Understanding Palin

Yuval Levin in Commentary has a lot to say about Sarah Palin. He correctly viewed Palin and Obama as the dominant 2008 election figures. And Levin made several other points that ring true to me:

➢ some criticisms of Palin were entirely appropriate. She had no experience in foreign or defense policy and very little . . . command of either. In a time of war, with a 72 year-old presidential candidate who had already survived one bout with cancer, this was a cause for very real concern. And Palin did perform dreadfully in some early interviews. . . But the more common visceral hostility toward her seemed to have little to do with these objections. . . The attempt to destroy Sarah Palin by rushing to paint her as a backwoods extremist was not a show of strength, but rather a sign of desperation.

➢ the Palin episode [was] really about. . . the age-old tension between populism and elitism in our public life, which is to say, between the notion that we are best governed by the views, needs, and interests of the many and the conviction that power can only be managed wisely by a select few. In America. . . the distinction between populism and elitism is further subdivided into cultural and economic. . .

➢ The Republican party has been the party of cultural populism and economic elitism. . . traditional values, unabashedly patriotic, anti-cosmopolitan, non-nuanced Joe Sixpack, even as they pursue an economic policy that aims at elite investor-driven growth. . . Republicans tend to believe the dynamism of the market is for the best but that cultural change can be dangerously disruptive. . .

➢ the Democrats have been the party of cultural elitism and economic populism. . . Democrats identify with the mistreated, underpaid, overworked, crushed-by-the-corporation “people against the powerful,” but tend to look down on those people’s religion, education, and way of life. . .Democrats tend to believe dynamic social change stretches the boundaries of inclusion for the better but that economic dynamism is often ruinous and unjust.

➢ intellectual elitism is actually fairly new in America, though it has been a dominant feature of European society. . . entry to the American intellectual elite is, in principle, open to all who pursue it. And pursuing it is not [difficult]. . . most of this elite’s prominent members hail from middle-class origins and not from traditional bastions of American privilege and wealth. . . the worldview of the intellectual elite begins from an unstated assumption that governing is fundamentally an exercise of the mind: an application of the proper mix of theory, expertise, and intellectual distance that calls for knowledge and verbal fluency more than for prudence born of life’s hard lessons.

➢ the intellectual elite want the government to serve the interests of [lower-middle-class families, but] do not want those people to hold . . . power. They see lower-middle-class populists . . . as profoundly ill-suited for governance, because they lack the accoutrements required for its employment—especially in foreign policy, which. . . is thought to be an intellectual exercise. [That’s why] Barack Obama, who actually has far less experience in executive governance than Palin, was not dismissed as unprepared for the presidency. Palin may have been elected governor of Alaska, but his peers in Cambridge had elected Obama editor of the Harvard Law Review. . .

➢ those who reacted so viscerally against [Palin] evinced little or no appreciation for an essential premise of democracy: that practical wisdom matters at least as much as formal education, and that leadership can emerge from utterly unexpected places. The presumption that the only road to power passes through the Ivy League and its tributaries is neither democratic nor sensible, and is, moreover, a sharp and wrongheaded break from the American tradition of citizen governance.

Yet in the end, Levin concluded that “Palin’s reformism, like McCain’s. . . offered no. . . coherent policy ideas that might actually address the concerns of American families.” But then Levin failed to strike the main point: voters wanted a president who could fix a bad economy. As Levin said above, Republicans stand for “economic elitism.” At a time when the “economic elite” failed America, McCain and Palin had nothing to say. No wonder the Democrat “cultural elite” won in 2008.