There seems to be a Palin derangement syndrome operating on both sides of the political aisle. Although I know you are being facetious, I state for the record that I didn't give myself attribution because I did not think it was necessary or modest and might weaken the punch of the piece. I had not used the piece which I had saved in my remote hard drive until the man who had traduced me declined to recant his insinuation and even doubled down on his libels. I simply cannot fathom how any rational person expects to advance his candidate's cause with that kind of behavior.
I really believe I was on to something in describing the left's Palin derangement syndrome as a replay of Melville's Billy Budd in which the title character is the figure of innocence and those he encounters who are infected with evil and therefore cannot tolerate his presence. The reaction to Billy Budd and Sarah Palin is biblical and visceral. I think it is rooted in her knowingly carrying to full term a mongoloid baby which makes her a living, walking indictment of the pristine evil that rots the core of the Democrat party. If they tolerate her example, her living presence, they indict themselves of murder. If they tolerate her very existence they expose the giant lie and their whole structure disintegrates. She is not just a threat to their rice bowls, she is a threat to their souls.
I believe our side, and I do not exclude myself, indulges an understandably human yearning for the hero, the embodiment of good, someone who represents a collection of values which we can adhere to. We see this, for example, in the posthumous veneration of Abraham Lincoln and JFK and now to some degree in Ronald Reagan. Palin supporters, of whom I count myself one, dismiss my Goldwater analogy but I can tell you that half a century ago we saw Goldwater as a kind of savior and we dismissed the deficiencies in his candidacy which ultimately brought us to a crashing defeat and the imposition of The Great Society which has caused to a large degree the mess we are in. The analogy is not to equate the candidates, Goldwater and Palin, but to equate the reaction to the candidacies by the conservative core.
If the Bible tells us anything, it tells us not to whore after false idols and to take very, very seriously the first two commandments which instruct us as to spiritual, psychic, and, I would venture, political orientation. The Israelites suffered as a group when they departed from the blueprint and went a whoring. It does not matter who the person is, if we worship a person we are worshiping a false idol, no matter her human virtues.
It is not Sarah Palin who is off track but those who worship her. Any good mutual fund manager would tell you the first rule is don't fall in love with a stock. In a sense, we invest in our politicians and if we invest more than our political but our emotional aspirations and even our spiritual identities, we cease to become a political party and become a cult. I have been wrestling with a vanity for some time in an attempt to understand what it is that drives human beings into the Democrat party. What is it that prompts people to condone the killing of 40 million babies? How can they live a blatant lie?
The answer I am closing in on for me is that there is a tremendous power in the herd instinct which they have tapped. All one has to do is surrender his duty of independent judgment to the movement and one is embraced, taken into the fold and relieved of all anxiety. If one reads Whittaker Chambers, Witness one sees how this operated in the Communist Party in America before the war and even afterwards and protected the likes of Alger Hiss. Today, it shields abortionists. It affects the entire African-American "community." It dominates our ivory towers and the Manhattan and Georgetown salons. It is the very essence of life, or should I say tyranny, in Hollywood. It serves up convictions ready to eat like so many TV dinners.
Even the Marine Corps knows that it can make a fine Marine but only after it strips him of his ego and replaces it with the Marine Corps ethos. In the case of the Marine Corps, we know them by their good fruits but in the case of the Hells Angels we know them by the evil they do. We saw the stupendous statistical power of this phenomenon in Chairman Mao. That is why I have so often analogized Barak Obama as a community organizer (read EST moderator) who got elected by turning the Democrat Party and more than half of America into an EST cult.
There is tremendous power in manipulating the emotional release granted the individual when he becomes part of a movement. I think it explains the kind of behavior we have seen on this thread. The irony is that the worship of Sarah Palin is the antithesis of who she is and what she stands for which is the proper, vertical, mandate of the first and second Commandment to a true God and a life so lived.
The old saying is that amateurs talk of strategy and generals talk of logistics. I am trying to talk about the logistics of winning a presidential election. The generals of this war, the guys who are real professionals, will not talk about national polling trends, they want to know what's going on in precincts in Ohio. I have always admitted, indeed I have advanced the notion, that my subjective opinion is not much better than anybody else's subjective opinion when it comes to forecasting the imponderables of the national mood. I do not pretend to be someone who is versed in the demographics of Ohio precincts or elsewhere. But I can say with absolute conviction that self-delusion leads to destruction.
When a derangement syndrome leads people to regard anyone who raises a logistical problem as a defeatist, as some on this thread have done, we are cruising for a giant disillusionment. The logicians in the Democrat Party are in business to exploit our illusions. They want us to live in a bumper sticker world. That is how they win. We who are political junkies know this but our proper reaction is not to descend into the weeds but to reduce the great American political drama every cycle to its irreducible core. What is true and what can we sell?
Self-delusion is fatal to understanding what is true and naïveté is fatal to understanding what we (or the other side) can sell.
As an aside, Democrats are masters at rationalization. By definition they must be if they can condone 40 million murders. But we must deal with the phenomenon as reality. They will have convinced themselves by the time election day comes that Barack Obama is indeed their last best hope and that the Republican candidate is the Archangel of evil and must be defeated to save humanity. That is why all Republican candidates are slandered as idiots and all Democratic candidates are extolled as geniuses. That is a very horizontal, non-vertical scale upon which to judge candidates.
Sarah Palin breaks that measuring stick and says, you are on the wrong axis, measure me vertically. That takes Democrats out of the world of the cult they live in. She does not attack their politics, she assaults their epistemology. They cannot abide it and remain Democrats and sane so they must utterly destroy Sarah Palin and, to a lesser degree any similar candidate like Bachmann. Thank God the fight will be over the independents who are not as tightly trapped in this psychic cage.
Most of the world will walk into the voting booth and exercise their franchise according to what they believe about the persona of the candidate. Few enough of us will pull the lever for a set of political convictions which happened to be represented for this season by a particular candidate. We must deal with the world we inhabit on its terms. That includes a judgment about whether Sarah Palin will or will not be a successful candidate.
It is not what we want, and God knows it is not what it should be, it is what can be sold.
It is time for Sarah Palin to enter the race and submit herself to the process to prove that she has the goods (we all know that she has) and that she can sell them-that is the question. When that is settled one way or the other we can cease being armchair pundits, stop our blather, and become cheerleaders.
I thank all of you, repeat, all of you, for your contributions to this discussion.
