Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.
She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch
Anti-intellectualism and anti-sophistication have been the hallmarks of the mainstream conservative movement for the last decade. Indeed, David Brooks knows this very well, as he wrote an article, in the Atlantic, no less, mocking coastal sophisticates. A sample:
We in the coastal metro Blue areas read more books and attend more plays than the people in the Red heartland. We're more sophisticated and cosmopolitan—just ask us about our alumni trips to China or Provence, or our interest in Buddhism. But don't ask us, please, what life in Red America is like. We don't know. We don't know who Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins are, even though the novels they have co-written have sold about 40 million copies over the past few years. We don't know what James Dobson says on his radio program, which is listened to by millions. We don't know about Reba or Travis. (his links.)Now, eight years later, when the fruit of what he has sown has been reaped in Sarah Palin's ascendancy to a nominee for Vice President, he has changed his tune:
Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
What caused this change? Brooks wrote the Atlantic article right after the election of George W. Bush, who, of course, came from an East Coast elite family and had an Ivy Leage education. He played the role of "middle American", but really, he was, like Brooks, a highly educated man and his administration was filled with men who went to Ivy League Schools. Bush, Cheney, and Ashcroft all attended Yale, with Cheney the only one who didn't graduate from there. Scooter Libby also is a Yale graduate. Donald Rumsfeld graduated from Princeton, Paul Wolfowitz from Cornell, and Tom Ridge from Harvard. In short, while the administration represented "Joe Sixpack", they were not Joe Sixpack and they had traditional "elitist" educations.
However, Sarah Palin does not fit this bill. While the Bush administration paid lip service to anti-intellectualism, Sarah Palin has lived it. She bounced around from college to college, finally graduating with a degree in Communications-Journalism and becoming a sportscaster. Prior to her nomination as Vice President, she displayed no interest in foreign policy, and since her nomination has frequently demonstrated her lack of understanding of what her party's platform is, let alone a grasp on what the issues are.
Brooks is not a stupid man. He understands the dangers that come with having an uneducated person a heartbeat away from being the most powerful person in the world. And what intellectual honesty he has forces him to report on this. However, by reporting on this, he is admitting his compliancy in the demonization of education and is, in part, intellectually responsible a potential Palin presidency.
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