The Anti-Intellectual Crusade

In this election, I have seen a number of my Republian friends turn their back on the Republican ticket, with a few even switching to Obama, because they felt the direction of the party no longer shared their values. For those of us in the middle-left-leaning Dem wing, I say "Huh? Isn't the Republican 'values' voter the definition of conservative?" In my research and thinking about it, though, I'm not convinced it is. In fact, I think they are indication of a trend, a growing rift in the Republican party between traditional conservatives and populists. As a kid who grew up in "thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican" and Contract with America eras of government, this has intrigued about where this rift comes from.

There's no denying that a rift is there, in my opinion, most recently and tangibly illustrated with the stutter-step nature of the McCain campaign. It seems McCain, who has long struggled ingratiate himself with the conservative branch despite his fiscal conservatism on earmarks, has abandoned these principles and switched to this emergent (and often "anti-") populist branch, with Palin pick, sudden introduction of plans to buy up all the bad mortgage debt and incorporate it into the government, etc. It's a weird and strange play, and it's created a Janus-like figure of the campaign. It's a radical departure from the early 90's where the definition of Republican was 'united front' to the words of that great statesman, Mayor Quimby: "If that is the way the winds are blowing, let no one say I do not also blow."

Conservative pundits have also noticed this rift, starting with the introduction of Sarah Palin to the scene - a bona fide celebrity of the populist Republican block. After all, she's a hockey mom/pit bull, folksy, shoots from the hip with some fine attack politics, and has an unnerving talent for deflecting questions that go off her talking points. Just like one sitting President of the United States. No one can deny her political talent in a time of waxing populist realpolitik, but many conservatives like George Will were direly concerned about her experience from the beginning and now firmly convinced of it. David Brooks, noted and highly eloquent conservative editor of the Atlantic Monthly, recently called her a representation "of a fatal cancer to the Republican Party." Brooks and Will are just a few conservative voices whom I respect (if not agree with) that caused my ears to twig up at the idea of this growing gap.

So how to define the conservative and populist sides of this rift? Another Brooks article, "Experience Matters," lays out this idea in a nutshell (where was my tinfoil hat?):

Conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement. Conservatives stood against radical egalitarianism and the destruction of rigorous standards. They stood up for classical education, hard-earned knowledge, experience and prudence. Wisdom was acquired through immersion in the best that has been thought and said.

But, especially in America, there has always been a separate, populist, strain. For those in this school, book knowledge is suspect but practical knowledge is respected. The city is corrupting and the universities are kindergartens for overeducated fools.

The elitists favor sophistication, but the common-sense folk favor simplicity. The elitists favor deliberation, but the populists favor instinct.

This populist tendency produced the term-limits movement based on the belief that time in government destroys character but contact with grass-roots America gives one grounding in real life. And now it has produced Sarah Palin.

With the Bush administration, we have seen the rise of populist Republican politics. He out-good-ol-boyed Gore, by far the more qualified candidate, to the presidency. Gone was the culture of "no" championed by guys like Reagan, Gingrich, and even Ron Paul, replaced with Bush's "compassionate conservativism." While that sounded nice - because, hey, those conservatives were mean! - people quickly found out there was very little compassion there - just an administration licking its lips at a giant surplus of money and a guy who the president once defined as "the guy who tried to kill my dad" firmly in its crosshairs.

In the Brooks "cancer" quote, he had this to say:

When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

People say the "thing" about Bush was, he was a guy you'd want to have a beer with - and in time people probably will again. Palin wins the same allocades - "she's one of us," her campaign says, she's a hockey mom, a rockstar, a "Joe Sixpack" as she'd say (as if they Joe Sixpacks out there wouldn't be something a shade of insulted, and maybe they aren't if they're populist Republicans). She's a moose-hunter, a gun owner, she's got a Yooper accent, 5 kids, a preggers teenage daughter, and no farkin' clue what the Bush Doctrine is (just like the president). She is specifically against Roe v. Wade, believes Alaska will be a shelter state during the Second Coming, a Pentecostal evangelical Christian, and believes being able to see Russia or share airspace with Putin's flyovers means she knows something about foreign relations. That, apparently, has been enough to get her a bigger and stronger base of supporters than the presidential candidate she's running with.

Nowhere in that bio is an idea of her ideas; nowhere is an examination of where she stands on political issues; and nowhere does she try to illuminate them. Because, ultimately, it seems populism mean social issues, character, and personality - not politics. This is how she can have the gall to lead the recent charge of "Who is Barack Obama" when she herself has been on the national stage less than 6 weeks.

In the Roger Cohen's op-ed piece "Palin's American Exception," he outlines what in my opinion defines Palin's populist Republican appeal in a nutshell.

Palin’s American Exception
By ROGER COHEN
Published: September 25, 2008

Sarah Palin loves the word “exceptional.” At a rally in Nevada the other day, the Republican vice-presidential candidate said: “We are an exceptional nation.” Then she declared: “America is an exceptional country.” In case anyone missed that, she added: “You are all exceptional Americans.”

I have to hand it to Palin, she may be onto something in her batty way: the election is very much about American exceptionalism.

This is the idea, around since the founding fathers, and elaborated on by Alexis de Tocqueville, that the United States is a nation unlike any other with a special mission to build the “city upon a hill” that will serve as liberty’s beacon for mankind.

But exceptionalism has taken an ugly twist of late. It’s become the angry refuge of the America that wants to deny the real state of the world.

From an inspirational notion, however flawed in execution, that has buttressed the global spread of liberty, American exceptionalism has morphed into the fortress of those who see themselves threatened by “one-worlders” (read Barack Obama) and who believe it’s more important to know how to dress moose than find Mumbai.

That’s Palinism, a philosophy delivered without a passport and with a view (on a clear day) of Russia.

Behind Palinism lies anger. It’s been growing as America’s relative decline has become more manifest in falling incomes, imploding markets, massive debt and rising new centers of wealth and power from Shanghai to Dubai.

The damn-the-world, God-chose-us rage of that America has sharpened as U.S. exceptionalism has become harder to square with the 21st-century world’s interconnectedness. How exceptional can you be when every major problem you face, from terrorism to nuclear proliferation to gas prices, requires joint action?

Very exceptional, insists Palin, and so does John McCain by choosing her. (He has said: “I do believe in American exceptionalism. We are the only nation I know that really is deeply concerned about adhering to the principle that all of us are created equal.”)

America is distinct. Its habits and attitudes with respect to religion, patriotism, voting and the death penalty, for example, differ from much of the rest of the developed world. It is more ideological than other countries, believing still in its manifest destiny. At its noblest, it inspires still.

But, let’s face it, from Baghdad to Bear Stearns the last eight years have been a lesson in the price of exceptionalism run amok.

To persist with a philosophy grounded in America’s separateness, rather than its connectedness, would be devastating at a time when the country faces two wars, a financial collapse unseen since 1929, commodity inflation, a huge transfer of resources to the Middle East, and the imperative to develop new sources of energy.

Enough is enough.

The basic shift from the cold war to the new world is from MAD (mutual assured destruction) to MAC (mutual assured connectedness). Technology trumps politics. Still, Bush and Cheney have demonstrated that politics still matter.

Which brings us to the first debate — still scheduled for Friday — between Obama and McCain on foreign policy. It will pit the former’s universalism against the latter’s exceptionalism.

I’m going to try to make this simple. On the Democratic side you have a guy whose campaign has been based on the Internet, who believes America may have something to learn from other countries (like universal health care) and who’s unafraid in 2008 to say he’s a “proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world.”

On the Republican side, you have a guy who, in 2008, is just discovering the Net and Google and whose No. 2 is a woman who got a passport last year and believes she understands Russia because Alaska is closer to Siberia than Alabama.

If I were Obama, I’d put it this way: “Senator McCain, the world you claim to understand is the world of yesterday. A new century demands new thinking. Our country cannot be made fundamentally secure by a man who thought our economy was fundamentally sound.”

American exceptionalism, taken to extremes, leaves you without the allies you need (Iraq), without the influence you want (Iran) and without any notion of risk (Wall Street). The only exceptionalism that resonates, as Obama put it to me last year, is one “based on our Constitution, our principles, our values and our ideals.”

In a superb recent piece on the declining global influence of the Supreme Court, my colleague Adam Liptak quoted an article by Steven Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern: “Like it or not, Americans really are a special people with a special ideology that sets us apart from all other peoples.”

Palinism has its intellectual roots. But it’s dangerous for a country in need of realism not rage. I’m sure Henry Kissinger tried to instill Realpolitik in the governor of Alaska this week, but the angry exceptionalism that is Palinism is not in the reason game.

That idea of exceptionalism, that America is great because its America, is a core nugget of where populist Republican thought and both conservative and Democratic thought divide, I think. Populists, like Bush, think that taking away rights is OK if it will "make us safe." In the world of big-daddy government, which conservatives so rail against, populists seem to be the true believers (even more so than Dems!) - from a populist Republican government, we've earned ourselves the bailout plan, the Patriot Act, the war against terror, the TSA lockdown, No Child Left Behind, and many many other programs with the very specific intention of protecting us from ourselves. They are the Republicans of the culture wars, fighting against a godlessness in America. Populists push for teaching creationism as equal to evolution as a theory in schools; populists push for mandatory Pledge of Allegiance participation; populists believe English should be the official language of the United States; populists believe "illegals" need to be thrown across the border. Because this is America, and goddamnit, it's exceptional - there's no better , no smarter or more beautiful place. How could it ever be wrong?

But conservatives by their very inclination, think we can always do better - otherwise they wouldn't be railing against government powers, against overspending and intrusion on liberties. True conservatives, as I understand them, cannot accept the invasion of privacy introduced by the Patriot Act (even if they think the treatment of 'war criminals' or violating the Geneva Conventions is OK), because they are constitutionalists. Though conservatives may be far more firm than liberals in their worldview of how things should be done, the fact is both sides think this nation is a work in progress. I mean, look at the bailout plan reaction - the "left" and the "right" both railed against the middle for upending the free market and saving corporations who were irresponsible - the left thought it just desserts for companies gambling with regular folks' futures, the right thought we must let the market run its course, for good or ill. McCain's ludicrous plan to buy up mortgage debt, not at the "haircut" rate as laid out in the bailout bill (where the gov't would buy at market value, and the lender would take the hit) but at 100% of the sale value, has made strange bedfellows of the Obama campaign and many conservative pundits ahead of the election.

This fracturing alliance of the Republican Party has torn the McCain campaign down the center, as it first strove to prove itself worthy of conservative support all the way up to the convention, then turned on a dime, co-opting Obama's change message, bringing on Palin, and transforming an "experience" ticket to a "character" ticket - in short, from a conservative campaign to a populist campaign. In doing so, he has turned off many amongst is base, even as he grew other parts, and in turn lit a fire beneath the Democrats who were still torn over the bitter struggle between Clinton and Obama. The culture wars are very much fresh in the minds of this country, and re-igniting them was the worst thing IMO McCain could have done, for the populist Republicans are by their very definition the enemy of liberals (and even moderates) of all stripes. All this move to populism has served for the campaign has been to polarize the election, to push the undecided voter to one side or the other more firmly when they are so critical to win, to make moderate Democrats who were on the fence choose their side firmly, to lose his credibility as a bipartisan negotiator, and the only improvement has been in screaming, angry, and sometimes frothing supporters at rallies. I hope McCain's finding that worthwhile.

I do find myself smiling at the thought, though - wouldn't it be ironic if the reason McCain loses in November is because he chose a side that manages to stand against the core principles of both Republicans and Democrats? If he was defeated by conservatives unconvinced in his judgement and liberals distrustful of his policies? If he lost to "that one" based on the fact that for all his experience, all his depth of knowledge, he chose to ally with the mob and lost on the basis of good politics?

EDIT: More on the tradition of anti-intellectualism in campaigns and why Obama seems to have dodged that particular bullet so far.