Catholic and Enjoying It!
First: drop everything and read this. Long, but worth it.
Second, once you’ve read that, stories like this, this, and this fall into place. All are tales of people scheming to belong to the Ruling Class, not to do anything of public service to the Country Class, except insofar as it helps gain access to the Ruling Class.
Third, the propositions “Sarah Palin is an idiot” and “Sarah Palin is at the top of her party” are not mutually exclusive, Roger.
Palin’s Know Nothing Populism seems to me to be a classic example of Chesterton’s point that revolutionaries know what’s wrong much better than they know what’s right. She and her followers are mad about government spending–and gung ho to spend trillions more to obtain “victory” in our campaign to build the Great Society in Afghanistan and Iraq at gunpoint. She wants freedom of religion–and to gin up hysterics to ban the perfectly legal building of a mosque since all Muslims are (wink, wink) terrorists. Her followers are enraged at the Ruling Class–and hope to help Palin make herself a member of that Class as soon as humanly possible. Because nothing says, “Integrity” like quitting your job halfway through your first term so you can pursue vast sums of wealth and then the Presidency. She is going to let her followers down big time.
But here’s the thing: she is perceived as the closest, by far, to anything like a representative of the interests of the “country class” (Ron Paul is much more that, but the Ruling Class has done a fine job of marginalizing him, so Palin wins that contest). The Ruling Class has made it clear that it will be looking out for the Ruling Class and the rest of us are on our own. The Tea Partiers intuit that and are looking for a savior–and are battening on her, overlooking her very serious deficiencies and cutting her the same sort of slack they cut other perceived members of the tribe like Dan Rather Andrew Breitbart. They know that the Ruling Class has no interest in honor and, being consequentialists like most Americans, they are coming to emulate them in the culture war in the hope of “winning”. Who cares if Palin is a quitter more interested in money and power than duty to office? She articulates my inchoate grievances against Them and makes me feel vicariously powerful as she climbs up my back to power like Yertel the Turtle. I live through her! Who cares if Breitbart smeared an innocent woman? He made Obama look bad! Victory by any means necessary!
What the excuse makers for this stuff don’t yet get is that guys like Breitbart and, yes, women like Palin are chasing after the One Ring just like members of the Ruling Class because they hope to become members of it themselves. So we arrive at the strange delusion of so many of the Country Class that a man like Dick Cheney lies awake at night filled with compassion and concern about the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of Ned Flanders. Reality: the Demublicans inside the Beltway, in DC, in NY, in Hollywood are the Ruling Class and Palin *longs* to be part of it all.
When you see somebody struggling with might and main to gain entry to a whorehouse, pay attention to what they do, not to what they say.
PS: Kathy Shaidle’s right. If you want to fight Arrogant Intellectualism, don’t use the fool’s weapon of Arrogant Anti-Intellectualism. It’s a tempting tool for populist movements, because it appeals to the prideful person who wants to preface his rhetoric with “I’m jes’ a simple country mom from the wilds of Alaska who hasn’t studied all the big city fancy lawyer stuff…” but, like all sin, the sin of being proud of your ignorance, like the sin of being proud of your knowledge, makes you stupid. Moral: when you screw up, laugh. Don’t go all Pee Wee Herman and say, “I mean to do that” while comparing yourself to Shakespeare.
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