Filed under: Author - ACG,Culture,Politics | Tags: Elitism, Media, Political symbols, Sarah Palin
The Palins' message for America.
Earlier this season, I woke up to a hungry cat and the news that John McCain had tapped Sarah Palin as his running mate. Yeah, I slept in… so sue me. To say that McCain’s pick worried me would be an understatement. Commenters here, and conservative bloggers afar, had billed Sarah Palin as a moderate, and the consummate reformer, a vision of conservatism in its heyday before the taint of the Bush years. She had the folksy wisdom to woo moderates, and the, eh, equipment to capture disenchanted Hillary voters. It was a bad morning.
In fact a different story emerged. Today, the McCain/Palin campaign is in shambles. Even if it manages to reverse its steady decline and somehow become competitive again, it will be, like Rome after Alaric’s invasion, forever changed. Sarah Palin, alleged moderate, turned out to be nothing more than a barbaric culture warrior, content to laud America’s towns by insulting its cities, mock community service, insult middle-America by justifying her ignorance as “small town values,” and stand idly by while her supporters hurl racist, ridiculous smears. Her folksy wisdom was, in fact, no such thing. The real Sarah Palin is a woman who hides behind an insulting stereotype of middle-America and masks bitter hatred in folsky colloquialisms…
…while the rest of us, perhaps foolishly, attempt to secure a modicum of respect and decency after a trying and divisive eight years.
The good news is that these tactics are losing, and should they fail to carry Election Day for the re-invented, single-mindedly anti-Obama Republican Party, it could function as a repudiation of not just Sarah Palin, but Sarah Palins everywhere. There’s no doubt that Sarah Palin’s political career, at least on the national stage, will be much damaged by a defeat in this election, but because (as Nate Silver argued) victory is the only judge of electoral tactics, for the foreseeable future, we could see an end to wedge politics as a campaign strategy and a return of substantive policy to the forefront of politics. This is good news for America, and the Democratic Party, too – when Americans aren’t being duped into bashing good ideas as “elitist,” at least for the past twenty years, Democrats have had a monopoly on good ideas, from not lashing out and starting superfluous wars, to controlling spending and budgeting responsibly.
The 2000 Election taught us that pandering to “small-town values” and artificial demographics (“hockey moms,” “Joe Sixpacks”) works when the nation’s doing well, and the American people can afford to validate our vision of an idyllic nation of citizen-farmers, and give ignorance a chance, and 2004 proved that an election cannot be won just by trashing the incumbent. But 2008 stands to prove – potentially, at least – that pandering doesn’t actually work when the nation is affirmatively in trouble, and that the culture war, the religious right’s rearguard action against the course of history, has to take a backseat to wars that actually matter. When we have real matters to attend to, people like Sarah Palin just don’t matter.
Filed under: Author - ACG,Politics,Religion,Science | Tags: Conservapedia, Politicized Science, Religious politics
Time for a break from the election!! Also, [bpsdb]
I’ve often had the chance to laugh at, ridicule, and criticize Conservapedia: so often, in fact, that it’s easy to forget that the site is, tragically, much more than a near-parody of internet conservatism. In fact, Conservapedia is affirmatively dangerous. Founder Andy Schlafly, son of Phyllis Schlafly, bills himself as a homeschooling organizer and tutor to high schoolers, which is fine in the abstract. I entertain the belief, until very firmly rebutted, that even my fiercest ideological opponents are, at heart, good people who just want to do their best by their fellow man. So in the abstract, I can believe that, when it comes to teaching the next generation of American minds, Andy drops his bigoted, hateful, racist, sexist, neo-crusader rhetoric and actually does his best to teach kids right. As it turns out, this presumption of good faith is not deserved. In practice, Andy is much, much worse than you’d imagine him.
Since Conservapedia’s founding, Andy has sought to “harness the power of Conservapedia” and utilize it as a way of disseminating homeschooling materials, partially for students he knows in person, and partially for web registrants. ((Nota bene: For the purpose of this post, I assume that the “courses” take place exactly as Andy imagines it: new users sign up, take the classes, learn, and leave. Of course there’s the possibility that there’s massive “sockpuppet” inflitration, making Andy’s “classes” little more than an exercise of talking to a wall… a wall that tries to subvert you at every step… the possibility that the classes are dominated by parodists et al is remote and, in any event, would not affect Andy’s mens rea or culpability in what he believes is a splendid indoctrination scheme. In any event, circumstantial evidence from RationalWiki, the leading internet platform for Conservapedia-watching, suggests that “sockpuppet inflitration” is small or nonexistent.)) This split implementation allows us a chance to observe the inner workings of his classes, insofar as the material is online, and the verdict has been, until this point, fairly tame. Though few of his courses have ever really taken off, those that have (World History & American Government) were, apart from a noticeable theo-conservative bent, historically inoffensive and moderate enough.
The “American History” lectures, and their implementation (which have seen the largest “enrollment” from online users yet – allegedly, 56), change all that.
