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It looks like you are running Python 2.5 or earlier, which did not support the byte string declaration syntax. Phusion Passenger requires Python 2.6 or later.
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I asked this same question on the Phusion Passenger list and Hongli also answered me there (thanks Hongli!!):
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/phusion-passenger/cYBgUPX_ICA
Dreamhost’s documentation is out-of-date, and their support team is not well versed in Phusion Passenger configs/issues.
It turns out that Passenger also requires at least Python 2.6 to even start up (if you are using it for Python apps or frameworks like Django), prior to loading your defined virtualenv Python interpreter in your passenger_wsgi.py file. To make this happen you need to modify how Nginx is configured…
Edit your Nginx config file (nginx.conf) and add the following line:
http {
passenger_root ...;
# Use Python 2.6 by default.
passenger_python /home/<user>/venv/<venv-name>/bin/python2.6;
server {
<snip>
}
}
This forces Passenger to use the defined Python interpreter in passenger_python for starting up. Voila! – a running webserver once again.