The People's Republic of Me

September 10, 2008—I don't normally talk about politics here. But last week was quite a week, wasn't it? So much so that I've a half-a-dozen half-written posts I've had to serially abandon as events progressed.

More on Sarah Palin, woman and political phenomenon, below. In this, her moment of triumph, though, words of caution for her and her erstwhile supports.

Probably no American political figure has ever so quickly and completely routed such a large and powerful attack as Governor Palin did at the 2008 GOP convention. It is more like something out of the movies than real life. (Imagine Faye Wray popping Kong on the button in the third reel, and you get something of the surprise and delight her speech caused.) I can think of only one parallel, in President Clinton's immediate survival in the first days of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Ms. Palin's crucible was less intense than Mr. Clinton's, but unlike him she forced back her attackers with a smashing blow of her own, instead of waiting for public opinion to coalesce about her. It is almost certainly true, in fact, that public opinion swung behind her only because of her convention speech.

Ms. Palin is resplendent in triumph, but the splendor—though maybe not the triumph—will not last. It never does, of course, but there are two groups of which she must beware.

First, there is the media. She made fools of them, and they will never forgive her for it. She will be their new Nixon, the person they are honor-bound to destroy. She has already proved herself preternaturally good, but unless she is absurdly lucky she will make a mistake before Election Day. And then the media will attack, as viciously as before; and this time she will have neither a speech nor the element of surprise behind her.

There will follow a war of attrition. She will have in her favor her immense charisma; and she appears to possess vast reservoirs of patience, cheer, and stamina. Unless there is a hairline crack in her personality that we have not glimpsed, she will survive at least until the election. The media, in the meantime, is likely only to Nixonize itself. Unfortunately for Republicans, the media is not itself a single figure who can, like Nixon or Dan Rather, be chased into exile. The contempt with which the cable networks and metropolitan newspapers are all too prone to cover themselves will always be spread too thinly to fatally tarnish any particular talking head; and, anyway, the pool from which it draws its writers and correspondents is a renewable resource. The press is like death: implacable and inexhaustible.

And then there is the "base," which I predict will one day turn on her in fury. Her strongest support at the moment comes from doctrinaire conservatives and libertarians, who regard her the way they regarded Reagan and Goldwater. Of course, neither Reagan nor Goldwater were thorough-going, doctrinaire conservatives and libertarians themselves—being responsible adults and servants in the government, they couldn't be. But both had built up sufficient goodwill with the base over the decades that they could be forgiven their departures from orthodoxy. Also, they operated at a time when access to print and broadcast were much more limited, so that the adults at National Review and similar organs could soothe the nerves of the base by explaining their deviations.

But Ms. Palin will have neither cushion. Serious and respected conservative pundits like Will and Krauthammer and Brookhiser have been pilloried by the more rabid blogs for expressing skepticism about Ms. Palin; should she offend the base, pundits of similar gravitas will not be able to protect her. Once she steps from the path of ideological righteousness—which is inevitable, because no one can agree on where that path runs—she may provoke a war between the ideologues and the Palinistas of the sort that now divides the progressives over Senators Obama and Clinton.

And Ms. Palin, if she makes it into national office, is likely to wind up offending most of her base at some point. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is the reference point most often made when talking about her, and, as John J. Reilly notes, that movie and others of its kind are not philosophically conservative or libertarian: "Bad government," not government per se, is the problem the heroes in those stories must tackle. Ms. Palin may avoid the opprobrium that has been heaped upon both Bushes, and which would certainly be visited upon a President McCain, by avoiding slogans and templates that explicitly legitimate government activity. But if she is actually a "reformer," then she will certainly at some point wind up espousing and even defending some program or other—likely a health-care initiative—that repulses the majority of her party.

Of course, it is dangerous to extrapolate from the little evidence we have seen of her. But like others I have the impression her views derive from her background and life experience, not from an ideological education; which, if true, means the conservative and libertarian clergy are fated to have words with her one of these days—and if first impressions are reliable, she in turn will have some choice words for them. I am quite certain that she is a deeply political person, but that is not the same as saying she is an ideologue. So I can't help thinking that she and the word "unprincipled" will become closely acquainted at some point, and it won't be her current political enemies who make the introductions.

In such a knife fight, you will probably find me on Ms. Palin's side. But then, I am a man in love. More on that below as well.

* * * * *

The governor almost certainly has a future in national politics, but to become vice president during the next administration she and her running mate will have to get past Senators Obama and Wossname. Ms. Palin is such an astonishing creature that this may be easier done than said. Nonetheless, I will try to explicate why it may happen.

Is Ms. Palin qualified to be vice president? Constitutionally, yes, but as in any employment situation the question is not about credentials but adequacy. The issue is certain to get a thorough airing, but it is unlikely to get much of an answering. That's because it can't be asked without implicitly posing a more important question: whether Senator Obama is adequate for the presidency. And there must follow from such a comparison a tedious, endless, and quasi-metaphysical exploration of their brief senatorial and gubernatorial careers, and what it means to be a senator and a governor and a president.

And don't think the Republicans won't relish making those comparisons, however much they might seem to threaten their vice-presidential candidate. Anything that forces a comparison of their light-weight vice-presidential offering to the Democrat's light-weight presidential nominee can only diminish the latter; and since his resume is already so thin—"voted for Carter" probably appears somewhere on it as an example of "political activism"—and he is aiming for the higher office, the comparison will diminish Mr. Obama without diminishing anyone else. The diminishment in question will probably take place at a subconscious level in the electorate; and you can count on Mr. Obama's supporters to comically magnify his record; and if this goes on for two months it will render the junior senator from Illinois risible. Already, Republicans who once sneered at him in fear are beginning to laugh at him in merriment, and the effect may be contagious.

That's because, for all his self-possession, Mr. Obama is a remarkably humorless man, and the humorless are always only a single pratfall from becoming the most ridiculous person on stage. The senator projects grace and ease, but it feels to me like the watchful ease of a man who is trying to daunt dangerous rivals by feigning an air of command. Should that air of command leak away, he would have nothing left to protect him; and laughter—even at himself—is the quickest way to dissipate such an atmosphere. Hence, the hint of insecurity and even anger when Mr. Obama is forced to be self-deprecating.

Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, there is nothing funnier than a serious man who has been chased up a tree, and Ms. Palin, a laughing Diana, has in only a few days almost got him in one. Already the senator is complaining of being "bullied", an accusation that will probably only send his tormentor into gales of delight and inspire even more merciless teasing. Mr. Obama's squeal for momma doesn't merit any kind of acknowledgment from the opposition candidate, and will only occasion more zingers. And if she succeeds in making him cry—or only gets people to wondering whether Mr. Obama is about to start sobbing—she can always issue a meek apology and promise not be so mean to him in the future: a reply that would set her running mate up for a fifty-state sweep.

All of which would be unfair and demonstrate absolutely nothing about Ms. Palin's qualifications or her rivals' putative lack of same. Vladimir Putin, for instance, is unlikely to be intimidated by a woman wrapped in nothing but an infectious smile; but then, it's not unreasonable to suppose that Mr. Putin would swallow like a gnat a man who can be intimidated by such a woman.

* * * * *

We are also told that Ms. Palin's nomination has reignited the "culture wars." The culture wars never went away—what did people think the "red vs. blue state" stuff was about if not culture?—but Ms. Palin's ascendancy may mark their climax, because she has in her the potential to reconcile conservatism and cultural change.

Twice before in its history the United States has been wracked by chronic, decades-long conflicts that seemed to admit of nothing but an apocalyptic resolution. The issue of black emancipation did climax in the apocalypse of the Civil War, but the issue in that earlier phase was really resolved only at the end of Reconstruction, with an tragic compromise that blacks would be emancipated but disenfranchised. In this way the southern conservatives were reconciled to the Union and the abolition of the peculiar institution. Similarly, the conflict between economic classes reached its climax during the Great Depression, and issued in a similar compromise between socialism and capitalism: a free-market economy was left in place, but anchored by an implicit social contract that legitimated almost unrestrained governmental intrusion and regulation. In both cases, the arguments rumbled on for a few more decades—and the racial conflict didn't move toward a formal settlement until the 1960s—but various attempts at counter-revolution (as with the Klan in the 1920s or social program cuts in the 1980s) were only muted aftershocks that did not seriously threaten the status quo.

The culture wars will end in a similar compromise, though how the compromise will work out in practice is yet to be seen. But in her person and history Ms. Palin offers one path for reconciling recent social changes with America's deep cultural conservatism.

It comes through her religion. Christianity is an inherently subversive faith, which is why it could serially topple the Roman Empire, the Vatican, and Westminster Abbey without ever ceasing to be true to itself. Evangelical Christians are in many ways the Leninists of Christianity: they are the revolution that is Christianity made permanent. They are an engine for subverting this world, but at the same time they are an engine for subverting the organs and institutions of Christianity itself, for these organs and institutions are things of the world too.

Contemporary "Christianism," to use Andrew Sullivan's despicable term (as no other seems to be handy), may have begun with the mossbacks associated with Falwell and Robertson, but in ceasing to preach only to the converted they pulled in congregants who did not begin with the same retrograde habits and demeanor; and the churches these congregants disproportionately joined were churches so stripped of doctrine that there is almost nothing on which old social attitudes could dependably hang. There is simply no room in the doctrine of personal salvation for racism, sexism, class bigotry, or anti-gay prejudice to dwell. This is in marked contrast to mainline churches, which are more like social clubs with a little bit of theology tacked on, and in which members "support" and "nurture" each other by reinforcing the clubby attitudes that drew them to the churches to start with. Put it this way: a bunch of racists will be racists even in church, and if their church is no more than a club it will likely subscribe to and support racist doctrines. But people who aren't racists and who come together in a new church because they are attracted to a theology that begins and ends with the redemptive promise of Christ are unlikely to taint their church with racism.

This is how an evangelical Christian like Ms. Palin can be so emancipated, and (I am guessing) find such support and enthusiasm from her church. She comes from a larger culture that, thanks to the efforts of feminists, abhors attitudes and practices that only forty years ago seemed perfectly sane and normal. Her church is itself knit from people that come from that culture; and through their churches they are pumping those cultural attitudes into the socially conservative classes that are so closely identified with Christianity. Not all the mossbacks are becoming progressive, and certainly they aren't become ideologically "progressive"; but many of them are, without realizing it, internalizing progressive social attitudes that they never would have assented to before.

With the obvious exception of the abortion issue—which is an argument that has both sides arguing past each other—Ms. Palin shows how feminism can and perhaps by this time has ceased to be an imposed social orthodoxy and become an unconscious convention (albeit one whose contours have only roughly been mapped). She offers a demonstration of feminism's success: "We don't have to worry about this stuff anymore, as I've just proved." Ms. Palin's nomination and reception, in a sense, have finished the job, and she doesn't need to actually be elected to anything. Even if she loses, the conservatives must now be fundamentally reconciled to independent, empowered womanhood; after Ms. Palin, only cockroaches could criticize, say, Mrs. Clinton for her parenting choices.

Of course, this would not satisfy the professional agitators, and just as sharp debates about the relationship of government to the economy continued for decades after the enactment of New Deal legislation, we can probably expect another few decades of culture war. But the noise caused by partisans running from their previous positions in the wake of this nomination cheers me. It looks like a scramble for advantage, but it also shows the tremendous flexibility in the combatants. It will be hard for them not to compromise after showing how easily they can adopt the other sides' previously entrenched positions.

* * * * *

But back to Ms. Palin, who is a star unlike any we have ever seen, in politics or the movies. In politics she is so novel there is no point in belaboring the fact. But why have movies never given us this kind of woman? The studio that handled her career would never need to make a comic-book movie again.

Oh, we've had feisty, sexy, independent gals in the movies before, most of them back in the thirties and forties, which is either proof that the pre-fifties were less benighted than we think, or that the patriarchy was so secure it could let these kinds of women run rampant in our dreams. Probably it's the latter, for even the most independent woman in the golden age of movies was domesticated in a way that Sarah Palin appears not to be. The most liberated stars—Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck, let us say—usually wound up marginalized as career women, vamps, or neurotic cases. Their independence may not have cost them their femininity, but it cost them bits of their souls. Only in screwball comedies like The Lady Eve could they be independent and wholesome, because these were comedies and hence unreal.

Greta Garbo was distant; Ingrid Bergman was weepy; Grace Kelly was aristocratic. Off the top of my head, I think only Kate Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, and Carole Lombard—and then only at times—had something of the magic Palin suggests.

Hepburn, for instance, was essentially regal, but she reconciled herself to us through her ardor for male company. In Adam's Rib she is at her most strident, but she also vibrates in Tracy's company like a string yearning to be stroked. She treated men like equals, but her regal air made this equality less than egalitarian; she met them on some private ground of her own, which even with Tracy gave her romances the impression of a private audience.

Like Palin, Bacall was a huntress, and like Hepburn she preferred male company; she was forward but not aggressive; and she let you know she could take you or leave you. But Bacall was invented by Howard Hawks, and entirely closed off by the master's vision of the battle of sexes, which was to be an unending, Hobbesian thing, never deepening or ripening beyond the chase. Bacall was a dream only.

Lombard was the most real and the most illusory of them all. There was no artifice in her persona, but neither could you quite shake the feeling that you were watching a clever complexion of spotlights, like a holographic image, rather than a real person. In To Be or Not To Be she performs the necessary job of making Jack Benny credible as a ham actor/resistance fighter by being even less credible as a Polish actress suffering under Nazi occupation. She is beautiful and funny, but she instantly transports the viewer from Warsaw to the soundstage.

But maybe Ms. Palin can't exist in the movies, and that is why they never invented her. She is not the fantasy that the man wants to take home with him. She is the fantasy that he wishes to find at home when he returns. She'd be cheapened if he had to share her with other moviegoers.

* * * * *

Explaining this is a long story, and goes back to Genesis. The fact is that men do not deserve the love of a woman. And that, perhaps, is why God made them—both sexes, I mean. Men learn (and by their sins demonstrate) that love is never deserved; and women learn (and by their heedless rush to the marriage bed often demonstrate) that love is a thing we must sometimes helplessly give. Thus is presented in our lives the theologians' image of God as a Being who by His essence helplessly loves a brutish and undeserving humanity.

My criticism of Hawks above notwithstanding, no modern audience ever got a better explication of the nature of love than from his films. This is particularly true of Bringing Up Baby, which I think ought to be added to the Bible. (Being, as it is, about a woman who cannot stop tormenting the man she loves, because she cannot abide the thought that he might abandon her, we might slip it in somewhere between the Song of Solomon and the Book of Job.) That's a film about love, madness, and conflict as facets of the same mysterious thing. Madness, of course, is a conflict within oneself, or between oneself and the world; love, we say, drives us mad; and (this is Baby's great point) love is often expressed through conflict. Where there are two, there is always the chance for love and for conflict, and for both to produce a kind of madness. You are; therefore, I love.

Bringing Up Baby never ceases to be funny, no matter how often you watch it, but its glory and genius become crushing after awhile; only a saint, perhaps, could bear to understand it and watch it a twentieth time. It illustrates life as a whole, and not just the mortal life, perhaps. The thought of love never-ceasing is a Hallmark concept only until the implications of Hawks' masterpiece sink in; at which point the best Christian in the world might be excused for praying, like Graham Greene, that God might direct his love elsewhere, at least for a little while.

Ms. Palin is as imperfect as any of us, and what I say should only be taken as an extrapolation of the iconography she brings with her. But I suspect she moves many men who watch her distantly, as she moves me, because she suggests God's gift, in the meantime and as a relief, of a love that is smaller and more endurable, but still analogous to, the divine.

This is not, I emphasize, a function of her evident fecundity and domesticity; these are only vouchsafes of the gift she makes of herself to her husband. Evidently, Ms. Palin could, if necessary, feed and dress herself from the carcasses of wildlife should she ever lose her position as the chief executive of our 49th state, and this stands for her independence and capability. I said above that men do not deserve women, and if you had to point to any woman that a man couldn't hope to conquer, Ms. Palin would stand as well as any other. And yet, with her hominess and apparent humility, she also suggests a woman that one doesn't need to conquer. Thus, she suggests what I described above: love and companionship, freely given, and given freely even when given helplessly.

To glimpse a love of such a kind is to glimpse a thing we must call "normal," not because it is standard or widespread, but because it is so clearly the way things ought to be. Who, after all, would insist that love be the object of bargaining, or that it might be owed or given over unwillingly, or that it must be measured out coolly and rationally and proportionately to some material standard? Such demands are made in the real world, of course, for the human heart is a maelstrom that will disorder whatever it touches. And no doubt the Palins are as messy and disordered as the rest of us. But that is one of the impressions their relationship conveys.

And that Ms. Palin should infuriate so many people, evidently not through her politics or her sudden elevation, but through her simple being—as evidenced by the nature of the scurrilous rumors spread about her—disturbs me deeply, precisely because it suggests a loathing of what I just suggested should strike us as "normal."

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August 3, 2008