That’s the idea. But I think this gets it wrong. To me, the cultural hot spots are actually the more important debates for the very reason that they are hot spots — they are the locations in which the national moral consensus breaks down. So debating them is the way we refine, move, test, and either break or reestablish a collective morality. And a true and good public morality is, it seems to me, more important than a refined policy consensus.

Debates about Palin aren’t really about Palin. She is a talisman, a symbol, a shortcut for conversations about more fundamental issues. (I recommend thinking about how politics is not actually about policy, and how “symbolic politics” may be a redundancy — our political affiliations and passions seem to center more strongly on cultural identities than on the provisions of H.R. XYZ.)

So discussing Sarah Palin is a shortcut to national conversation about all the things she symbolizes — that is, about the status of Middle America, of evangelical Christianity, of children with Down syndrome, of folksiness, of hunting, of anti-cosmopolitanism, of all the doings of all those people out there who flaunt the status cues of coastal America.