by publius
One personal benefit of the Bush years is that I’ve become increasingly less cynical about politics. I now view political fights as both substantive and vitally important. I also believe (in a reversal since Iraq) that voters will generally act rationally assuming the press informs them what’s going on. Indeed, most of you probably feel this way too — if you didn’t think ideas and arguments actually mattered, why bother reading or commenting?
But Palin’s rise to fame has jarred me a bit. In fact, it’s bringing out my cynical side and reminding me of March 2003.
Looking back, the really scary part of the Iraq War was not the war itself, but how quickly Americans accepted and embraced a top-down war. The public went from never thinking about Iraq in July 2002 to being whipped up in a frenzy by October 2002, with no triggering event like Pearl Harbor in between (yes, 9/11 was in the background, but it wasn’t a direct trigger for war).
It was a pure top-down war — a pure vanguard movement in the Leninist sense. The administration decided on war, and proceeded to sell the public on it largely on the basis of a savvy media campaign. The war was troubling enough, but the public’s willingness to be manipulated — Julius Caesar style — was borderline terrifying. If we could be persuaded to march off to Iraq in that manner, what else could we be persuaded to do if, say, terrorists attacked again?
Love her or hate her, Palin’s rapid ascent has some eerie parallels. And to be clear, these criticisms have nothing to do with Palin individually, or her views or ideology. She may be a dud, or she may be the next Abraham Lincoln. The point is that no one knows.
What’s troubling then is not so much her, but the way in which both the conservative base and apparently a decent chunk of swing voters have embraced her on the basis of essentially nothing but media images and prepared speeches. It’s surface politics gone wild.
