To listen to Ross Douthat, writing in yesterday’s Times, Governor Palin embodies the second, rarely-seen prototype of American success — the self-taught statesman:
Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.
This ideal has had a tough 10 months. It’s been tarnished by Palin herself, obviously. With her missteps, scandals, dreadful interviews and self-pitying monologues, she’s botched an essential democratic role — the ordinary citizen who takes on the elites, the up-by-your-bootstraps role embodied by politicians from Andrew Jackson down to Harry Truman.
Douthat’s very next paragraph significantly undercuts his valorization of Palin as some latter-day Jackson. But not nearly enough. I can’t contest the fact that, at many points in American history, we have held up as exemplars men & women who’ve obtained their knowledge and power through non-traditional means, outside of the academies. Hence the protoype of the farmer-statesman, embodied as much by Washington as by Lincoln.
But. When we hold up men like Jackson, Jefferson, and Washington as embodying the “democratic ideal” (from rags to riches and great power), we applaud them for coming to the same end as those who climb the formal ladder to power, and for overcoming adversity and acquiring unique outsider knowledge along the way. Jackson, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Washington were easly the intellectual equals of Wilson and Obama – they just came to their knowledge and realized their intellectual potential through a more circuitous, and differentially laudable route.
Sarah Palin is different. Rather than coming to knowledge & intelligence through an arduous alternate route like, e.g., Lincoln, Palin and those like her completely disclaim the value of intelligence in political decisionmaking, and evince an outright distrust of earned knowledge, regardless of its source. Her motivating principle is not that experience can supply the same intelligence found in elder, learned statesmen, but rather that intelligence is completely irrelevant to governance. To her, impulse, instict, and faith are all you need, and “book smarts” are worse than useless. She’s more Stephen Colbert, and less Lincoln.
Admittedly, the farmer-statesman is a curious type, and often trades on the perception of himself (or herself) as an ignorant rube. But this image is, in the end, a ruse. Think Lincoln, who relished the chance to benefit from others’ underestimation of his abilities. For Palin, it’s not. Don’t confuse the two.
So what is the motivation behind Palin’s popularity, and the persistent narrative, like Douthat’s, that holds her out as conforming to the democratic ideal? More on that later.
LOL Your own words, “Don’t confuse the two.”
But you’re confusing two things yourself – intelligence and formal education.
Palin has never disparaged intelligence and has in fact shown a great deal of it over the course of her life and career.
She has, however, disparaged the education provided by these modern academies…
Posted by jonolan | July 7, 2009, 4:26 pmSure. Wait – What? When has she displayed intelligence? Certainly not on the earthly realm. Perhaps you mean that she inhabits simultaneously the plane of existence we mortals experience, where she displays anything but intelligencce; and another one visible only to conservatives swooning over the size of her tits?
Posted by Mike | July 7, 2009, 8:27 pmOUCH. Hmm, I’ll go a little less and say, I understand how some on the far, far, almost Christian Identity right wing would find her “intelligent,” because for them, her faith substitutes for any objective measurement of intelligence. But other than that, I don’t see it.
Posted by ACG | July 7, 2009, 9:13 pmI don’t even think she has bagged on education. She mainly has bagged on the notion of reason trumping experience, which is the basis for most liberal thought.
Posted by Mike | July 7, 2009, 4:58 pmGiven Palin’s glaring lack of both reason and experiance she was in no place to critisize anyone.
Posted by Jello | July 7, 2009, 5:39 pmJello beat me to it. It’s hard to spin Palin as having either reason OR experience. I’m sure being a hockey mom is tough – being a mom, period, is tough already – but I don’t see how that relates to governance at all.
And I don’t see where you get the idea that “reason trumps experience” is the basis for liberalism. I can’t imagine a fact set anywhere that bears that conclusion out.
Posted by ACG | July 7, 2009, 5:52 pmI think the classical Enlightenment-based strains of liberalism, as well as the now deprecated Modernist strains of liberalism, definitely had a strong element of holding that reason & analysis trump experience, conventional wisdom, and people’s feelings. I agree with you, though, that “basis” doesn’t seem right. That implies, at least to me, that technocracy is an end unto itself, rather than the means for rebuilding the world in a utopian manner.
Posted by Steve | July 7, 2009, 10:31 pmAnd I don’t see where you get the idea that “reason trumps experience” is the basis for liberalism. I can’t imagine a fact set anywhere that bears that conclusion out.
Have you looked at Obama’s administration and what jobs they previously held?
Posted by Mike | July 8, 2009, 9:29 amMike – unless I’m badly mistaken, most Obama admin people have histories that either begin or include “X of X, 1992-2000.” Clinton administration jobs are real jobs, believe it or not :).
AND, for a comparative perspective, look at Department of Justice hires between 2000 and 2008, and check for this: how many come from top-25 law schools, as compared to previous administrations, and how many come from Christian “diploma mill” schools like Ave Maria or Liberty?
Posted by ACG | July 8, 2009, 11:13 amThe point is practical experience in the fields they are effecting. Not just policy.
With the Justice Dept, are these people coming straight out of school or having they been practicing law for awhie?
Posted by Mike | July 8, 2009, 11:20 amLess “education” and more “science”, but her (and McCain’s) disparaging remarks on spending money on bear and fruit fly research was just offensive.
Posted by Anzezzle | July 8, 2009, 1:49 amReplace “was” with “were”, and the internet would be better with the option to edit for grammar.
Posted by Anzezzle | July 8, 2009, 1:58 am