It seems that Sarah Palin’s nomination has driven the entire country and parts of the rest of the world completely crazy. On the left, the mere sight of her and her family apparently sends some people into a frenzy. Mark Shea and Rod Dreher (see links in sidebar) have been documenting a lot of this. In some feminists the effect is especially marked. I’ve noted for a long time the special malice they have for conservative women, whom they see as traitors, and Palin has brought it out in spectacular fashion: see this, this, and this for some really over-the-top examples.
On the right, we’re seeing something similar to the Obama phenomenon: a candidacy with such great symbolic impact that people are reading impossible promise into it.
We see the left complaining that a woman is not staying at home with her family, and the right screaming “Sexism!” at every opportunity. I’d like to think the madness reached a peak yesterday with the “lipstick on a pig” fiasco, in which the McCain campaign, not content to let the opposition dig its own grave with hysterics, resorted in a web advertisement to an an out-and-out lie (it’s the words “Barack Obama On: Sarah Palin” that take it from typical political distortion into the category of plain old lie).
All of this confirms to me something I’ve been thinking for a while: that presidential elections are now primarily symbolic contests. I don’t mean that the office is only symbolic—obviously it’s extremely powerful. But the emotions aroused are disproportionate and intense in a way that indicates that something deeper than disagreement about policy is at work. And it is; it’s what we have called for some years now the culture war. Politicians, journalists, and the public act as if we’re electing a philosopher-king, as if the president, and not Congress, were the source of all law, and as if the president, not the Supreme Court, were the final determiner of what the law means. The president can neither destroy nor repair nor command the religious belief or disbelief of the nation, the character of the people, the cultural conditions which precede politics.
As I’ve said, I think Palin’s candidacy is a promising sign. But this madness is quite the opposite of promising.
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