Sarahnoia Strikes Deep, or a Seemingly Very Nice Middle Class President (Palinism #3)

posted at 10:04 am on July 13, 2009 by CK MacLeod
[ Politicians ]    printer-friendly

In the recent, widely noted waders-on exchange with Fox correspondent Dan Springer, Governor Sarah Palin was asked whether she thought she “would make a good president.” After conceding uncertainty about what the future holds, she had the following to say about the presidency:

I think any average, hard-working American, though, whose heart is in the right place, who has the work ethic that is required, and can articulate what it is that America needs right now is going to make a darn good president.

Like many of Palin’s off-the-cuff utterances, the above statement partly conceals both a radical challenge and a complex view of the historical moment beneath an unpretentious surface, losing the grammar cops, the diction scolds, and the ideologically pre-deafened, but coming through clearly to those inclined to listen.

A similar message was implicit in H Ross Perot’s “get under the hood” appeal to the “radical center” of the electorate.  Every presidential candidate strikes some series of populist poses.  Yet who else other than Sarah Palin and a few high concept creative writers working up modernized THE PRINCE & THE PAUPER storylines has put forward this kind of radical Americanism, radical democratism, in anything like these terms?

It’s hard to imagine a statement more at odds with the implicit views of Palin’s critics – especially the “reform” or “moderate” conservatives whose ideas of the presidency, governance, and society made them vulnerable to Barack Obama’s pitch and persona, and which were typified in those sections of last Friday’s Peggy Noonan column that were removed and flushed during a recent vivisection by the good Doctor Zero.  That last quivering mass on the examining table is Noonan’s conclusion:

The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do.

It’s not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won’t be that way.

We are going to need the best.

The above reads a heckuvalot smoother than Palin’s extemporaneous seaside chat, but, if it’s a political statement at all, it’s an authoritarian, even a crypto-fascist statement, the operatic fanfare for an American Il Duce.

The world, saith the Prophet Peggishmael, is so wrong that we will have to depend on an extraordinary supreme leader to keep it right.  Because all the old “assumptions of our childhoods” will cease to matter, as the famous slate is wiped clean by apocalyptic catastrophe (terror in the cities!, secession!), it matters less what the towering above-the-cut figure will believe or represent in any particular, than that he or she is one of “the best.”  It almost goes without saying – though Noonan gleefully underlines it anyway – that no “nice middle class girl” need apply for the job, and that we simple folk, we pathetic but lucky Betas, Gammas, and Deltas, will need to rely more than ever on the discernment of Alphas like… Peggy Noonan (i.e., the people who brought us Barack Hussein Obama).  For us to disagree, to protest, to seek alternatives within our own feeble grasp, that would be to indulge in “resentment,” or, even worse, “frivolity.”

Ours is not to reason why, ours is to speak when spoken to, and not too much.

If we turn away from this counsel from our oh-so-much betters, however, we still need to ask ourselves what the alternative means.  If Noonan’s view exemplifies the major modes of anti-Palinism – one part politics and, to employ a wonderful coinage by J.E. Dyer, one part “Sarahnoid” dementia – what about the opposite view?  What does it mean to favor an “average hard-working American”-in-chief over a brand new Noonan-approved super-aristo V2.0 or higher?

The question may remind the reader of William F. Buckley’s famous line about preferring to be “governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the dons of Harvard,” but I think Palin goes  further – that is, she’s not just tweaking the dons and their admirers. I think she means what she says. In her description of an ideal American chief executive, implicitly herself but not necessarily herself at all, she conjures the image of a federal government, a government of this United States of America, global neo-empire, that would exist on a human scale, a government of the individual, by the individual, and for the individual, accessible to the mind and the experience of each citizen – not some distant superstructure of techno-, pluto-, and bureaucrats producing unquestionable and unfathomable (even unread!) decisions and laws.

At the same time, rather than merely add a plank to Palin’s enunciated platform – energy independence, national security, fiscal restraint, small government, local control – this definition of the presidency places that platform in a much larger ideological and historical context.  It may register to some as the quaint and slightly ridiculous notion of a “girl,” to some as an unattainable ideal, to others as a vehicle for mere populism or worse, to others as the basis at most for a campaign slogan, prop, or stop, but everything implied by an effort to understand it, reach it, and finally grasp it may also represent what a conservatism that finds itself in a position to replace Obamaism must begin: a project of American renewal impossible without the unwinding, reduction, and re-conception of the federal government.

Now, to say “radical” or “revolutionary” is usually to invite ridicule and marginalization, not to mention discomfort and fear:  It has rarely been in the interest of an American politician, even going back to the real Revolution, to embrace any form of “extremism.”  “Radical” amounts to the political antonym of “Realist” on both the right and the left and around the world, and the safe assumption is that reality naturally belongs to the Realists, who always – or almost always – win, but, when this conventional reading is a misreading, it’s the biggest misreading of all.  The radical center threatens to become more real than realism whenever the great mass of citizens, in response to whatever combination of crisis and charisma, are motivated to assert themselves.  Before Palin and Palinism, as recently as in 1992-4 via the Perot skyrocket and the Contract with America Republicans who partly re-traced its trajectory, it threatened not just to re-align American politics but to re-fashion basic political assumptions in ways not seen since perhaps the 1850s.  Because the Realists won out in ‘92 and following ‘94, as usual, they were able to banish the to them unpleasant and frightening events from public memory.  If they today remain beyond the imaginations of most members of our political class and the intelligentsia, even and especially the self-styled conservative intelligentsia, perhaps it’s because acknowledging them at all makes their re-appearance seem more terrifyingly possible.

In one of the more thoughtful reactions to Palin’s resignation, and to the Palin phenomenon generally, historian Angelo M. Codevilla at NATIONAL REVIEW’s The Corner divides American politics into two virtual parties, what he calls the “Court Party” (insider America) and the “Country Party” (flyover America). He closes with some thoughts about a possible course for their competition:

The 2012 election’s potential for revolution, then, depends on whether Sarah Palin or anyone else lives up to the contemptuous caricature that the Court party has drawn of the Americans they imagine to be their underlings. Any leader of the Country party would have to challenge the Court party’s assertion of wisdom and morality, attack it for its privileges and corruption, and repeat the most damning of questions: Who the hell do you think you are to presume to rule us like this?

Codevilla’s insights explain why his fellow NR contributor Victor Davis Hanson, in his latest provisional autopsy of Obamaism, may have gotten things exactly wrong at the conclusion of an otherwise persuasive essay:  “Because Obama is a revolutionary who seeks to overturn 50 years of doing business in America both at home and abroad, his shortcomings have the potential not only to diminish his own stature through unmet impossible expectations, but to take all those who signed on to his megalomania down with him.”  From the Palinist perspective Obama and his movement, including his allies on the supposed center right, are reactionaries of the liberal state, not revolutionaries.  The Obamaists are not overturning 50 years of doing business, but, from Stimulus to Sotomayor, perpetuating and extending it, aiming to complete an even older project to subsume American constitutionalism and republican democracy fully under the technocratic state.

The Palinist response expresses a radical Americanism – and the diametrical opposite of Obamaism as we’ve come to know it.  In that sense Palinism is revolutionary in both American senses of the term, invoking both the American Revolution, including a certain Tea Party that helped get it started, as well as a small-r revolutionary challenge to the existing order.   It is as radical today as it was 200 and some years ago, even if in a democratic order it looks to debates and elections rather than armed struggle.

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