Cultural Paranoia on the Left
What is “The Meaning of Sarah Palin”? So asks a very interesting February 2009 article from Commentary magazine. The author, Yuval Levin, defends the populist strain of American politics that I mentioned in an earlier post here. He is not a full-fledged fan of Mrs. Palin, but gives her most of the credit she is due and offers good advice about her political weaknesses. You may want to read the entire article, The Meaning of Sarah Palin.
An interesting quote, emphasis added,
The reaction to Palin revealed a deep and intense cultural paranoia on the Left: an inclination to see retrograde reaction around every corner, and to respond to it with vile anger. A confident, happy, and politically effective woman who was also a social conservative was evidently too much to bear. The response of liberal feminists was in this respect particularly telling, and especially unpleasant. “Her greatest hypocrisy is her pretense that she is a woman,” wrote Wendy Doniger, a professor at the University of Chicago. “Having someone who looks like you and behaves like them,” said Gloria Steinem, “who looks like a friend but behaves like an adversary, is worse than having no one.”
Another quote from Levin,
Many of those (including especially those on the Right) who reacted badly to Palin on intellectual grounds understand themselves to be advancing the interests of lower-middle-class families similar to Palin’s own family and to many of those in attendance at her rallies … But it is hard to escape the conclusion that while these members of the intellectual elite want the government to serve the interests of such people first and foremost, they do not want those people to hold the levers of power. They see lower-middle-class populists like Palin and their supporters as profoundly ill-suited for governance, because they lack the accoutrements required for its employment—especially in foreign policy, which, even more than domestic affairs, is thought to be an intellectual exercise.
