One of the commonplaces or cliches about conservatives is their devotion to given-ness, their sense of the "rightness" of the old-fashioned and their resistance to the "new fangled". But there's a truth there, especially when it concerns Sarah Palin conservatives. This "rightness" correlates in their mind as "common sense" because it's time tested and has a kind of numinous quality because of its association with the wisdom of the ancestors. This is the way it's always been; you just don’t pass a law to change the wisdom of the ages. That's Liberal foolishness. They just don't get it.
This Thanksgiving weekend I spent time with relatives who are tenacious defenders of Sarah Palin, and I think I understand where they're coming from. They ground themselves in a basic defense of this "common-sense" feeling for the world, which they believe correlates with the American foundational national narrative. She is loved for fighting for its preservation, no matter what her flaws might be, which my relatives have no illusions about. Nevertheless, they enjoy her in-your-face brashness, how much she irritates Liberals, and in the end that's all that matters. And that's fine, so far as it goes.
My relatives think of me as Liberal, even though I'm not. I'm a believing, practicing Catholic, and the phrase "liberal Catholic", while people do use it, is oxymoronic, if the second word in the phrase has any meaning. But I voted for Obama, so the distinction is lost on them, and because I accept a pluralizing modern world for what it is, which they don't–it sounds too much like multi-culturalist relativism to them. They don't see me as belonging to their tribe because I'm not someone who has the same enemies they have, and because I don't share in their "common sense".
Sarah Palin conservatives look at Liberals–and people like me–as people defined precisely by their lacking this "common sense", as lacking a groundedness in a given world of meanings and traditions that give their world sense and shape. I'm family, so they want to think well of me, but they can't quite understand how I went astray. My father attributes it to bad influences in my formative years in the sixties and seventies. But it struck me recently that the way Sarah Palin conservatives see "liberals" is similar to the way the American Indians saw the white man.
The Indians thought the white man was "crazy", as having no understanding, because the white man lived outside the system of sacred relationships that gave the Indian world its shape and meaning. And so white behavior was inexplicable and barbaric to them. Well that's pretty much the way Liberals appear to Conservatives. It's not just a difference of opinion that makes conservatives different from liberals; it's a completely different epistemology, a different way of experiencing what's true and what's not, what has value and what doesn't.
In a way, Sarah Palin conservatives, in their celebration of what has been given by the tradition, share more with the American Indian than they do with Liberals. Liberals reject givenness as a truth standard and replace it with a skeptical, rationalist standard that throws everything into doubt until it's proved valid by rational evidence standards. This, for the Indian mind, and premodern mind in general, is insanity–and so it is for the white Conservative mind. And so therefore Liberals are kooks who cannot be taken seriously. They are, in fact, dangerous fools. Why would anyone in his right mind reject the tried-and-true wisdom of the ancestors for the anything-goes world embraced by Liberals. And so it follows that all the mess we're dealing with now comes from Liberals running things for most of the 20th Century.
Palin/Beck/Limbaugh conservatives look at all Liberals, especially those holding office, not just as people with whom they disagree, but as this kind of senseless fool. Obama or any Dem cannot do well because he is by definition a fool with no common sense. It's not that they want him to fail; it's that everything that he succeeds in doing must by definition be foolishness. If he wants it, it has to be bad. So everything he does must end in making a bigger mess of things. If he or any Liberal does something that works out, it's a happy mistake, like a shanked golf shot that hits a tree and bounces into the hole. Or it was trickery: Clinton's balancing the budget and generating a surplus? Done with some accounting sleight of hand that hurt us more than helped us. I heard Rush Limbaugh the other day ranting about what a mess Dems have made of everything, and then he said that Republicans bear some of the blame, too. Why? Because they think and behave too much like Democrats!
It's airtight, isn't it? All the complexity, all the problems that come from living in the modern world can be reduced to blaming the Liberals because Liberals are, by definition "kooks" and "fools". And so everything would be so much better if there were no big governments and schools and churches run by these kooks. For these elites are solely to blame for all the confusion, dislocation, and mayhem that is life in a market-driven, consumer-capitalist, technologizing, globalizing, modern world. But worst of all these liberals are to blame for rejecting the system of sacred relationships and the hallowed national narrative that gives Palin conservatives' life, the real American life, its shape and meaning, and for replacing it with a new-fangled, multi-cultural, deracinated, traditionless world the Liberals in their foolishness accept as normative.
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I'm not a multi-culturalist. I do think some cultures and civilizations are superior to others. I think that Greek civilization was superior to the Persian, that Jewish culture was superior to the Canaanite cultures that surrounded it, that Christianity was superior to the Germanic and Celtic cultures that became Christianized, and I believe that open societies are superior to closed ones. And so I am a pluralist, which means I don't think that any one culture should dominate, and that it's possible to get along living side by side, to converse–and argue–and learn from one another. And so for me the only thing I can't tolerate is rigidity and a refusal to converse. And so my chief frustration with Sarah Palin conservatism has been its impenetrable rigidity, its defensiveness, its inability to see things from another point of view, to dismiss any worldview except its own as kooky. And I think that I've come to see that Sarah Palin conservatives don't really want a lively exchange of ideas. That's a luxury they can't afford, because for them it's about survival.
For these conservatives, especially the mountain-west variety, the memory of the brutal treatment of American Indians and Mexicans is still alive. They have a survivalist mentality, they think of the world in kill-or-be-killed terms, and they know that what goes around comes around. That's what this border security obsession is all albout, because they sense, for good reason, that it's coming around for them. Not extinction, but the end of their ruling the roost. They realize that their traditionalist imagination of what it means to be an American is no longer the national narrative, and that they are slowly being relegated to their place on a multiculturalist reservation.
Sarah Palin conservatives talk about losing their democracy and freedoms, but they're really talking about losing a particular white, Protestant-dominated imagination of America. They insist that they are not racist, and they are quite sincere. They think of racism as the attitude of the dominant race victimizing the minority race. But since they think of themselves as the victimized minority, how can they be racists? They're the victims–you hear it over and over again from Limbaugh and Beck, and that's how it can make a certain sense for Beck to call Obama a racist. He and his Liberal cohort are victimizing the Beck/Limbaugh/Palin white minority with their socialist, multicultural, un-American policies.
They sense that the world is not going their way, that they will not play a dominant role in defining America's future, and that feels like extinction. The culture war is for them a war for cultural survival, and so rather than submit and go to the reservation, they will resist no matter how futile. That's why many Sarah Palin conservatives think of themselves as being bullied by Liberals–no matter how much power these conservatives have in Washington or in the media. It's the way the slaveholding southerners felt before the Civil War–no matter how many battles they won in congress or in the courts. They knew deep down their world and values were on the losing side of history, but they were going to go down fighting.
Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are these conservatives' Sitting Bull or Chief Joseph or Geronimo. And they are very like fundamentalist Muslims in that they both hate the same thing–the modern system that is destroying their respective worlds of sacred meanings and relationships. They are, or were, freedom fighters to defend worlds for which modernity has no respect; they are, or were, huge, persistent, but ultimately futile, middle fingers held up to the Modern Machine, and for Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, and those who are drawn to them, the Tea Party movement is their Ghost Dance. So it seems to me, anyway.
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