In the palm of her hand

posted at 2:21 pm on February 7, 2010 by CK MacLeod
[ Tea Party ]   

Glancing at the title of an Andrew Sullivan post – “One Last Word” – linked at Memeorandum Saturday night, I knew it had to be about Sarah Palin’s Tea Party Nation keynote speech.

My guess was that he’d gotten busy yesterday, summoning his personal Palin demons and holding a tea party of his own with them. Considering the infernal depths of his Palin obsession, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was his 10th post of the day on her. Nor would I have been surprised if it had been even more foully offensive, deluded, and craven than the most recent previous piece of his I happened to see excerpted, one in which he went on as usual about things he doesn’t understand and that only he and said demons take seriously regarding Palin and her infant son Trig.

I confess, however, that the title made me hope, just a little, that Sullivan had finally done the right thing: Take an extended, indefinite leave of absence, possibly involving intensive psychotherapy and spiritual counseling – leaving “One Last Word” as his farewell – but, no, as expected, the post turned out to be about Palin. Oddly enough, however, it was something that a Palin supporter might actually enjoy – assuming an ability to read between the lines of Sullivan’s obscene melodrama and paranoid bigotry.

Promising to assess Palin as a potential presidential candidate, Sullivan first stretches for familiar “conservatives = Nazis” tropes of the sort that the invocation of “Godwin’s Law” was once meant to banish from web conversation, among other things equating Palin’s criticism of Obama as commander-in-chief with the Hitlerian “stab in the back” attack on the post-World War I German left: Hitler accusing the German left of treason and losing the Great War = raising questions about Obama Administration detainee treatment policy. Put simply: In the Sulliverse, any criticism of the great and wonderful Ø’s war leadership = Nazism.

Sullivan then turns to the good stuff: an at least somewhat grounded analysis of Palin as potential presidential candidate:

…there is a huge constituency out there (rightly) outraged by Washington corruption and she now has the critical mantle of the rogue outsider; she can channel Christianism and fuse it with the slogans of phony “fiscal conservatism”; she will blame every lost job on Obama; and she will accuse him of betraying the troops and befriending America’s enemies. Behind her are the Cheneyites.

Above all, she is capable of generating a personality cult – much, much more so than Obama, because she can harness Christianism to her divine destiny. The power of this kind of appeal – of a charismatic, beautiful woman, an icon of the pro-life cause, persecuted by the evil elites, demonized by libruls, and commanding the biggest military on earth – should not in my view be under-estimated.

Know fear.

It might almost be worth translating the above paragraphs into sane, but I suspect that anyone who has read this far can play that game at home. Conservatives, and sufficiently numerous members of the American electorate for conservatives to win elections, have become rather adept at exegesis of this type. This ain’t complicated. These aren’t the historico-political allegories embedded in The Lord of the Rings or Revelation, and conservatives can fall back on nearly 50 years of practice, since “libruls” have been reflexively painting conservatives as “extremists,” and shouting “The end is near!” at least since the anti-Goldwater campaign of 1964 – when a single famous line of Goldwater’s, and the liberals’ own epochal political success, helped to fuse the terms “conservative” and “extremist” together in the liberal mind and Democrat playbook.

Sullivan’s fear-mongering, literal fear-mongering, itself seems a bit frightening in the larger context of politicized Palin hatred – it only takes a Sullivan with a gun to make this psychosis real – but too little he says in general makes enough sense for anything he says in particular to be taken very seriously. For the same reason, it may be too much to attribute balanced judgment to Sullivan regarding Palin’s political potential. Still, I think he’s right that Palinism has immense potential. But anyone can see that now.

We’re left to pray, perhaps to our “Christianist” God – why not? – that Sullivan and his followers keep to themselves with their pathetic emotionalism. It would be a shame if they hurt anyone, even themselves. Otherwise, people so wounded in spirit and intellect have little to offer and are not themselves much to be afraid of.

They don’t count for much, but their collective fear does smell a bit like victory for the taking…

* * *

One last note: “One Last Word” wasn’t a last word, at all, naturally. Today, Sullivan is “talking to the hand,” along with a circle of like-minded bloggers (if “minded” can ever be the right word with these people) about notes that Palin may have inked into her palm for the Q&A session at Tea Party Nation last night. I hope that the nutroots continue to push this absurdly and indicatively trivial line of attack, since it makes Palin look like just what she is – refreshingly human and informal, determined to get the job done – and incidentally reminds everyone about which leading politician (if “leading” can be used in this context) is truly reliant on external devices to express himself, word by wearisome word.

Furthermore, you can’t bring up this event without bringing up those three main points, on all of which Palin, the Tea Party, and conservatives have much more popular positions than the HuffPo and ThinkProgress and Daily Dish left. It’s free publicity for the Palin program every virtual second it’s discussed and re-transmitted.

If the pseudo-scandal becomes widely enough known, we may someday see crowds of everyday Americans inking such useful reminders – “energy,” “taxes,” “lift America’s spirits” – into their hands, and proudly waving them at Palin rallies, or photographing and t-shirting them. The first example I’ve seen of such spin-offs was linked at HotAir by commenter Emperor Norton, and is shown at the top of this post.

Like Sullivan’s frightwig of a commentary, what this micro-controversy says to me is that she’s got them in the palm of her hand, she’s crushing them, and there’s not much they seem able to do about it. They can’t help it. The more they struggle, the worse it is for them. You almost have to wonder if they like it that way…

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

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