I was slobberingly grateful yesterday that Jesse wrote about Ross Douthat’s latest ode to the oh-so-sexy (because you think they’re too scatterbrained to use contraception) red state ladies and their leader Sarah Palin, but alas, after reading Matt’s rejoinder, I’m forced to jump into the game. Matt singles out this quote from Ross’s attempt to play the Palin-the-victim card.
Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.
As yes. As much as people like to compare her to the Shrub, in actuality, Palin is Richard Nixon reborn. Her strategy of playing the poor, put-upon victim---just like you, white people, who are sick of hippies and black people that want to share your lunch counter!---is right out of the Richard Nixon “Southern Strategy” handbook. Matt’s answer is funny:
I think the implicit idea here that the real class struggle in the United States is between graduates of fancy colleges and graduates of less-fancy colleges is pretty blinkered.
You say “blinkered”, I say “intellectually dishonest”. Douthat is playing the same tired game that Ivy League-educated East Coast conservative commentators have been playing for a long time---praising the white middle class that viciously and racistly dominates the red states like they’re the only truly oppressed people in the country, oppressed because of their pureness, goodness, and ability to have rowdy sex without protection, the only kind that really gets you off. We’re treated to pity-the-rednecks-and-wannabe-rednecks essays about how snooty liberal elite sneer at hunting and fishing, at religious beliefs that are built strictly around wishful thinking that would make your average kindergartner blush, at big hair, at over-the-top patriarchal fantasizing about zygote life, and now at state schools. Well, all that and we get to hear about how the willfully fucking stupid are morally purer than the rest of us.
But the implication is clear---the red states are the salt of the earth, and the goodness and light of the dominant class shows why the liberal elite are bad people. They hate Sarah Palin not because she’s a nasty person with nasty beliefs and a nasty ideology. No, it’s because she’s a shiny female specimen with good hair, because she has 5 kids and acts like pregnancy was a big shock (instead of what happens when you do it without using contraception), because she went to State U., and because she’s a gleeful redneck. Because liberal elitists have this irrational hatred of this specific tribe of white people, a hatred that has nothing to do with political differences and everything to do with an irrational hatred of pick-up trucks, country western music, and the word “y’all”.