I always figured I appreciated a tragic female \u2014 Mary, Queen of Scots, the Black Dahlia, Edie Sedgwick \u2014 as much as the next ghoul. But when it comes to Sarah Palin, I seem to have overlooked a deep seam of tragedy that my colleagues in the Fourth Estate have been mining for years. Quite by chance, I discovered that not one, but two articles titled \u201cThe Tragedy of Sarah Palin\u201d have appeared in high-profile publications over the past thirty-one months.<\/p>\n
Both say basically the same thing \u2014 that Palin, had she contrived to present herself as something other than a conservative culture warrior, could have made a better impression on swing voters in 2008, and would have a better chance than a snowball\u2019s in Phoenix of doing so in 2012. In the words of John Ridley, writing for the Huffington Post<\/i> in October, 2008:<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Over the past eight years, the Republican Party has imploded. In this election cycle, the conservative intelligentsia has effectively split from the \u201cbase,\u201d that portion of the party that is seemingly \u201cexcited\u201d or \u201cenergized\u201d not by issues of war or oil or the economy but by those that forge a social wedge. Add to that the shifting demographics of America and the Republican Party\u2019s woeful inability to attract people of color, and there is a very real possibility that for the foreseeable future the Republicans will be reduced to a nonentity within politics.<\/p>\n The Republicans desperately need their Barack Obama.<\/p>\n It could have been Sarah Palin.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In this June\u2019s Atlantic,<\/i> Joshua Green makes the point<\/strong><\/a> that, not only should Palin have courted the center, she had a resume and a skill set that could have made the courtship succeed. After praising Palin for leading a bipartisan campaign to raise the state tax on oil revenue, he asks, rhetorically:<\/p>\n How did someone who so effectively dealt with the two great issues vexing Alaska fall from grace so quickly? Anyone looking back at her record can\u2019t help but wonder: How did a popular, reformist governor beloved by Democrats come to embody right-wing resentment? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ridley regards conservative values voters with brazen contempt. On first reading, Green sounds more thoughtful, but the phrase \u201cright-wing resentment\u201d carries a whiff of paternalism, a sense of \u201cthe natives are getting restless.\u201d It\u2019s an attitude that has always seemed to lend itself to a self-flattering logical fallacy. Ever since the 2008 elections, it\u2019s become fashionable \u2014 frankly, a bit of a clich\u00e9 \u2014 to explain disaffection among conservatives by citing \u201cThe Paranoid Style in American Politics.<\/strong><\/a> In analyzing the tropes of early 1960s John Birch-type rhetoric, Hofstadter writes:<\/p>\n RegardingBut the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The right-wingers Hofstadter has in mind were the ones who believed that the U.S. government was being run by communist cells \u2014 cells that some swore included both Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. That type has by no means perished from the earth. We\u2019ve seen birthers, we\u2019ve heard Glenn Beck warn that a concern for social justice is the first step on a very short and slippery slope to fascism. And it\u2019s pretty self-evident that many conservatives are upset that their values and opinions are, in many cases, no longer the dominant ones. But just because some of the self-perceived dispossessed resort to conspiracy theorizing, doesn\u2019t mean their sense of dispossession is no more valid than a conspiracy theory.<\/p>\n