No Laughing Matter: The Palin Phenomemon

[fencesitter]

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/no-laughing-matter/index.html

Judith Warner, NYT

****It’s Sarah. Sarah’s going to be the vice president,” she had told the little girls, clad in their matching polka dot dresses. “Sarah Palin.”)
She was a nice woman. She told me history was in the making. She told me where to get lunch. She handed me back my reporter’s notebook when one of her almost-two-year-old twins, fixing me with a dark look of mistrust, took it away. “Liberal media, eh?” her solemn eyes glared. “Well, watch what you say about my mommy and Our Sarah.”

Do not think for a moment that I was being paranoid.
Fred Thompson had warmed up the crowd, his familiar old district attorney’s voice restored to full bombast, and he’d been in fine form, denouncing – to loud boos from the crowd — the “lawyers and scandal mongers and representatives of cable networks” (boos from the crowd) who were at that very moment descending upon Alaska looking for dirt on their Sarah.
“I hope they brought their own Brie and Chablis with them,” he’d said, to raucous laughter, as I willed myself to disappear, remembering, with a shudder, that my children had demanded Brie for breakfast only that morning.

I should have been finding this funny. My whole plan, after all, had been to write something funny this week about the whole Sarah Palin phenomenon. I’d arrived at an if-you-can’t-beat-’em-laugh-at-’em kind of a juncture, I suppose.

******

“Palin Power” isn’t just about making hockey moms feel important. It’s not just about giving abortion rights opponents their due. It’s also, in obscure ways, about making yearnings come true — deep, inchoate desires about respect and service, hierarchy and family that have somehow been successfully projected onto the figure of this unlikely woman and have stuck.

For those of us who can’t tap into those yearnings, it seems the Palin faithful are blind – to the contradictions between her stated positions and the truth of the policies she espouses, to the contradictions between her ideology and their interests. But Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, argues in an essay this month, “What Makes People Vote Republican?”, that it’s liberals, in fact, who are dangerously blind.
******
Mo!

[mrreowwr_kittty]

1. The idea that conservatives understand liberals better than vice versa is odd

I'd say both groups suffer from a lack of understanding of the other's perspectives to a certain extent but one only has to listen to RW radio or read the LTTE section of any newspaper in a red state to see that liberals and progressives are routinely characterized as socialists who want to kill babies and turn the US into Sodom and Gomorrah. These are people who think gays want to recruit children!

It’s also, in obscure ways, about making yearnings come true — deep, inchoate desires about respect and service, hierarchy and family that have somehow been successfully projected onto the figure of this unlikely woman and have stuck.

That's easy to figure out. It's called authoritarianism. It's what they're all about.

[Newshues]

2. but in a blue state the same is true from theri side

of the coin.

here, http://kennebecjournal.mainetoday.com/ is a local paper in the very heart of a blue state. Read the opinion page, you'll feel right at home and quite comfortable. Then read the readers comments.

activists on both sides are just mirror images of each other for various reasons. I've learned more about my own politics and my own view of issues by looking at the hard core of the other side and seeing a bit of myself, in terms of thought process, in them. It's hard to learn new things when everyone around you agrees with you.

Republicans understand that a little better than we do I think. It stems, I think, from having to try to figure out how to stay in power after they sold out their principals.

[mrreowwr_kittty]

3. Republicans understand how to manipulate the emotions of ignorant people

And screw that "both sides of the same coin" nonsense. That's the same kind of false equivalence that gives a scientific consensus on global warming the same weight as bullshit from oil company shills. It's the same kind that regards creationism and a belief that the world is 6000 years old with "respect". The people Warner is writing about are uneducated authoritarians with a delusional worldview. Stop equating them with people who think. They don't. They operate off pure self-interest and instinct and then have the nerve to say liberals (who have fought for, and are the reason for everything good they have in their lives) are self-centered. If John McCain gets elected, I hope all those women will be encouraging their kids to sign up for his 100 years of war. Or perhaps they'll expect kids from other communities to make that sacrifice. As usual.