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Source/Letters: Dissent Magazine/Foundation for the Study of Independent
Social Ideas, Inc.
<editors @ dissentmagazine.org> web: <http://www.dissentmagazine.org>
Link: <http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=140>
Palin and the Sad State of American Politics
Kevin Mattson - September 5, 2008
So what do we know about this young governor from Alaska, besides the fact
that team McCain forgot to vet her? The list keeps growing, because it was
left to the media to find out.
So far, we¹ve got a 17-year-old pregnant, unwed daughter and a mother with
no tolerance for sex education and abortion; trooper-gate in which she is
accused of using her influence to fire a state trooper involved in a messy
divorce with a family member; friendly relations with the Alaska secession
movement (Alaska First!); connections to Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff
and Alaska U.S. Senator Ted Stevens; a push to ban books in public
libraries; at first favoring and then opposing the ³Bridge to Nowhere²; and
finally the idea that somehow the Iraq war was God-inspired.
We¹ve also got a sense of the McCain campaign¹s strategy to deal with Sarah
Palin¹s problems: Blame them on the media. The elite media, that is. In
translation that means blaming journalists who check for things called facts
and then report those facts to readers or viewers in an effort to figure out
what they mean. For the right, the liberal media is just ganging up on a
defenseless ³hockey mom² from a small town in Alaska.
It¹s the salt of the earth versus what Nixon vice president Spiro Agnew
called ³the nattering nabobs of negativism² all over again. The Republican
base is energized and ready to rumble; its war cry is against the media
elite and their right to believe whatever they want.
On PBS, I watched David Brooks talk about Palin¹s acceptance speech. He
argued that Palin didn¹t press social issues, that she had therefore evaded
the culture wars. Instead, Brooks explained, she described herself as a
hockey mom who had angered the D.C. elite. It was all I could do to stop
from screaming‹in order not to awake my son sleeping upstairs‹that¹s ³the
META-CULTURE WAR!² The Republican salt of the earth‹the base that¹s jazzed
up by one of the most conservative party platforms in history‹are slaying
the liberal establishment (even though such a thing doesn¹t exist any
longer).
Do we really want to live with this for the next sixty days, let alone for
four years afterwards?
The Republican Convention has made it clear: Their base is happy. The word
on the floor of the Republican National Convention, from everything we can
tell so far, is excitement and pleasure at having a hard-line, anti-abortion
young female candidate in second place on the ticket (and in line with the
furthest right party platform ever). The reports about the bizarre aspects
of Palin¹s worldview can now be chalked up to the ³other America,² the
America of inquisitive negativism.
George Orwell once said that to imagine the future is to imagine a boot
stomping on someone¹s face over and over. I would say that to imagine the
conservative future is to imagine an unending culture war. Permanent war
and apocalypse. And permanent rebellion against an establishment that
exists only in the imagination of those waging the war.
There are better reasons to vote for Obama than what we got the past two
nights at the Republican National Convention. But, nonetheless, a pretty
good reason to vote for him this year is to try to prevent the culture wars
that John McCain seems intent on reigniting.
Kevin Mattson is author of Rebels All!: A Short History of the Conservative
Mind in Postwar America.
http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/Rebels_All.html
He will speak with Todd Gitlin 7:00 p.m., September 10 at McNally Jackson
(52 Prince St, New York City) about his new book and the history and ideas
of postwar conservativism. (For more information about the event, click
here.) http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1288
© 2008 Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>
Judy Reed
Liberal, Progressive, Secular, Green, & Humane
This is distributed for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.
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