In the weeks ahead there will be many postmortems analyzing where McCain's campaign went wrong. For me, I stopped considering his candidacy after he selected Sarah Palin as his VP pick. Aside from her policy views, Palin's hatred of elites and insistence that small town America is "real America" rubbed me the wrong way. Palin will be part of the political scene for years to come. Below (and below the fold) I offer expanded thoughts on Palin in the context of a wonderful essay I just read – "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill. Mill was a champion of eccentric elites and his view on this issue is worth considering and juxtaposing with Palin's.
In a recent issue of The New Republic, Noam Scheiber notes how common it’s become for politicians to one-up each other in expressing their distaste for “elites.” From George W. Bush and Mitt Romney blasting the overeducated and entitled, to Hillary Clinton famously remarking that she wasn’t going to “put [her] lot in with the economists” during the gas price spike (she’d rather listen, presumably, to “real Americans,” whoever they are), conveying your common-man bona fides is essential to winning an election in America.
While both sides of the aisle shoo-shoo condescending elites, Republicans have championed this mode of rhetoric more in the last few elections. David Brooks recently observed that over the last 15 years most conservative pundits think “the nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.” At the Republican convention in Minneapolis Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, both coastal, well-to-do men, blasted the cosmopolitanism of liberal elites who are out of touch. It’s this constant rhetoric around “Two Americas” (contra John Edwards this bifurcation is between the coasts and the heartland), Brooks argues, that’s causing entire voting groups to turn blue — tech executives, lawyers, doctors, the west coast, northern Virginia, etc. In other words, any geographic region or profession where a cultivated mind and taste for fine wine is nothing to be ashamed of.
No fact captures the contemporary Republican party’s distrust for urban elites better than their christening of Sarah Palin. Her arrival on the national stage (a stage she will be on for many years to come) represents the ultimate celebration of everyday America. Her resume boasts no fancy degrees and instead a small town mayorship and rural state governorship. Her passport, empty of stamps. Her accent is defined by a folksy twang. Her debate style involves winks, home-town shoutouts, and phrases like “doggone it” and “say it ain’t so Joe.”
What’s so wonderful about Palin is that it’s almost all real. (That this is remarkable says something about our current politics or at the least the cynicism of a generation whose introduction to D.C. came in the form of Bill Clinton lying about an oval office blow job.) Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose pathetic attempt at relating to small-town folk led her to down Crown Royal whiskey and pizza at a campaign stop, Sarah Palin can credibly drink Coors Light, watch a Nascar match, and shoot a gun. If Hillary and Sarah were to face off at a Town Hall meeting, and a questioner asked about gun-rights, it’s pretty easy to imagine Hillary becoming entangled in a wonkish explanation of the 2nd Amendment, with a chirpy Sarah responding, “Hey now, don’t ya think every old shmuck like me (wink) oughta be able to have a gun to keep the psychos of our lawns?”
Certainly, some portion (though as we learned on Nov 4 not most) of the population responds favorably to the latter style of answer. But others shrivel up – like me. Her overbearing folksiness rings hollow. Then again, I’m not her audience. By Palin’s calculus, I’m one of the coastal elites who’s too stuck up to listen to a hockey mom. A deep-rooted class resentment has been part of Palin’s worldview and identity for as long as she’s been in the public eye.
The larger question to ask about Palin and her style and history is whether it’s the only way to engage Nascar-loving middle Americans. By picking her, the Republican party seemed to think so. Their losing 2008 playbook read: extol the virtues of the common man, celebrate the simple life of the marginally educated, and insult pointy heads’ polysyllabic phrases. I, for one, find it patronizing to think that a factory worker will respond only to relentless plain speak and not an even mildly cerebral argument. But there’s a deeper concern beyond the condescension of party strategists who underestimate (and indeed create a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy around) the mental horsepower of someone who works with his hands and reads the Bible: it is the disregard of the idea of intellectualism and the work of professional intellectuals.
John Stuart Mill can defend these disregarded intellectuals better than anyone. Mill more than most cherished the contributions of geniuses, of eccentric personalities, of original thinkers. Mill more than most sounded the alarm at societal pressures to “normalize” these types rather than harness their energy for broader good. And so it is Mill more than most who would be dismayed at Palin’s near-proud anti-intellectualism and the Republican party’s broader elevation of the everyman-over-refined-man strategy.
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