The Washington Post website today linked to its sister site of black political analysis, The Root, where former Time magazine editor and columnist Jack White asserted Sarah Palin's "tea party speech revived the ancient practice of attacking people who actually know something."
White painted Palin (and conservatives) as unthinking. Like many liberals, he doesn’t grasp that what conservative speakers are often inveighing against is not people who think. It’s against people who think that conservatives don’t think. White is clearly, precisely one of those people.
White plucked out one phrase of Palin's speech -- that "we need a commander-in-chief, not a law professor at a lectern" -- into a grand indictment of know-nothing populism, vigilantism, book-banning, and the general hatred of knowledge:
In her view, and that of the tea party movement she is seeking to co-opt to her own inflated political ambitions, the painstakingly acquired insights of experts on subjects ranging from evolution to global climate change is of less value than the instinctive "common sense" of average people with no special knowledge of those subjects.
Hence her sarcastic references to the common people’s supposed resentment of being "lectured" by Obama and his fellow liberal politicians. To Palin, Obama is the teacher you loved to hate—especially if you didn’t get to go to college. It’s the envy the C students aim at the A students, and it does not go away.
More ominously, her campaign draws on the same old tactics—scapegoating outsiders and immigrants, ascribing power to nefarious plotters, pitting the so-called people against the so-called oppressive elite—that have characterized right-wing, know-nothing, populist movements since the early days of the Republic.
They often arise at times of economic stress, such as the current recession, pointing fingers and driving out rational thought with appeals to angry emotion. Theirs is the impulse behind vigilantism and the urge to ban books and the invocation of supposed traditional values to oppose social change. Theirs is the value system that stubbornly puts more value on intuition and received wisdom than on scholarship and experimentation. Theirs is the mind of the mob, resenting being told things it does not want to hear.
That leaves out a lot of context. White knew it was an indictment of Obama’s terror fighting. After he trotted out all the pro-Obama talking points on how tough he is on "man-caused disasters," he turned it into an attack on smart people. But he could have at least let Palin have one paragraph of elaboration from her speech, like this:
The events surrounding the Christmas Day plot reflect the kind of thinking that led to September 11th. That threat then, as the U.S.S. Cole was attacked, our embassies were attacked. It was treated like an international crime spree, not like an act of war. We're seeing that mindset again settle into Washington. That scares me for my children and for your children. Treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at grave risk. Because that's not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this. They know we're at war. And to win that war, we need a commander-in-chief, not a law professor at a lectern.
That has a lot more thought in it than liberals are willing to acknowledge. They should do more to engage it, and less to simply invent their own ideas of Palin's cynical hate-mongering and race-baiting and pandering to the "booboisie."
