exactly right to be. How this anger will manifest itself remains to be seen. Whether it will be helpful in the longrun or harmful also remains to be seen. But it has to be acknowledged and it needs to be addressed.

On a note of humor, I'm including the appearance by a comic on Jay Leno's show in which she talks about the bailout. I think her comedy perfectly encapsulates the mood of the country, which is way different than what the Republican National Committee would like it to be. To watch the video, click here.

Glen Chancy is CIO for corfun.com and publisher of Orthodox Biz. You can contact him here .

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 [Rod Dreher Understands Populist Anger]

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