The Danger of "Palinism"

UPDATED: As a point of clarification, I am no out to demonize Sarah Palin as a person even though I disagree with her on nearly everything. The point is that to be VP in today's world, she needs to - to quote Andrew Sullivan - be able to take over as president in an instant and cope with three wars - in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan - and a potential reprise of the Great Depression. Clearly, she is NOT up to the task and McCain needs to be held accountable for his insane selection of Palin.

*

Roger Cohen has a column in the New York Times that both describes the mental vacuousness of Sarah Palin and the anti-knowledge and egocentricity that are the hallmarks of Christianists and the "America - Love it or Leave it" crowd. As I have noted before, it is dumbfounding in some ways that a supposedly educated populace can be so ignorant and gullible to demagoguery. But for this phenomenon, the GOP would have lost power years ago and the country would likely be far better off today. The big question, is how best to defeat this mindset and outlook. Here are some column highlights:

*

Sarah Palin loves the word “exceptional.” . . . 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.

*

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?

*

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.