Leave Palin alone, liberals

As a political prospect, Palin is terrifying; as someone who embodies an American story, she is fascinating. She is Huck Finn in reverse. Instead of fleeing civilization and lighting out for the territory, she started in the territory and lit out for civilization. What she discovered is that civilization—our politics, and our media—is even more feral, less bound by morality, and more unforgiving than the wilderness she had come from. We know this dirty little secret of civilization theoretically—cynicism about everything is our American meat and milk. But we rarely come across a public person whose experience of it is so raw and uncontrolled…

True outsiders often discombobulate the liberal mind. The source of liberal values is the idea that life’s quick changes make us all fundamentally outsiders, and that any social and political arrangement has to take the outsider, not the cozy insider, as its moral starting point. (See the liberal philosopher John Rawls’ profoundly beautiful conceit of the “veil of ignorance” in his “Theory of Justice,” in which Rawls imagines men and women creating a social contract based on their mutual vulnerability.) But powerful liberals are rarely outsiders, and so true outsiders shake their sense of self. Plenty of liberals must have felt a few minutes of alarm when Sarah Palin first appeared on the scene and challenged their authenticity. Then she imploded, and they tore her apart, perhaps in savage relief at finding their virtuous identities still intact…

But all the piling-on seems to me intended to cancel out her humanity. She is being turned into an object, and in this sense, her very presence has exposed a certain ugly attitude among the liberal elites that has always cast such a long shadow over liberal politics.