“The intellectuals don’t understand her, like her. She doesn’t analyze herself. She doesn’t analyze her thoughts; she just has them and expresses them.”

                                                                                                                                                  –Rush Limbaugh on Sarah Palin’s appeal.

“You cannot underestimate the wisdom of the American people.”

–Sarah Palin, on her own appeal, on Hannity and Colmes.

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

                                                                                                                                                                   --Isaac Asimov.

Introduction:

The Two Americas

of Sarah Palin

While speaking at a fundraiser in Greensboro, North Carolina, on October 16, 2008, Republican Party vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin praised the virtues of small-town America, which, she said, were in direct contrast to life in the country’s big cities. “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America,” Palin said, “being here with all of you hard-working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.” Palin continued: “This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us. Those who are protecting us in uniform. Those who are protecting the virtues of freedom.”

Palin’s message was unmistakable: There were pro-America parts of the country and anti-America parts of the country. Unfortunately, she was not more specific in identifying the two Americas. Americans were left to wonder if they lived in one of those areas Palin called “the real America.” God forbid you should go to bed thinking you were in one of those “wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America” and then wake up in one of those um, very, um anti-America areas, where there weren’t kind, good, and courageous Americans who worked in factories, taught in schools, and protected our freedoms.

According to Jon Stewart, host of the Daily Show, if small towns were part of the real America, then big cities such as New York and Washington, D.C., toward which Palin regularly directed her contempt, were the capitals of what she might consider “the fake America. . . the ground zero of fake America, if you will,” Stewart quipped. Osama bin Laden must have felt like a real fool after learning he had bombed “the fake America” on 9/11, Stewart said.

Palin often said that if anyone wanted to learn what real America is like, they could find it in her hometown: Wasilla, Alaska. The Daily Show sent correspondent Jason Jones to Wasilla, where he rhapsodized about the “mom-and-pop general stores” while an accompanying video showed strip malls and chain supermarkets. A thriving drug trade prospered amidst boarded-up businesses. A local teacher told Jones that Wasilla was known as the “meth capital of Alaska.” Jones interviewed a Wasilla man who proudly showed off his pornographic tattoos of his ex-wife and mistress. If viewers were not already convinced that there was no more “pro-America” area, Jones interviewed Mark Chryson, a member of the Alaska Independence Party, whose organization wants the state to secede from the United States.

Social critic Christopher Hitchens said Palin’s raison d'etre is in her “deft cultivation of resentment against the big cities, the intellectual elite, the media, and all who look down on small-town folk. It’s a worn and cracked old disc,” Hitchens said, which was “orchestrated in Washington by Fred Malek, an old inside-the-Beltway hack, who once ­provided the paranoid populist Richard Nixon with a list of subversive Jews who worked in the Department of Labor.” But in Palin’s case, Hitchens said, her resentment wasn’t simply “worn and cracked,” it was blatantly false. Palin was not the outsider she claimed, but a crass opportunist who owed her popularity, in part, to GOP elitists William Kristol, Fred Barnes, and Rich Lowry and the conservative establishment media, including the Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Fox News.

Palin is not the first to exploit what sociologist and historian Daniel Bell called “the dispossessed,” or those who feel the country has changed and that those who are responsible–liberals, communists, academics, intellectuals, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Mexicans, blacks, whoever–must be cast aside so that the chosen people can lead. Palin and her followers would have been comfortable in the nativist Know-Nothing Party, which formed in the 1840s in response to the growing numbers of German and Irish Catholic immigrants who were believed hostile to Anglo-Saxon Protestant values. The Know-Nothings demanded laws to curb immigration, insisted that English be spoken exclusively, and proposed that there be daily Bible readings in public schools.

During the 1920s, Baltimore Sun columnist H.L. Mencken went to Dayton, Tennessee, to report on the Scopes Monkey Trial, where a schoolteacher had been arrested and charged with teaching evolution to his students. Mencken bristled at the notion that religious dogma could trump scientific theory in education. He attacked the ignorant, intolerant, and gullible folks of Dayton as “the Booboisie.” Mencken famously said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” During the Red Scare of the 1950s, demagogues such as Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin exploited the fear of communism by accusing social progressives of being communists or communist sympathizers. It didn’t matter that little or no evidence supported those accusations or that those charged did not have the opportunity to defend themselves or face their accusers.

History tells us that there’s little new under the full moon that gives conservative extremism its distinctive pathology. Conservative extremists have long said they stood for American ideals. But their ideologies are universally bad ones: nativism, jingoism, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, militarism, and so forth. Conservative extremists talk reverently about the Constitution and such American ideals as freedom, justice, and limited government but then cast them aside for sedition laws, segregation laws, loyalty oaths, warrantless wiretaps, and torture. Conservative extremism has taken the country to such absurd lengths as prohibiting Wagnerian operas and creating alternative names for German measles, sauerkraut, and dachshunds when we were at war with Germany; forcing the Cincinnati Reds to change their name to the Redlegs during the Cold War; and, more recently, demanding that the congressional commissary change the name of French fries and French dressing after France opposed our invasion of Iraq.

In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that the far right is historically motivated by “how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.” This, he said, is the far right’s standard operating procedure. “Behind such movements there is a style of mind . . . that has a long and varied history,” Hofstadter said. “I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” According to Hofstadter, conservative extremism is not merely closely associated with paranoia, which “has a greater affinity for bad causes than good,” it is fed by “anti-intellectualism,” which replaces reason and thought with fear and paranoia. “The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectualism is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it,” he said.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics was written in response to Senator McCarthy and his movement, which, Hofstadter said, “roused the fear that the critical mind was at a ruinous discount in this country.” In a 1950 speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy announced that he had a list of more than 200 communists working in the U.S. State Department. As it turned out, McCarthy had no list and little demonstrable evidence, but that didn’t stop him from using the news media to whip the right into hysteria. McCarthy, like Palin, knew what he knew, and like Palin, argued that the unknown could be explained by the unraveling of conspiracies and by pitting the pro-Americans against the anti-Americans. Once the anti-Americans were exposed for what they were, then all that was wrong could be set right again. “We are all sufferers from history,” Hofstadter said, “but the paranoid is the double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

A half-century after McCarthy, demagogues like Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly exploit “status anxiety” by railing against those intellectuals and know-it-alls who base their arguments on reason and facts. On the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert parodies the bombastic O’Reilly, expressing his suspicion of facts because they have a “liberal bias.” In merely by reporting the facts, the news media perpetuate this bias. Colbert’s buffoonish alter ego says he ignores facts and trusts only his gut. “Truthiness,” as he calls it, “is what you want the facts to be as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support.” Colbert said Republicans must fight the Democrats’ facts with “factiness,” or what writer Amber Day called “inflated innuendo and accusations based on information that is somewhat true, or at least cannot be proven to be untrue.”

No better practitioner of “truthiness” or “factiness” exists than Sarah Palin. In her autobiography, Going Rogue: An American Life, Palin said that ninety percent of the reporters who covered the vice-presidential debate between herself and Democrat Joe Biden were liberal. She did not include a source. In her book America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, she wrote that most college professors are atheists. She again did not include a source. In fact, according to a national survey of 1,714 professors, reported in the journal Sociology of Religion, less than ten percent of professors identified themselves as atheists. Palin wrote that the news media believe that people who regularly go to church or synagogue “are largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” She based this comment on a single quote that appeared in the Washington Post that, in fact, did not say what she claimed it did. In 1993 a Post reporter foolishly reported that followers of the Christian Right–and not people who regularly go to church–are “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” The Post retracted the comment the next day, saying “there is no factual basis for that statement.”

When, if ever, has Palin retracted a comment she’s made that had “no factual basis”?

As this book will demonstrate, Palin–like many of the Fox and talk-radio commentators who praise her–makes no attempt to distinguish between confirmed facts, outright lies, and what is made up on the fly. If the facts don’t support what Palin believes, she ignores the facts. Palin famously lied when she repeatedly claimed that she told Congress “Thanks, but no thanks” for the so-called “bridge to nowhere.” Her teleprompter did not malfunction during her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, as she said it did. Palin’s claim that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s tax plan called for raising taxes on the middle class was false. So was her promise to Republican presidential candidate John McCain that she would support his policy positions, her claim that an ethics probe cleared her of wrongdoing, and her claim that the Democrats’ healthcare legislation included “death panels.” Obama did not “pal around” with terrorists, as she repeatedly said.

While there is no evidence that Obama ever supported any group that hated America, Palin was a vocal supporter of the Alaska Independence Party, which called for the state to secede from the United States. Palin’s charges that Obama was a socialist and that he would “experiment” with socialism once in office were baseless. When Palin ran for vice president, however, she was governor of Alaska, where only one percent of the state’s land is privately owned. In Alaska, Palin said, the people “collectively . . . own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Palin’s criticism of Obama’s lofty rhetoric hides her own word salads. Her obsession with Obama’s use of teleprompters obscures the fact that she relies on teleprompters even when answering friendly questions on Fox News and needed to write notes on her hand to answer pre-screened questions at a Tea Party rally.

Palin, like other demagogues on the far right, thrives among the ignorant and fearful. If fear doesn’t exist, she creates it. If it does exist, she exploits it. Palin uses ad hominem attacks and lies to advance her reckless ambitions. According to many on the far right, Obama was not born in Hawaii; Saddam Hussein committed the 9/11 terrorist acts; all Muslims are terrorists; creationism is science but evolution is pseudo-science; global warming is a hoax; civil rights is a communist conspiracy; due process is a legal technicality; torture is unconscionable when committed by our enemies but justified when we commit it; and Fox News is fair and balanced.

Palin’s presence on the GOP ticket exposed the gap between what the late William F. Buckley, Jr., editor of the National Review and the founder of modern political conservatism, called the “Right” and the “kooks.” Buckley often warned of the dangers posed to conservatism by right-wing extremists, saying, “I’ve spent my life separating the Right from the kooks.” Buckley never met Sarah Palin. He died several months before John McCain selected her to be his running mate. Writer Christopher Buckley said his father “would have been appalled” by Palin’s candidacy. William F. Buckley rejected the kind of divisive rhetoric of Sarah Palin, and transformed the political right into the movement that elected Ronald Reagan president in 1980.

This book argues that the Republican Party needs to again purge itself of extremists who poison conservative philosophy and jeopardize the future not only of political conservatism but of American democracy. As Buckley wrote a half-century ago and columnist George Will wrote in 2011, it is in the best interests of conservatives to reject the far right. It is also in the best interests of Americans to reject political and religious extremism. This strain of conservatism has never improved the country and has always moved us away from what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

This book examines Palin and her words because they reveal so much about her, but also because they reveal so much about politicians on the far right and the people who love them. When Palin is criticized for one of her misstatements, her followers make no attempt to correct the error but, respond with malevolent, and usually anonymous, email or blog posts. When one of Palin’s neighbors complained about the traffic outside the governor’s mansion, anonymous posts on pro-Palin blogs called the neighbor “sick,” “unhinged,” and “drug-addicted.” When conservative columnist Kathleen Parker questioned Palin’s qualifications for vice president, the Palinistas sent her emails saying her that her mother should have aborted her and left her in the garbage. When Shushannah Walshe, who had covered Palin’s vice-presidential campaign for Fox News, later wrote a column correcting some of the more outrageous lies in Palin’s Going Rogue, Walshe was attacked in anonymous posts as a “smear merchant.” And when author Bella DePaulo questioned Palin’s integrity, she received a number of emails including, “Why is it that fat, ugly sluts like you are always liberal Democrats?”

{Figure 1, Horsey, a rift in conservative coalition}

Figure 1. Dave Horsey, Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Reprinted with permission of Tribune Media Services. All rights reserved.

This book intends to show that Palin’s words, rather than representing the America she claims, run contrary to nearly every fundamental idea that America, at its best, represents. Palin repeatedly refers to the main influences in her life as God, Ronald Reagan, and country. Palin’s followers say they are drawn to her because of that. Palin’s speeches and interviews expose an ignorance of Reagan and country, and her words and actions expose someone who is not motivated by religious faith. It is not faith but blind ambition that motivates Palin–and it is not faith that motivates her followers, but ignorance. After interviewing Palin, talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh told his audience, “The intellectuals don’t understand her, don’t like her. She doesn’t analyze herself. She doesn’t analyze her thoughts. She just has them and expresses them.” In his profile of Palin in GQ magazine, Todd Purdum wrote: “What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded?”

Palin may be hard to take seriously, but we should take her seriously because she reveals a lot about the state of modern politics and the media. During the McCarthy era, Hofstadter wrote, “The growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment.” New Yorker writer Sam Tanenhaus observed that Hofstadter’s statement appears to be Palin’s “operating principle.” Daniel Boorstin, author of The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America and one of America’s most distinguished conservative historians, distinguished between heroes who “fill us with purpose” and “celebrities” who seek personal fame. “A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services,” Boorstin said. “The true meaning of Palin is Sarah Palin,” Tanenhaus added, “nothing more, nothing less. She is a party unto herself.”

Salon.com writer Matt Taibbi said Palin’s autobiography Going Rogue captured the cynicism of a political age that made possible politicians like Palin. Where once political discussions were about, well, politics, this is no longer the case, Taibbi wrote. “We’ve got a whole generation that is accustomed to screaming at cultural enemies as an end to itself, for the sheer dismal fun of it. Start fighting first and figure out the reasons later,” he wrote. “Sarah Palin is the Empress-Queen of the screaming-for-screaming’s-sake generation. The people who dismiss her book Going Rogue as the petty, vindictive meanderings of a preening paranoiac with the IQ of a celery stalk completely miss the book’s significance, because in some ways it’s really a revolutionary and innovative piece of literature.”

This book examines what Palin reveals about herself, the far right, and the state of American politics. Palin has long been a source of amusement and ridicule for the left. This book barely acknowledges the left’s criticism of Palin. That ground is well-covered. Instead, most of the material comes from the conservative media, journalists, pundits, websites, and from those who know Palin and have worked for and with her. Frank Bailey, who served as one of Palin’s closest aides for years, said he believed her when she said she was committed to God and country. But Bailey said he learned that Palin cared little about either God or country and only about furthering her ambition and punishing her critics. “I believe our leaders should be strong, honest, and principled,” Bailey said, “and she is not any of those things.”

This book concludes, among other things, that the best reason for why Palin should never be elected president of anything except the Alaska Independence Party is found in her own writings, speeches, and interviews. In one episode of Saturday Night Live, comic Tina Fey delivered a brutal depiction of Palin by using the candidate’s exact words. To paraphrase humorist Robert Benchley, the best way to make a fool out of Palin is to quote her. Satirists, including editorial cartoonists, have long captured the hypocrisy and foolishness of politicians by depicting them as they are and not as they want to be seen. This book includes drawings of Palin by some of the country’s best editorial cartoonists, including winners of ten Pulitzer Prizes. The primary source for this book is Palin herself–her speeches, interviews, and two autobiographies, Going Rogue and America by Heart. When writing this book, I was interested in the Sarah Palin she chooses to put in front of the camera or the impression she chooses to make in her books. The words in this book are Palin’s, and her quotes are in the context in which they appeared.

Is there no fairer way to judge someone?