Toward a Rough Draft of Palinism: Sarah vs. the Scarecrows

posted at 1:31 pm on May 9, 2009 by CK MacLeod
[ Politicians ]   

Wizard of Oz: They have one thing you haven’t got: a diploma. Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitartus Committiartum E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of ThD.
Scarecrow: ThD?
Wizard of Oz: That’s… Doctor of Thinkology.

As we know, the appearance on the national scene of Governor Mrs. Sarah Palin, the woman; of the media construct “Sarah Palin”; and of the potential for something that, for now only provisionally, can be called “Palinism,” was greeted by the American intellectual elite in the manner of phagocytes reacting to a life-threatening pathogen – or, recalling one particularly unseemly outburst, to the effects of a “cancer.”

We were told, and no doubt many of the tellers mostly believed, that the all-devouring supernatural she-beast from the frozen wastes banned books and despised learning, perhaps because enraged by her own total, ineradicable illiteracy; though a saurian monster herself – eater of raw flesh, drinker of crude oil, airborne sadist toying with desperate wolves like a house cat with mice – she denied the existence of dinosaurs, the hypocrite; so hateful of sex, but in love with procreation, she would force abstinence on teenage girls, exposing them to ravishment and the subsequent forced delivery of special needs children, while denying them the forensic kits that would no doubt implicate her own depraved brood of drunken taser-wielding white trash in-laws in uniform, then stealing the offspring for herself, not merely hiding the medical records, but commiting them to flame in strange half-pagan rites of voodoo-Christian witchcraft.  In other words:  A typical conservative.

Or might there have been some exaggeration involved?

There are two kinds of elite.  The make-up of one elite conforms to an imposed hierarchy of prescribed values, and inevitably equates with an establishment whose members become increasingly concerned with the reinforcement and protection of their positions, until self-perpetuation becomes their first and last purpose:  In the real world, “intellect for intellect’s sake” sooner or later reveals itself to be “intellectuals for intellectuals’ sake.”  The other elite has no set membership, no credentials, no tenure track.  It arises as the organic, imperfect, spontaneously emergent, quasi-Darwinian (as naturally selective) result of a process allowed to run its course over however much time is available.  Its character is libertarian in the broad sense, born from the confidence that economic and political freedom, including self-interest, is the best or only means for reaching practical, resilient, adaptive, broadly acceptable, humane, creative, unpredictably positive and also worst-except-for-all-alternatives, demonstrably rather than ideally superior solutions to enduring as well as to novel political, cultural, and social ills.

The first is the Scarecrow elite, membership verified by Oz-certified diploma and accompanied by the requisite Emerald City perks and privileges and by enough e pluribus unum to handle Emerald City rents and restaurants.  The second is Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy” – which can be defined as the people who turn out to have been aristoi, the best, according to standards that cannot be understood, often cannot be even outlined ahead of time.  The earliest members of this other elite, none of them aristocrats on the terms of the old order, promised a wonder – an egalitarian, prosperous, self-governing nation – and their heirs delivered a miracle, the most powerful, productive, and transformative national culture in the history of the planet.

The amount of actual or even possible overlap between the two elites is open to debate, though the Scarecrows Guild asserts the right to adjudicate membership in good standing, and promises to find and induct promising new apprentices wherever they both appear and qualify, while the free range Naturals in the hinterlands deny any such monopoly, even if they remain susceptible to co-optation by whatever Universitartus Committiartum.

As for the present day, why would anyone expect the openly acknowledged bankruptcy of our national elites to be restricted to the political and financial spheres?  If the opposite is the case, if no inherent immunity protects American intellectual culture from the diseases that afflict its leading exponents, then we might have reason to wonder whether there are more Naturals on the “outside” than on the “inside.”  For the sake of the nation, we might hope so, and urgently seek their unfamiliar accents and unfamiliar insights – where their words are not immediately interpretable to us, then their eloquent acts, their deeds of genius, their well-landed leaps of faith – in the frontiers, in flyover country, in ideological and spiritual backwaters, the unfamiliarer and backwetter the better.

For Sarah Palin to fulfill the promise she made, or seemed to make, just by showing up and occupying a vividly empty space in the national political tableau, becoming “Sarah Palin”; for Sarah Palin herself to prove that she can play in the Natural League and defeat those Scarecrows who long ago left the farmhand’s humility and patience behind, she would need to articulate and communicate ideas and principles more fluently, more consistently, and more often than she has thusfar been able.  She may not need to pass the ThD orals that some want to put her through, but she would need to speak to those who have ears to hear, and who understand that a national leader cannot do without new and just words, ideas, and even “memes.” Where her early stumbles hurt her most, almost to the point of disqualifying her, it was not, as her critics alleged, because they betrayed congenital intellectual deficits, but because they made her seem incapable of instilling confidence through language, something all politicians, even barbarian warlords and warrior queens, must be able to do.  The same factor was at play when against expectations she spoke to astonish us, inspiring a thousand panegyrics on Sarah, and even causing the media Scarecrows to forget their dreary catechism for a few welcome minutes.

Palin may yet decline or simply prove unable to finish “Palin”‘s course, or, to say the same thing, she may with all our help re-define “Palin” as the finished unfinishing one, the one abandoned on a Bridge to Nowhere.  If so, someone else will have to enunciate what Palinism would have been, to delineate its full contours under a different heading.  At least that person or persons will know what to expect from the Thinkologists – that is, until and unless the political wind starts blowing at her or his or their back instead of into her or his or their face. 

An emergent American conservative libertarianism, Palinism with or without Palin, with or without “Palin,” driven by crisis as much as by charisma, by economic and geo-political facts of life as much as by anyone’s ideological hallucinations or social psychosexual fantasies, may represent an objective as well as subjective danger to creatures of superfluous privilege, and to the self-styled intellectual elites most of all. The frenzy and the fever may recur, but those who find themselves fearful and trembling – most of them wrongly if it’s her or him or the whole lot of ‘em that they chiefly fear, rather than their own superannuation – should in the main turn to groveling.  (If you doubt that’s what they do best, review the ’08 campaign from both sides.)  At that point, they may have cause to rejoice if it’s Palin, not “Palin,” and not some fiercer Palinist, looking down on them.

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