Mama Grizzly vs. The Establishment
Mini Teaser: As the GOP's leading contender in 2012, can Sarah Palin channel the optimism of her hero Reagan without abandoning her bromides against the tyranny of the ruling class?
[amazon 0062010964 full]Sarah Palin, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag (New York: Harper, 2010), 304 pp., $25.99.
Sarah Palin, Going Rogue: An American Life (New York: Harper, 2009), 432 pp., $28.99.
IN HIS novel The American Senator, Anthony Trollope has Elias Gotobed visit England to study its institutions. Senator Gotobed, an apostle of the wisdom of the common man, soon expresses his consternation at the feudal power and prerogatives, the arrogance and presumption, of the nobility. He informs a British acquaintance that his country is stuck in the past:
The spirit of conservatism in this country is so strong that you cannot bear to part with a shred of the barbarism of the Middle Ages. And when a rag is sent to the winds you shriek with agony at the disruption, and think that the wound will be mortal.
It’s a sentiment that American conservatives have always grappled with uneasily. In the past century, the Right has wavered between Burkean conservatism on the one hand and fiery populism on the other. But whether one traces its origins back to Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, who loathed cities and venerated rural life, or argues that it is of a slightly more recent Jacksonian vintage, a militant populism—God-fearing folk carrying the mantle of American exceptionalism—has become a potent feature of America’s political landscape.
[amazon 0061939897 full]Indeed, an insurrectionary trend—the attempt in fact to overthrow the regnant liberal ruling class—began to take hold in the early 1950s with the Joseph McCarthy–led revolt against intellectual elites and establishment Republicans. Too much too soon perhaps—too indebted, above all, to the bilious McCarthy—it never gained the necessary traction.
The liberal historian Louis Hartz suggested that the absence of a feudal aristocracy meant that a viable American conservative tradition could not exist. In 1955, William F. Buckley Jr., who cowrote with L. Brent Bozell McCarthy & His Enemies, established the National Review and declared that its mission was to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop.” Buckley was trying to create a right-wing movement by improbably grafting together Burkean traditionalism with populism. His personal lodestar might be Edmund Burke, but he also knew that for conservatism to flourish, it needed foot soldiers. Barry Goldwater and his libertarian challenge to the GOP’s complacent grandees supplied them. The Goldwater uprising set the stage for the Reagan revolution.
Ronald Reagan’s presidency signaled the apparent demise of the Republican ancien régime. With Reagan’s rise, a dynamic conservatism flourished. The stodgy Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover–style Republican era was passé: “I don’t think we ought to focus on the past,” Reagan said, “I want to focus on the future.” As historian Garry Wills has noted, the Gipper espoused a most unconservative sentiment by frequently quoting the radical Tom Paine: “We have it in our power to start the world over.” In his first inaugural address, Reagan declared that government was the problem, not the solution, all the while championing a crusading foreign policy (which rested on Washington’s intervention abroad).
It has been a back-and-forth battle for the soul of the party ever since. For the war against the old-guard Republican establishment, the “wets” to use the British term, was never decisively won. Rather, during George H. W. Bush’s presidency, conservatives of various stripes fell into a funk over his readiness to compromise on tax hikes and his alleged timorousness in global affairs—most notably when it came to Iraq and Bush the Elder’s refusal to take us all the way to Baghdad.
As the New York Times’s Sam Tanenhaus observes in the epilogue to his book The Death of Conservatism, by 1995 neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol was so exasperated that he called for the emergence of a new “popular movement,” one that was ready to “walk away” from the GOP if it succumbed to the temptation to cater to moderates. Kristol, in other words, anticipated the rise of the Tea Party and the purge of establishment Republicans.
Certainly since the end of the George W. Bush presidency, conservatives have been feuding. The recent round of bloodletting, which has culminated in the loss of likely Republican Senate seats in Delaware and elsewhere, has yet to end as conservatives like Richard Lugar are now being targeted for insufficient ideological purity. This all prompted former–Republican Senator John Danforth to recently remark that the GOP may end up “beyond redemption.” The Republican Party is a house divided. It has resurrected itself politically, and Americans are turning back to the GOP, but the party is sundered by enmity between populist and elitist camps.
No doubt the Right’s hardiness has come as something of a cataleptic shock to the many liberals who concluded that with President Barack Obama’s victory it was time to read the conservative movement its last rites. It hardly appears ready for embalmment. Instead, it is vigorously waging a battle over its own identity. Those looking to restore a dynamic golden age of antiestablishment, everyman sentiment seem to be winning. The result is that the party is moving decidedly to the right.
PERHAPS THAT is why at the 2007 presidential primary debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, each Republican contender vied to claim the Great Communicator’s legacy. And no one has prompted more anguish within the Republican Party than Sarah Palin with her Gipper-like posturing.
While the Left depicts the erstwhile VP candidate as a kissing cousin of The Beverly Hillbillies and mocks daughter Bristol’s performances on Dancing with the Stars, former–Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Texas Governor Rick Perry, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, and onetime presidential contenders Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, among others, have dutifully lined up to issue new campaign books to compete with the GOP’s star attraction. While Palin has played a pivotal role in prompting the electorate to rebel against the current administration, her amazing rise is clearly triggering heart palpitations in the Republican establishment. With the 2012 presidential election looming large, those on the right are taking sides—it is Middle America’s hoi polloiagainst the old guard.
Enter blue-blood sentiment: George H. W. Bush made his feelings quite clear by declaring that Romney would make an excellent president. But the real sting was administered by Barbara Bush: “I sat next to her once, thought she was beautiful, and I think she’s very happy in Alaska. And I hope she’ll stay there.” Palin responded:
I don’t want to concede that we have to get used to this kind of thing, because I don’t think the majority of Americans want to put up with the blue bloods—and I want to say it with all due respect because I love the Bushes—the blue bloods who want to pick and chose their winners instead of allowing competition.
Palin has a point. Many of the criticisms of Palin have more to do with her as a matter of taste than with her specific stands. In substance, her views are barely distinguishable from Bush the Younger’s. She is “W,” you could even say, without the strawberry leaves.
So this explains why one group in particular within the GOP has fervently backed her since the outset—has, in fact, staked its claim to her. Palin may champion the Tea Party, but she was discovered by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and has earned accolades from author Midge Decter, who declared in the British neocon journal Standpoint that Palin is “young, handsome, clever, firmly married, a mother, a serious Christian, a right-to-lifer, who has been successful at virtually everything . . . to which she has turned a hand or mind or body.” Put otherwise, Palin represents what Irving Kristol was searching for in 1995—a stalwart, uncompromising and popular social conservative, a princess who needs guidance from a neocon adviser to the throne. In bashing liberal elites, she is sounding the theme that Kristol began enunciating in the 1960s when he attacked the “new class” of professors, bureaucrats, city planners and environmentalists who form a parasitic caste that restricts the free-enterprise system and personal freedom. Small wonder that Kristol fils was so taken with Palin when he first met her on a Weekly Standard Alaskan cruise in June 2007.
Palin has been a neocon with training wheels on for quite some time now; two of her closest advisers, Randy Scheunemann and Michael Goldfarb, are certainly card-carrying members. But she’s branching out. Palin represents a unique amalgam of neocon social conservatism, opposition to big government and a crusading foreign policy—including obeisance to Israel. She ostentatiously trumpets her populist bona fides, while steadily becoming part of the media elite. Like the neocons, she sees herself as an outsider battling the establishment.
But the trouble with Palin may be fundamental. Can she channel her hero Reagan with his cheery spirit of a nation full of optimistic individualists? Or will she destroy the resurgent conservative movement from within by coming across as a Mean Girl, reveling in her miscues, endorsing quondam witches like Christine O’Donnell for the Senate and demonizing her opponents while trying to return America to a mythical past? Will she look to the greater good of the party or will she throw a hissy fit if marginalized at the Republican convention?
AS PALIN’S two books—her memoir, Going Rogue, and her new testament, America by Heart—indicate, she has an inveterate hatred of those she perceives as elites. In tracing that hatred, too little attention has been paid to Palin’s youth. She notes that her father left the precincts of American liberalism—North Hollywood—for the sticks (first Idaho, then Alaska). Thanks to the forty-ninth state’s eagerness to attract teachers to the Far North, he could earn double his normal salary (though Palin makes much of her mistrust of big government, she doesn’t really address the fact that her father was a state employee).
Her memoir suggests that her suspicion of elites surely has its origins in her childhood membership in the Assemblies of God, the world’s biggest Pentecostal church whose members often engage in the practice of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. Palin calls it the most “alive” church in Wasilla, where she soaked up fire-breathing sermons. The hockey mom has never attended a hierarchical church that claims sacerdotal authority. Instead, the emphasis on an unmediated, direct access to God may help explain why not much seems to impress Palin apart from her own intuition. Palin, who after attending one college after another finally landed a bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of Idaho, makes it abundantly clear that she is wholly unimpressed by diplomas, expertise, science (a subject that her own father, who, she hastily notes, was no churchgoer, taught). She announces:
In eighteen years of impromptu supper-table lessons and expert-guided field trips to America’s national parks, never had Dad or anyone else convinced me that the earth had sprung forth conveniently stocked with the ingredients necessary to spontaneously generate life and its beauty and diversity; in fact, I thought that idea flew in the face of the evidence I saw all around.
She flaunts her ignorance as a badge of credibility.
In this regard, she is different from her idol Ronald Reagan, who worshipped new technology and actually lived in a futuristic home outfitted by General Electric, for whom he worked as a pitchman. Where Palin does jibe with Reagan is in serving as a town crier for the old virtues that America has supposedly abandoned. Her early career also resembles his—like Reagan, who first worked as a sports-radio announcer, Palin recounts that she covered high school and college sports as an intern for several television stations: “I loved the intensity of the newsroom, the deadlines, the adrenaline.” But Reagan lit out for Hollywood to make it big.
Palin, by contrast, argues for the backwoods. It was a “huge relief” to her to return from Idaho and, we are told, “beat feet back to Alaska,” where her boyfriend and future husband Todd lived. She never traveled beyond her comfort zone. Even today she doesn’t leave the red states for her book tour, let alone take a trip abroad. One wonders if she even holds a passport.
And though she may now be a celebrity extraordinaire, Palin never carved out a working career. Instead, she became what she purports to despise—a professional politician. The Wasilla City Council. The mayoralty where she got to ban books at the local library, or so the story goes. Service on an oil and gas commission. Then governor. Finally, the nod from John McCain. For all her noisy praise of the joys of motherhood, it seems clear that, again and again, her children took a backseat to her political career.
To underestimate Palin or treat her as living in cloud-cuckoo-land, as many do, is obviously a mistake. Palin is formidable, enterprising, gritty. Among other things, she has managed to transform the very insularity of her life into a trampoline upon which this lissome lass can keep bouncing higher and higher.
NOW SHE is staking out her political positions; and they all vibrate with an antielitist, America-as-chosen-nation, tell-the-world-how-it-is tenor. Nor is hypocrisy in short supply.
She begins her gauzy book, America by Heart, by extolling Frank Capra’s film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. She declares that because it contains “timeless truths,” “it’s a movie Hollywood would never make today.” In fact, it’s a treacly left-wing film devoted to showing that the powerful corporations, who buy politicians with ease, are intent on oppressing the working class. For Palin, however, the bottom line is that the movie shows that Americans can take their country back if they only have enough gumption to stand up to The Man. How she squares her denunciations of backroom corporate oil deals in Alaska with her call for more drilling is somewhat mysterious. But overall, her populism amounts to a very 1960s message, if you think about it, further testament to the radicalism that’s overtaking the conservative movement.
Radicalism is also present in her foreign-policy views. Palin exemplifies the neocon credo that America, because of its innate goodness, is an exceptional nation, one endowed by a higher power to act with force around the globe to promote freedom, behaving as though tyrants at home (yes, the evildoers on the left) and foreign dictators are functionally and morally equivalent, requiring overthrow from freedom fighters on the right. This from the woman who can see Russia from her backyard. Palin, who has remained immured among her kind, exemplifies the illusion of American omnipotence.
Then there is her adulation of Reagan once again reflected here—redolent of Neocon 101. She regurgitates the brummagem claim that Reagan huffed and puffed and blew the Soviet door down. She claims, “For my entire life, Americans had been told by the propaganda mouthpieces of the Communist regimes—not to mention plenty of others in the free world—that Soviet communism was the way of the future.” Oh, please. Belief in the “Soviet experiment,” as it was known, was a phenomenon of the 1930s that petered out with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. And by the 1980s, shrewd observers of the Soviet empire such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan were arguing that it was a spent force, not a potent threat to American national security.
Palin’s real aim in lauding American exceptionalism and decrying Hollywood and the liberal media elite is to portray Obama as deeply unpatriotic, un-American and a very bad man. She concludes, “We have a president, perhaps for the first time since the founding of our republic, who expresses his belief that America is not the greatest earthly force for good the world has ever known.” But Palin is preaching Wilsonianism on steroids, not conservatism. At a moment when Obama is prosecuting two ruinously expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and might become mired in a third in Korea, it seems odd to criticize him for a lack of martial vigor, as does Palin. And when it comes to domestic politics, she seems to regard Democrats as unpatriotic varmints who need to be hunted down.
ARE THESE jabs just preparation for a presidential run? Some of Palin’s pronunciamentos about “refudiating” the Left are simply good for a giggle. But she clearly is trying to bulk up her policy credentials. Palin has been weighing in on a variety of issues, including monetary policy, where she is warning of hyperinflation thanks to Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s determination to stimulate the economy back to some semblance of life. For his part, Obama says he’s not spending any time “thinking” about Palin. If so, he must be the only person who isn’t.
The truth is that Palin’s star wattage has never burned more brightly. Supermom has her books, a reality-television program, a Fox News show, not to mention her sprawling family, to keep her center stage. Perhaps Palin’s celebrity will fade. But it doesn’t seem likely. She has every incentive to make a run for it. The longer she occupies the limelight, the more she becomes a member of the class that she denounces. To capitalize on her populist credentials, she needs to run, now or never.
There can be no doubting that Palin’s formidable political talents and sheer viciousness would make her difficult to defeat in the Republican primaries. As a presidential candidate, her adherence to contemporary conservative catechisms, coupled with her Mean Girl acidulousness, might make her the perfect weapon to defeat the prissy Obama, who seems terrified of uttering a sentence without the assistance of a teleprompter. The only person who could take on Palin might be the current first lady, but Michelle’s not running for office (at least not yet).
Palin couldn’t ask for a more perfect foe. Obama represents everything she has been battling against for decades, an Ivy League elitist who surrendered his street cred to join the meritocracy. Palin has been in combat almost since she left the womb. But whether Palin is qualified to be commander in chief is another matter. Her wild statements suggest that she lacks an internal governor, which is why to call Palin a conservative is a misnomer. She is a radical. If this Mama Grizzly reaches the Oval Office, her lusty roars might well make the Bush presidency look like a dainty tea party.
Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest.
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