The Real Meaning Of Sarah Palin

The big news on this holiday weekend in our Summer of Death was, of course, Sarah Palin's announcement that she would resign as governor of Alaska. As pundits webwide wonder what it all means, I've been thinking about the larger question of Palin's significance to her party, her devout followers, and to our American polity in an age of recession and retrenchment. But first, let's look back to a novel from 1961, and its description of the progenitor of one its supporting characters.

Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. "As ye sow, so shall ye reap," he counseled one and all, and everyone said, "Amen."

Major Major's father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle, and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could. He was a devout man whose pulpit was everywhere.

This is, of course, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and it's a good reminder that the strain of "where's mine" economic populism is nothing new; Palin's own state of Alaska is a massive example of government socialism disguised as rugged individualism. American history is, of course, rife with moments where the politics of resentment are played out against those who have the least so that those who have a little bit more than the least don't recognize that a little bit more than the least isn't actually all that much, and that it's those who have the most upon whom we should really direct our focus.

What's interesting to me about Palin, and why I think she strikes such a chord with both supporters and detractors alike, is that she's the first politician on the national stage to have actually been inculcated in the GOP's modern strategy of castigating liberalism and elitism and any policies that aren't aimed at protecting and promoting the interests of major corporations and their beneficiaries who has accepted that instruction without actually understanding that it actually is artifice, a deliberate appeal to anti-intellectualism and cultural acrimony to better obfuscate what can only be described as class warfare aimed at the have-nots.

(Sorry, that sentence was long and rambling. I never said I was Thomas Frank.)

Anyway, my theory: Sarah Palin is the logical conclusion of the GOP's "Southern strategy," where ignorance is prized and yelling "liberalism" or "socialism" about any policy with which you disagree is perceived as a thoughtful and considered argument. What's different about Palin is that, where the Atwaters and Roves and the politicians they served knew that these were the things you said to make your policies more palatable, Palin takes it as gospel. (Whatever you thought about George W. Bush, didn't you think, deep down in your heart, that he knew he was being cynical about a lot of the crap he claimed to support?) The fact that Palin—raised too soon to national prominence because John McCain didn't have the 'nads to insist on choosing a running mate he actually respected (or knew)—does represent forty years of Republican contempt of the electorate turned into an ideal is extremely disturbing to both those on the right who are horrified to see that someone is taking their old joke and using it to bear witness and to those who were never in on the joke at all and are horrified to see that the rest of the country thinks that everything they've been taught to believe is, in fact, a joke. And not a very good one.

There are, of course, allegations of sexism and the elite's disdain for what they see as their cultural inferiors, but these are the leftover grievances that Republican strategists have used for years to "work the refs" and disguise the sheer odiousness of their policies. (It is particularly rich to see Republicans complain about sexism after, I dunno, everything.) There probably is some discomfort with Palin on the left because of her God-worshipping and insistent fecundity; it is unfortunate, but no less unfortunate than the ugliness foisted upon the public discourse by the very policies which have made Sarah Palin such a big star for such a small group. (Talking to a friend this weekend, I expressed a slight bit of sympathy for Mark Sanford. My friend nodded and said, "Yeah, I feel a little sorry for Sanford too. But I feel a lot sorry for everyone else whose life has been made a living hell by the policies he supported all the way up until he found his 'soul mate.'" It's a good point.)

Right. Where were we? Oh, yeah, Sarah Palin. Will she be president? Too soon to tell! But I do very honestly believe that if she someday is, it will say something very, very ugly about our country and its credulousness and malleability. But then again, I'm a Godless New Yorker. Maybe I just don't get it.