Re-Entering the Palin-Drome
Looks like Ross inaugurated Sarah Palin day yesterday at TAS. Well, I guess that’s another excuse not to finish my comments on that book of literary criticism I read a few months ago.
As someone who was quite enthusiastic about Sarah Palin for about 30 seconds, and then walked a long way back towards disliking her intensely (if you want to track my sentiments, feel free to wander through the archives; the record isn’t hard to find) I feel a certain obligation to make three points about Ross’ column.
Point #1: There is an assumption running through Ross’ column that Palin, had she not been thrust into the arena too early and too quickly, might have developed into the kind of right-populist leader that the GOP really needs. That was, in fact, what I thought when I first heard of her (from Reihan, as it happens) some while before her sudden stardom: this looks like someone really promising, and it would be a big risk for McCain to pick someone like this for VP, but he needs to take a big risk because the safe choices aren’t going to do it, and she looks really promising. But it’s not what I think now, because I’ve seen how she actually performed. Ross is perfectly willing to say that she performed poorly. He doesn’t seem to be very willing to say that her performance reflects things about her fundamental character. Why? What has she done to earn the benefit of the doubt that he gives her? Why does he still have as much faith in who she could have been that he seems to have? It speaks a level of emotional investment in Palin that I don’t see a lot of justification for, unless the reason relates to my next point.
Point #2: The column, and Ross’ writing about Palin generally, treats her not so much as an actual person so much as a symbol, a personification of a certain type of person. There’s an expression for that: identity politics. It’s a kind of politics that, purportedly, the American right is against, and while I never think that was truly the case (indeed, I’d argue that identity politics are unavoidable, because so much of the motivation for engagement in politics comes from questions of identity), I’m surprised by the degree to which movement conservative politics in this country have become entirely the politics of identity, and the Palin phenomenon is the best evidence thereof. I think Ross should be against this trend, and if he isn’t I’d like to understand better why he isn’t. It strikes me that it is problematic to say the least, both practically and in terms of principle, for the American right to so openly embrace the politics of identity. This is a topic to which I will return at a later date.
Point #3: Ross is critical of the idea of meritocracy as the prime organizing principle of society. So am I. I’m interested, though, in how Sarah Palin represented a meaningful response to that idea. Meritocracy, in practice, means the selection of the “best and the brightest” for positions of power and authority, primarily by means of testing and scholastic hoop-jumping. The elite chosen in this manner are Nicholas Lemann’s “Mandarins.” And there are alternative roads to power and authority in this country. For example, you can work your way up slowly through an organization – Lemann’s “Lifers.” And there’s always nepotism – an important social force in any society, and unfortunately something you can’t talk about objectively in America because we’re supposed to be against privilege of birth (all the while we strive mightily to ensure just that privilege for our children). And then there are Lemann’s “Talents” – people who distinguished themselves by achievement in an entrepreneurial fashion – the Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Michael Bloombergs. Sarah Palin would, presumably, be one of this last group. But what, exactly, is her achievement, beyond her one election to the Alaska governorship? The big problems I have with meritocracy include: that it tells the chosen they are better than other people (in some objective sense), which is an anti-democratic ethos; that it very consciously separates our elite from the people, which isn’t healthy for democracy either; that it separates the elite from “real life” in a way that ill-prepares them for the reality that will inevitably smack them in the head one way or other; and that it selects for particular personality types that, while useful in an elite, need to be balanced with other personality types. It is not one of the problems of meritocracy that it tries to select people an elite as such, or tries to select one that will be good at its job. You have to have an elite; you can’t have a functioning society without one. That being the case, what exactly is the great counter-meritocratic message that Palin purportedly embodies, and that Ross wants to salvage (presumably for some future candidate) from the wreckage of her brief career on the political stage?
Of course identity politics are important in the real world.
If one party is allowed to use the power of identity politics and the other party is not, then the first party has a major advantage.
— Steve Sailer · Jul 7, 11:04 PM · #
It seems to me that insofar as either party engages in identity politics they more often than not damage themselves.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Jul 7, 11:15 PM · #
/golf clap
You kinda get it, Millman.
But like I said, this has been going on since the ancients.
You see, the advent of Sarah Palin on the electoral landscape summoned an ancient unkillable demon from the dawn of history— Kylon of Croton and the myth that all men are created equal. You might remember Kylon as the pissed-off plutocrat that raised a mob of local farmers to protest his failed attempt to get into Pythagoras’ school for rulers by chopping up the teachers with scythes and burning down the school.
Perhaps I would respect Douthat more if he actually acknowledged Palin was simply unfit to lead/rule.
Douthat has consistantly tried to excuse, shift blame and obfusticate Palin’s nature, which I expect he recognized all along, unlike the republicans that ran from her like scalded cats….cough, cough..Colin Powell.
Ross was pretending. Alternatively we can just say he was LYING, kk?
Now she has pretty much rubbed Ross’ nose in what she is…pretty impossible to deny this or shift blame onto the interviewer.
“But as for whether another pursuit of national office, as she did less than a year ago when she joined Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the race for the White House, would result in the same political blood sport, Palin said there is a difference between the White House and what she has experienced in Alaska. If she were in the White House, she said, the “department of law” would protect her from baseless ethical allegations.“I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out,” she said.
There is no “Department of Law” at the White House.”
The the iron law of the bellcurve of IQ simply invalidates Ross’ lame hope to find a “commoner” that can lead.
The cake is a lie.
Once a candidate is an upper right tailer, they are automatically elite.
— matoko_chan · Jul 7, 11:42 PM · #
And…I think I could argue that mandarins, lifers and talents are all dependent for success on some optimum ratio of IQ and………. g.
;)
— matoko_chan · Jul 8, 12:13 AM · #
Nice establishment of street cred with the Portal reference, m_c, but you blow it by treating IQ as a measure of anything remotely useful or important.
— Erik Siegrist · Jul 8, 12:46 AM · #
Is Douthat suggesting that Palin’s alleged lack of merits— no Ivy League pedigree, limited fluency in the lingo of insider Washington— contributed to her current exile?
During the campaign, I recall very little national discussion of her educational background. Of course, plenty of bloggers remarked on her Odyssey through small Western colleges, but in the national press it was hardly hammered at all. Not, at least, in the way you would expect from a band of Eastern media elites out to get her.
The Daily Dish and David Letterman do not make a class of enemies. Sure, she created a visceral reaction among most liberals, but by and large the old media outlets did not go out of their way to tear her down. (Now, they might have gone out of their way to treat Obama with kid gloves, but that’s another matter.)
Gibson and Couric did not harp on Palin’s rambling academic career. Couric just wanted to know what periodicals she liked with her morning lox. That Palin bungled this basic question has nothing to do with class-based biases about merit, resume or “background,” unless Douthat wants to claim that literacy is an unfair hurdle in a democracy.
Palin’s problems, I think, can be mostly tied to the quality David Brooks discussed in the Times this morning: dignity. Douthat, no doubt, would regard me a snob for saying so, but Palin has suffered from an essential lack of dignity. She’s an erratic, uneven performer. She claims to love to battle, but she fights not with the selective, steady purpose of a statesman but in pitiful lunges characterized by overreaction and resentment.
Where Douthat unwittingly nails it is when he calls Palin a “great success story,” implying as he does the real nature of American success. Douthat would claim that it’s her beautiful children, her faith in the Almighty and her raw talent for telling truth to power that makes her a success. But no, it really has to do with her boom-or-bust volatility. She was a gold rush candidate: so much promise, so little return.
We don’t necessarily mind the perimeter chaos created by such success nor the long odds on its survival. In fact, we get sucked into these stories over and over. We use them to measure success, whatever lip service we pay to humbler achievements.
It’s like the whole country operates with an NBA lottery mentality. We realize that so few of us have a chance of breaking through, and that it’s a potentially self-destructive hope to believe we do, yet we continue to accept and even revere the rules of the system. Perhaps we forgive the system because it occasionally provides us with the savory downfall, the symmetrical flame-out of one of its stars. And all the better when— believe it or not, Douthat— she brings it all on herself.
— turnbuckle · Jul 8, 03:12 AM · #
Aww…that was so sweet…….not!
Millman and Douthat are hunting snipe in their wistful search for a non-meritocratic candidate.
Any Palin clone will flame out in some similiar fashion.
Can’t fake the substrate……not anymore.
Palin is a casual serial liar. She lies when the truth would serve her better. And she can’t seem to stop.
I think she wrote that speech her bigself as a slap at Schmidt…see, I can too write a speech!
And all she did was demonstrate why Team McCain could never let her talk to the press without a minder and a script.
J’accuse, Douthat….you knew from early on that she was completely incapable of fulfilling presidential duties, and yet you continued to make excuse and shift blame onto a “hostile” press for her failings.
She destroyed herself, like turnbuckle says.
And inshallah she will continue to selfdestruct.
She was an absolute horrorshow, and conservatives that defend her like Douthat and Schwenkler are intellectual whores and worse…..crack-dealers that dipped into their own merchandise.
Good luck with that snipe hunt, boyz.
— matoko_chan · Jul 8, 03:52 AM · #
I don’t see why meritocracy is a bad idea. You can say: we want people of stronger merit to rise to the top, and that they ought not be out of touch – it’s not necessary to choose.
Ross’s democratic vs meritocratic point ought not be accepted. Democracies are effective when they select Obamas, they fail when the outcome is Lou Dobbs’s preferred candidate. Populism is shorthand for “we hate government”, and Palin would stuff the government with her own Heckuva Job Brownies.
— Steve C · Jul 8, 05:14 AM · #
I could understand if Ross were hostile to certain structural elements of meritocracy (e.g. credentialism or an overly rigid hierarchy), but Ross goes further and exhibits a general hostility to merit itself.
The case against Sarah Palin really emphatically is not that she failed to go to the right schools or summer in the right coastal hamlets. Rather, the case against Sarah Palin is that she has prover herself to be a deeply ignorant, incurious and dishonest person. If Ross disagrees, he should rebut that case rather than gesture vaguely at some inchoate dream of having a president who went to a junior college. He needs to show us that Sarah Palin has some merit at her core, then we can maybe go back to explaining away the deficiencies, if any, in her credentials.
— southpaw · Jul 8, 06:08 AM · #
And what a disservice crackheads like Douthat have done for the Republican base.
Shameful.
— matoko_chan · Jul 8, 12:06 PM · #
hmm….here’s what I think……Palin wrote (or free-associated) the resignation speech her bigself in a snit over the Trig photoshops and the tidbits Schmidt and Team McCain were leaking in the news…..the speech was very bad, jesus-take-the-wheel moment when she said she prayed on the decision, use of the royal “we”, rambling disjointed, resentful and angry.
What if…..McCain or Schmidt or someone told her to step down or they would go public with the whole epic fail of Palin’s campaign performance?
I believe there is a whole lot more we haven’t heard.
That speech had the whole, my way, and you be damned, and ima do an end run around Team McCain and build my own GOP constituency flavor.
;)
— matoko_chan · Jul 8, 12:52 PM · #
hehe…..I betcha(heh)…… Team McCain just told her to stfu and go back to Alaska and try to learn something….. and she came up with the resignation herself.
“I’ll show them!”
— matoko_chan · Jul 8, 01:02 PM · #
oooo! ooooo!
She mentioned the ethics complaints and the Trig stuff…but glaringly not the Team McCain revelations…dead give-away.
Hidden in plain sight.
— matoko_chan · Jul 8, 01:05 PM · #
Krauthammer was in on it and maybe Goldberg.
The GOP leadership was trying to rescue the Palin brand.
hahaha
Did Ross know too?
— matoko_chan · Jul 8, 01:09 PM · #
C’mon, guyz…am I right?
The GOP said stfu and go up to alaska like a good grrl and read some books, or we will out you as a moron drama-queen with campaign tales.
And she said….F.U. ima take my ball (the base) and go home.
And mebbe I’ll make a third party if you don’t play nice wid meh.
hahaha!
— matoko_chan · Jul 8, 02:14 PM · #
Since when doesn’t the Republican party like identity politics? What about Ronald Reagan? The biggest federal building in DC is named after him. The local airport is named after him. As for meritocracy, would you like someone illiterate and ignorant to be performing neurosurgery on you? Or leading the country by spending one billion dollars on an unnecessary war? There is nothing wrong with intelligence and hopefully ethics being important attributes of leaders in our society. Palin was and is a seductress. When I saw her blowing kisses at the audience and winking into the camera during her first big speech at the Republican convention, I was nauseated. Since when is being a politician gender-specific? Are we supposed to nominate and vote for those whom most men would like to bed? If she were not a former beauty queen, all these male commentators would not be so fervent in their praising or loathing her.
Aunt Laura
— Aunt Laura · Jul 8, 02:30 PM · #
Conservatives play identity politics by claiming that they aren’t playing.
— Freddie · Jul 8, 03:10 PM · #
Southpaw astutely writes: “The case against Sarah Palin really emphatically is not that she failed to go to the right schools or summer in the right coastal hamlets.”
Case in point: George W. Bush did, in fact, go to the right schools and summer in the right coastal hamlets. And all good liberals hated him nonetheless.
And to underline: Joe Biden went to the University of Delaware. I haven’t noticed him suffering liberal scorn for his proletarian education.
— Paul Souders · Jul 8, 03:54 PM · #
No Aunt Laura….they are trying to preserve her brand for a comeback…..that is what Ross is doing.
THey aren’t actually thinking with the little head, but they know the base will. Look at the timeline …..Krauthammer said, go back to Alaska and read some books….then Schmidt et all leaked a bit of bad juju to show her what they COULD do….
Ross knows Palin is a horrorshow…..and he doesn’t care……. he just wants to reset her public image so the GOP can use her to scam the base again!……that is what this load of horsepucky is all about.
The GOP leadership advised her to go back to alaska via Krauthammer, and then Goldberg, and then they dripped some PR poison into the press to show her what they COULD do. hahaha!
And she took her ball and left the playground.
Now her counter-offer is make nice wid me on the national scene or I’ll make my own party!
Palin owns the base.
Wow….talk about creating a monster.
Frankenpalin.
— matoko_chan · Jul 8, 04:38 PM · #
To Souders: that just shows liberals are hypocrites for failing to live up to the false cultural stereotype Republicans have constructed of them. But Republicans don’t do identity politics. . ..
— Criminally Bulgur · Jul 8, 04:39 PM · #
That is what this is all about, isn’t it? Ross and Krauthammer and Goldberg were doing memetic damage control so they could trot out the refurbished Palin in 2016 or 2020…..“she will still be young!” hahaha
But she played herself in this little drama and wrecked their plans……she isn’t going to wait….she doesn’t have to!!
That whole speech was a big F.U. to her GOP mentors and their plans for her.
— matoko_chan · Jul 8, 04:48 PM · #
“Southpaw astutely writes: ‘The case against Sarah Palin really emphatically is not that she failed to go to the right schools or summer in the right coastal hamlets.’”
Yup. And since everyone is giving high marks to David Brooks’ “Dignity” column, let us not forget that he wasn’t above writing this load of disingenuous codswallop last fall:
“Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. . . People who’ve never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.”
— forked tongue · Jul 8, 04:51 PM · #
Frankenbarbie.
— matoko_chan · Jul 8, 05:06 PM · #
At some point, her “defenders” will use her as a cut-out/poster child for victimhood at the hands of the perceived liberal/MSM trash machine.
The LESS likely she will actually gain elective office, the more attractive she is as a weapon — the pundits who support her won’t have to deal with the crisis of conscience when she would be put in power only to inevitably fail (and take the country with her). She’s an unloaded gun at this point — so they can bluff all they want without fear of it going off.
— AC · Jul 8, 05:26 PM · #
Sarah Palin is like cigarettes. Poor people buy them and vote for their right to continue buying them and think they’re “free” when they do. Rich people own the brand, do the marketing and pocket the profits. The woman is thick as two short planks. That and nothing else is the reason she’s disdained. It was simply UNCONCEALABLE. It’s why there have been no more Katie Couric or any other serious interviews.
What’s the chance that someone got the unreleased tapes and demanded that she resign or they be released? Certainly the more exposure she gets the lower her ratings.
— paul · Jul 8, 05:55 PM · #
Putting aside for now the question of whether Palin even believes in democracy, as well as the dubious assertion that Obama doesn’t fit the man-of-the-people mold (see Coates today), it’s obvious that Douthat is so invested in pushing his brand of Wal-Mart conservatism that he conveniently forgets that the distinction in the last election wasn’t between Palin-the-real-deal and Obama-the-effete-elite, but between McCain, the plutocrat-by-marriage and Midshipman-by-birthright and Obama, the breath of fresh air that seemingly came from nowhere to defeat an entrenched Democratic machine.
I like Douthat, but he’s either engaging in willful obfuscation or rigid ideological framing.
— Toshi · Jul 8, 06:28 PM · #
If I am wrong……how about Ross comes out and explains why?
Barring that fantasy scenario……
I have only one question.
Ross Douthat, why do you hate America?
— matoko_chan · Jul 8, 06:32 PM · #
Palinstein. Let’s leave Franken out of it.
— pinhead · Jul 8, 06:44 PM · #
I will refine my thought experiment a bit….
I think they offered Palin both the carrot and the stick.
“A slightly more cynical instinct tells me that Palin’s departure was facilitated by sources who offered to fund her future efforts, for motives of their own, while assuring her that her cover story of injured family pride and wounded dignity were not only true, but would be accepted by the public at large.”
— matoko_chan · Jul 8, 07:23 PM · #
Hey, Noah. When you return to the topic of the problems with the American right embracing identity politics, could you also take some time to flesh out your critique of meritocracy? Because, I just do get it.
You seem to suggest that meritocracy is solely about credentials (through testing and scholastics), but I would argue that “Lifers”, “Talents” and “Mandarins” would all end up in power in a meritocracy.
— 62across · Jul 8, 08:28 PM · #
Sure is quiet here.
No defense? No refutation? No explanation?
Did I nail it?
— matoko_chan · Jul 9, 12:23 AM · #
Matoko,
The President has named Francis Collins as the new head of NIH.
I think he’s a top scientist, but I really enjoyed Sneer Review’s earlier take on it
— Daniel Dare · Jul 9, 12:47 AM · #