Get up off the floor and keep reading; naturally, I intend to offer proof for such a far-out, incredible assertion. Here it is, from the Sept. 9 edition, "Some of Sarah Palin's Ideas Cross the Political Divide":
Let us begin by confessing that, if Sarah Palin surfaced to say something intelligent and wise and fresh about the present American condition, many of us would fail to hear it.That is not how we’re primed to see Ms. Palin. A pugnacious Tea Partyer? Sure. A woman of the people? Yup. A Mama Grizzly? You betcha.
But something curious happened when Ms. Palin strode onto the stage last weekend at a Tea Party event in Indianola, Iowa. Along with her familiar and predictable swipes at President Barack Obama and the “far left,” she delivered a devastating indictment of the entire U.S. political establishment — left, right and center — and pointed toward a way of transcending the presently unbridgeable political divide.
The next day, the “lamestream” media, as she calls it, played into her fantasy of it by ignoring the ideas she unfurled and dwelling almost entirely on the will-she-won’t-she question of her presidential ambitions.
So here is something I never thought I would write: a column about Sarah Palin’s ideas.
There was plenty of the usual Palin schtick — words that make clear that she is not speaking to everyone but to a particular strain of American: “The working men and women of this country, you got up off your couch, you came down from the deer stand, you came out of the duck blind, you got off the John Deere, and we took to the streets, and we took to the town halls, and we ended up at the ballot box.”
But when her throat was cleared at last, Ms. Palin had something considerably more substantive to say.
She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).
In supporting her first point, about the permanent political class, she attacked both parties’ tendency to talk of spending cuts while spending more and more; to stoke public anxiety about a credit downgrade, but take a vacation anyway; to arrive in Washington of modest means and then somehow ride the gravy train to fabulous wealth. She observed that 7 of the 10 wealthiest counties in the United States happen to be suburbs of the nation’s capital.
Her second point, about money in politics, helped to explain the first. The permanent class stays in power because it positions itself between two deep troughs: the money spent by the government and the money spent by big companies to secure decisions from government that help them make more money.
“Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done?” she said, referring to politicians. “It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’ve got a lot of mouths to feed — a lot of corporate lobbyists and a lot of special interests that are counting on them to keep the good times and the money rolling along.”
Because her party has agitated for the wholesale deregulation of money in politics and the unshackling of lobbyists, these will be heard in some quarters as sacrilegious words.
Ms. Palin’s third point was more striking still: in contrast to the sweeping paeans to capitalism and the free market delivered by the Republican presidential candidates whose ranks she has yet to join, she sought to make a distinction between good capitalists and bad ones. The good ones, in her telling, are those small businesses that take risks and sink and swim in the churning market; the bad ones are well-connected megacorporations that live off bailouts, dodge taxes and profit terrifically while creating no jobs.
Strangely, she was saying things that liberals might like, if not for Ms. Palin’s having said them.
“This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk,” she said of the crony variety. She added: “It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest — to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners — the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70 percent of the jobs in America.”
Is there a hint of a political breakthrough hiding in there?
Of course it is snarky and snide; it is the New York Times after all. But it notes that Palin is saying things that make her something other than a shill for corporate America. Who knows, if this keeps up maybe Times journalists someday will discover that fly-over country actually is inhabited.
The column continues, in the breathless tone of an anthropologist announcing at a live news conference the discovery of a previously unknown civilization under the ice of Antarctica:
Ms. Palin may be hinting at a new political alignment that would pit a vigorous localism against a kind of national-global institutionalism.
On one side would be those Americans who believe in the power of vast, well-developed institutions like Goldman Sachs, the Teamsters Union, General Electric, Google and the U.S. Department of Education to make the world better. On the other side would be people who believe that power, whether public or private, becomes corrupt and unresponsive the more remote and more anonymous it becomes; they would press to live in self-contained, self-governing enclaves that bear the burden of their own prosperity.
It obviously has never occurred to this writer, even by the end of this article, that maybe - just maybe - Palin is expressing ideas that are widespread in the Tea Party Movement and other esoteric sects such as the Founding Fathers, for example. If only journalists who pontificate about American culture and politics had to read de Tocqueville's Democracy in America during their university years in between learning how to be disdainful of the bitter clingers who do so much to impede "progress."
Sarah Palin did not think up these ideas last Wednesday. She is not the only one thinking this way. If you want to consult on-line resources that frequently discuss in depth ideas like these, you can check out these links, which will provide links galore to further writings in these areas.
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Public Discourse (The Witherspoon Institute)
Peter Hitchens Blog (Daily Mail)
You could also look at conservative writing in National Review, The Weekly Standard, Human Events and The University Bookman. Of course these journals bash Obama and think Marxism is evil. But if you think that is all there is to them, I pity you.
It is a measure of the isolated, in-grown, smug, poorly educated nature of the American permanent governing class that my argument here - that Sarah Palin is articulating ideas that are widespread in the conservative underground - would be news to them. No wonder political debate can't even get started in America.
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1 comment:
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing this Dr. Carter. I have especially come to love the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in the last couple years. One of the reasons I self-identify as conservative is because groups like them and the people at First Things articulate thoughtful, substantial views on issues of import in a way that I don't see happening in many places.
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