Going Rouge (25 page)

Beyond the Palin

Rick Perlstein

The conservative opinion elite is divided—irreconcilably so—about Sarah Palin’s decision to quit the Alaska governorship. One faction says good riddance: The
Washington Post
’s Charles Krauthammer had already judged her unfit for national office twenty-four hours before her announcement, and the
New York Times
’s Ross Douthat now refers to her “brief sojourn on the national stage” in the past tense. On the other side, the
Post
’s William Kristol called Palin’s quitting a “high-risk move” designed to catapult her to greater public prominence. Taking the longer view, though, the clash is symptomatic of the deepest strategic debate in Republican circles since the disciples of the Reagan revolution captured Congress in 1994.

For decades it has remained a Republican article of faith: White, lower-middle-class, “heartland” masses, fundamentally socially conservative, were an inexhaustible electoral resource. So much so that Bill Clinton made re-earning their trust—he called them the Americans who “worked hard and played by the rules”—the central challenge in rebuilding Democratic fortunes in the 1990s. And in 2008 the somewhat aristocratic John McCain seemed to regard bringing these folks back into the Republican fold so imperative that he was moved to make the election’s most exciting strategic move: drafting churchgoing, gun-toting unknown Sarah Palin onto the GOP ticket.

But beneath the surface, some Republicans have been chafing at the ideological wages of right-wing populism. In intellectual circles, writers like David Brooks and Richard Brookhiser have argued for a conservatism inspired by Alexander Hamilton, the least democratic of the Founding Fathers, over one spiritually rooted in Thomas Jefferson, the most democratic. After Barack Obama’s victory, you heard thinkers like author and federal judge Richard Posner lamenting on his blog that “the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.”

Such discomfort has been dormant for some time. Under the influence of philosophical gurus like Leo Strauss and Irving Kristol, the sotto voce tradition arose of flattering the sort of voter who drove a pickup truck even if he wasn‘t the sort you might want to socialize with. (Take, for example, “jes’ folks” Mark Sanford of South Carolina. Long before his jet-setting affair, after all, he met the jet-setting, Georgetown-educated Yankee investment banker who became Mrs. Sanford at a Hamptons beach party.) But Palin has raised the “class” question publicly among conservatives as seldom before.

Michael Barone, writing in March on
U.S. News
’s Thomas Jefferson Street blog, noted that the electorate’s portion of “under-30 downscale whites” has been stagnating, while the participation of both young upscale whites and African-Americans generally has spiked upward. The pool is shrinking; thus he thinks Republicans should now focus on wooing upscale whites, banking on their disenchantment with Obama’s moves to fix the economy. Author and former Bush speechwriter David Frum recently made the argument, on the occasion of the split between Palin’s single eighteen-year-old daughter, Bristol, and the nineteen-year-old father of her child, that “it is marriage that creates culturally conservative voters—and young downscale Americans are not getting married. When they do marry, they do not stay married: While divorce rates among the college educated have declined sharply since the 1970s, divorce rates among high school graduates remain ominously high.” In a much-discussed blog post titled “Bristol’s Myth,” Frum cited statistics showing that white women without a college degree are far more likely to have a child out of wedlock than their college-educated counterparts. He concluded that “the socially conservative downscale voter is increasingly becoming a mirage—and a Republican politics based on that mirage will only lead us deeper into the desert.”

It was a strange argument to make. This is the kind of statistical story liberals frequently tell: They will note that the states that vote most heavily Republican are the ones with the highest divorce rates, teenage births, and usage of online pornography—the highest rates of sin. They mean to sting conservatives with the charge of hypocrisy: “See? Conservatives aren’t more ‘moral’ after all.” Such claims, though, misunderstand a basic underpinning of conservative philosophy: Human beings become civilized not through the absence of sin but the conscious struggle with sin. Sin is bad; but the true offense is sin in the absence of guilt—an indifference to the notion that there are moral boundaries even worth recognizing. Conservatism is usually most politically successful in religiously orthodox precincts where anxiety over the modern-day collapse of visible moral boundaries is most evident. That Americans sin a lot so we can‘t hope for them to vote conservatively is a new claim.

Why the change? For one thing, populism has never been an entirely comfortable fit for elite conservatives. Majorities of middle-class Americans can be persuaded to support tax cuts for the rich—even repeal of the estate tax—out of an optimism that they may eventually become rich themselves. But they are also susceptible to appeals like the one George Wallace made in the recession year of 1976. He built his campaign on both hellfire-and-brimstone moralism and a pledge of soak-the-rich tax policies. The elite conservative fears that the temptation to woo working-class voters will, you know, shade into policies that actually advantage the working class. That fear surfaced recently when Rush Limbaugh—whom Frum himself has singled out as one of the dangerous populists dragging the Republicans down—dismissed those who criticized the AIG bonuses as “peasants with their pitchforks” who must be silenced for the sake of conservative orthodoxy. But it’s harder to persuade the economically less fortunate to respect conservative orthodoxy during a recession. That’s starting to make some conservatives nervous.

Another thing that makes some elite conservatives nervous in this recession is the sheer level of unhinged, even violent irrationality at the grassroots. In postwar America, a panicky, violence-prone underbrush has always been revealed in moments of liberal ascendency. In the Kennedy years, the right-wing militia known as the Minutemen armed for what they believed would be an imminent Russian takeover. In the Carter years it was the Posse Comitatus; Bill Clinton’s rise saw six antiabortion murders and the Oklahoma City bombing. Each time, the conservative mainstream was able to adroitly hive off the embarrassing fringe while laying claim to some of the grassroots anger that inspired it. Now the violence is back. But this time, the line between the violent fringe and the on-air harvesters of righteous rage has been harder to find. This spring the alleged white-supremacist cop killer in Pittsburgh, Richard Poplawski, professed allegiance to conspiracist Alex Jones, whose theories Fox TV host Glenn Beck had recently been promoting. And when Kansas doctor George Tiller was murdered in church, Fox star Bill O’Reilly was forced to devote airtime to defending himself against a charge many observers found self-evident: that O’Reilly’s claim that “Tiller the baby killer” was getting away with “Nazi stuff” helped contribute to an atmosphere in which Tiller’s alleged assassin believed he was doing something heroic.

At least in the past, those who wished to represent their movement as cosmopolitan and urbane could simply point to William F. Buckley as the right’s most prominent spokesman. Now Buckley is gone, and the most prominent spokesmen—the Limbaughs and O’Reillys and Becks—can be heard mouthing attitudes once confined to the violent fringe. For the second time in three months, Fox heavily promoted anti-administration “tea party” events this past Fourth of July—rallies in praise of secession and the Articles of Confederation, at which speakers “joked” about a coup against the communist Muslim Barack Obama like the one against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. “What’s going on at Fox News?” Frum recently asked, excoriating Beck for passing out to followers books by the nutty far-right conspiracy theorist W. Cleon Skousen. If you were an elite conservative, you might be embarrassed too.

The conservative intellectuals once were able to work together more effectively with the conservative unwashed. Now, more and more, their irritation renders them akin to the Stalinist commissars mocked by poet Bertolt Brecht, who asked if they might “dissolve the people/And elect another.” The bargain the right has offered the downwardly mobile, culturally insecure traditionalist—give us your votes, and we will give you existential certitudes in a world that seems somehow to have gone crazy—is looking less like good politics all the time.

Sarah Palin’s Death Panels

Robert Reich

Three years ago, my mother died after a long and painful illness. During her last months she was only partially conscious, and in her brief intervals of awareness was often distraught. At several points my father, sister, and I met with doctors to figure out how to ease her obvious suffering with pain medications, and how we could get her into a hospice facility. We could afford the counseling, but millions of other families cannot—which is why one of the useful health care reforms now moving through Congress authorizes Medicare to reimburse doctors for such voluntary end-of-life consultations. The American Medical Association and the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization support the provision.

But in a cruel contortion, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin calls these consultations “death panels,” and in a Facebook posting charges that they’ll force the elderly to accept minimal end-of-life care in order to reduce health care costs: “It’s misleading for the president to describe this section as an entirely voluntary provision that simply increases the information offered to Medicare recipients.” She added, “It’s all just more evidence that the Democratic legislative proposals will lead to health care rationing.”

In her short time on the public stage, we’ve come to expect this sort of thing from Governor Palin. But listen to other Republicans these days—and if you can bear it, tune in to right-wing Hate Radio—and you’ll hear more of the same.

Health care is already rationed, of course. Those who can’t afford health care don’t get much of it, except in emergency rooms. For those who have insurance, the rationing is done by prepaid medical groups, the legacies of HMOs, that decide what drugs and procedures their members will get. Or it’s done by insurance company personnel who decide what will be covered.

But for the scaremongers to say that under the health care reform proposals now being considered, government will do the rationing—and that government bureaucrats will decide whether people live or die—is odious. It’s a deliberate lie that preys upon the fears of many people who already scared as hell about loss of their jobs, health care, homes, and savings.

The “town meetings” that are now spewing such anger reflect deep-seated fears that are welling up across America during this economic crisis. Health care reform may ease some of these fears. But the demagogues that are manipulating those fears for political gain don’t give a hoot.

Have they no shame?

How Sarah Palin Renewed American Socialism

John Nichols

I am not sure that I will ever be able to convey the depth and breadth of my appreciation for Sarah Palin. I know that my sometimes snarky articles and blog posts have probably made it seem like I do not value the contribution she has made to the national discourse. But I do. I really do.

So let me say this as plainly as I can: Thank you, Sarah Palin. Thank you for bringing socialism back from the wilderness. Thank you for infusing it with the credibility that can only be conveyed by someone who sees Russia from her house. The post-ideology crowd may imagine you as just another clueless candidate spewing stream-of-consciousness political punch-lines. But you and I know better.

Your obsession with socialism, your determination to label every government program you come across (with the possible exception of Alaska’s annual redistribution of the wealth from oil companies to citizens) “socialist,” your willingness to identify your opponents as “socialists”—even when they most certainly, and most disappointingly, are not—has renewed the economic and political discourse in a country where it had pretty much died.

Socialism, the very American ideology that Tom Paine imagined and that immigrant believers in the utopian ideals of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier gave shape and meaning to on the nineteenth-century frontier, had fallen on exceptionally hard times in a country that had forgotten its roots in revolt against empire. Even as Latin America succumbed, country by country, to exciting new variations on the vision of a cooperative commonwealth, the dictatorship of the not-so-proletariat so dominated the United States that liberal Democrats proclaimed their passion for free-market capitalism with a fervency that would have embarrassed Margaret Thatcher.

Then came you. Late in August of 2008, the Republican Party (itself the spawn of French socialist immigrants who gathered in Wisconsin in 1854 to form a radical antislavery movement) nominated a certain Alaskan governor for the vice presidency. Channeling the “analysis” of
National Review
, Rush Limbaugh and the assorted ideological mentors who had championed a nineteen-month governor as the appropriate running mate of an aging nominee, Sarah Palin immediately began to suggest that Barack Obama might just be a “socialist.”

Unfortunately, Obama had no instinct toward socialism. Fortunately, Palin had no instinct toward accuracy. When Palin appeared on CNN (or, as her backers refer to it: the “Communist News Network”) she was asked: “Is Barack Obama a socialist?”

She did not dismiss the notion. Rather, with that flirting-with-facts style we had come to love, she announced: “I’m not going to call him a socialist. But as Joe the Plumber has suggested, in fact he came right out and said it, it sounds like socialism to him. And he speaks for so many Americans who are quite concerned now after hearing finally what Barack Obama’s true intentions are with his tax and economic plan.” It was clear that, even if she was “not going to call him a socialist,” Palin obviously sympathized with Plumber Joe’s assessment that Obama stood slightly to the left of Hugo Chávez on the ideological continuum.

The governor got over her compunctions about describing Obama and his policies as “socialist” quickly enough. Two days after the CNN appearance, she told a crowd in Roswell, New Mexico—yup, the alien place—that Obama’s platform “sounds more like socialism” than she liked. “Friends,” she screeched, in a plea for the rejection of Obama, “now is no time to experiment with socialism.”

Wow, there it was again, that word
socialism
. Maybe Palin was right. As a journalist, I had a responsibility to check out whether Obama was some kind of Manchurian candidate—or, maybe, considering the right’s obsession with a certain Venezuelan president, some kind of Caracas candidate. So I contacted the Socialists. I got hold of Brian Moore, the 2008 presidential nominee of what remained of America’s honorable old Socialist Party. “Is Sarah right?” I inquired. “Is Obama a fellow traveler?”

No such luck, Moore told me. Obama was “bought and sold” by Wall Street, said the Florida peace activist who was carrying the banner that year of the party of Eugene Victor Debs and Norman Thomas. Of course, Moore added, so too was Palin’s presidential running mate, John McCain. “The two major candidates cannot move, they are imprisoned by accepting all that corporate money,” explained the Socialist candidate.

What would a real socialist be proposing? To begin with, instead of supporting the socialism-for-the-rich bailout by the American taxpayers of bad bankers that both Obama and Palin had recently endorsed, Moore suggested socialism for the rest of us. Congress, he argued, should “nationalize the banking system” and replace it with “a socially owned, democratically controlled independent national banking authority, made up of consumers, workers, accountants, and economists, who will set national policy. It would be a nonprofit national institution, which would operate through credit unions, cooperatives, and state-run banks.”

Any chance that Obama and the Democrats might be sitting on a secret plan to do just that? Was it just possible that Palin knew something that we didn’t? Not a chance, said Moore. While “the economic system is collapsing before their very eyes,” he explained, “neither major party fully grasps the severity of the situation.”

Moore was, of course, correct. But, while economic democracy might not have been in the offering, Sarah Palin was still on to something. She kept telling anyone who would listen that people who asked whether Wall Street’s meltdown might suggest a flaw in the capitalist calculus were socialists. As the crisis grew worse, this twenty-first-century Josie McCarthy’s campaign-season ranting about socialism undoubtedly helped rather than hurt Obama. Palin was attacking the Democratic candidate for being insufficiently invested in the economic orthodoxy of the Republicans who had run the country for the better part of a decade at precisely the moment when the underpinnings of the financial system went into spectacular collapse, Wall Street was freefalling, and Americans began worrying if they would ever be able to retire.

The prospect that Obama might not be a completely committed capitalist of the Reagan/Bush/Cheney/Palin school seemed to be, if not an argument in and of itself for the Democrat’s election then surely a point in his favor. At precisely the point when casino capitalism spun out of control, the Democratic nominee for president was being attacked more vociferously and consistently as a socialist than any party nominee since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And, like Roosevelt, Americans elected Obama by a landslide.

Obama got more cautious, and capitalist, after his election. But Palin and her posse kept invoking the S-word. Indeed, as the Obama presidency unfolded, Palin quit her governorship to go on the attack full time. Her pal Sean Hannity asked her in mid-2009 whether the Obamanation that America had become was “headed toward socialism.”

Why, yes, Palin replied. “If we keep going down these roads nationalizing many of our services, our projects, our businesses, yes, that’s where we would head,” she said. As it happened, Obama was giving money to corporations, not nationalizing them. But Palin courageously threw off the bondage of facts.

And she kept talking socialism. Even if Obama wasn’t keeping up his end of the bargain, Americans were listening. After years when the word “socialism” was barely mentioned in the American media, when pols and pundits never uttered the word, it had been reintroduced by no less a figure than the Republican nominee for vice president.

Palin’s determination to present socialism as the alternative to casino capitalism had a remarkable impact. In the spring of 2009, a survey by the Republican-friendly Rasmussen Reports polling group found that one in five Americans viewed socialism was a preferable system to capitalism. Another 27 percent of Americans said they weren’t sure whether they preferred socialism or capitalism. A bare majority—53 percent—was still rooting for the system that Americans had for decades been told was “the only alternative.” Among young people, the numbers were even more startling. Thirty-three percent of those under thirty told the pollster they preferred socialism to capitalism, while just 37 percent were for capitalism. That’s a statistical tie! Add the 33 percent for socialism to the huge undecided group in this survey—30 percent—and you get a whopping 63 percent of the rising generation of Americans refusing to embrace capitalism.

Could numbers like this have been imaginable just a few years ago, when President Bush and his amen corner in the media were beating into the popular consciousness the theory that America had become an “opportunity society” where everyone was going to roll the dice on the free market craps table and hope to come up lucky? No way. It took a revolutionary to break the lockstep mentality. It took a twenty-first-century Margaret Thatcher to tell America that there is an alternative to boom-and-bust, meltdowns, mass unemployment, credit crunches, and foreclosure notices. It took Sarah Palin to give socialism back its good name.

Thank you, Sarah Palin. From America in this time of crisis, and from the rising generation of Americans that you have shown another way, thank you. Thank you for reminding America that socialism is still an option.