Earning Middle America's revulsion

A couple of readers have sent me this column from Nick Cohen, writing in the Observer (UK). Here's the key passage:

Democrats had only to maintain their composure and the White House would be theirs. ... The same could have been said of the American Democrats last week. But instead of protecting their precious advantage, they succumbed to a spasm of hatred and threw the vase, the crockery, the cutlery and the kitchen sink at an obscure politician from Alaska.

For once, the postmodern theories so many of them were taught at university are a help to the rest of us. As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was 'the other' - the threatening alien presence they defined themselves against. They might have soberly examined her reputation as an opponent of political corruption to see if she was truly the reformer she claimed to be. They might have gently mocked her idiotic creationism, while carefully avoiding all discussion of the racist conspiracy theories of Barack Obama's church.

But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk. On the one hand, the media treated her as a sex object. The New York Times led the way in painting Palin as a glamour-puss in go-go boots you were more likely to find in an Anchorage lap-dancing club than the Alaska governor's office.

On the other, liberal journalists turned her family into an object of sexual disgust: inbred rednecks who had stumbled out of Deliverance. Palin was meant to be pretending that a handicapped baby girl was her child when really it was her wanton teenage daughter's. When that turned out to be a lie, the media replaced it with prurient coverage of her teenage daughter, who was, after all, pregnant, even though her mother was not going to do a quick handover at the maternity ward and act as if the child was hers.

Hatred is the most powerful emotion in politics. At present, American liberals are not fighting for an Obama presidency. I suspect that most have only the haziest idea of what it would mean for their country. The slogans that move their hearts and stir their souls are directed against their enemies: Bush, the neo-cons, the religious right.

Too true. But for every action, there is an equal and positive reaction. The dragons they unleashed onto Sarah Palin and her kind have called forth equally puissant dragons from the Right. There wasn't much enthusiasm for John McCain's campaign till last week, not among conservatives. Nothing compared to the enthusiasm behind Barack Obama. Last week changed all that.

But what Cohen says of American liberals -- that they're not at present fighting for an Obama presidency, but only against their enemies -- is almost certainly true of American conservatives in the present moment, re: a McCain presidency. The right doesn't really know what a McCain presidency would mean for our country. I suspect that if McCain had lost a normal campaign, there would have been disappointment, but most conservatives, I'd wager, know that Republicans don't deserve four more years in the White House. We would have been able to console ourselves by saying that we had this loss coming.

Now, though -- well, conservatives just can't let their enemies triumph. Can't give 'em the satisfaction, not after last week, nor the opportunity to govern. If Obama loses this election, it will have been lost in these last few days, and not by poor Obama -- who was very sane and decent about Palin and her family -- but by his blue tribe berserkers, who, as Cohen writes, just couldn't help themselves.

None of this is edifying, of course. But all of it is illuminating of where we are in American life today. If you read my book, you might remember a moment toward the end in which I'd sat in a bar in my neighborhood listening to a group of middle-aged yuppies joking about what a great thing it would be for a terrorist to drive a truck bomb into Prestonwood Baptist Church here in north Texas. Ha ha! I was so disgusted by these people that I left the bar and drove home almost trembling with anger. What happened to Palin last week evoked a similar emotional reaction. We can't, or we shouldn't, vote or act on emotion. Still, there it is, and it is tremendous. I have two months to think through all this after observing how Palin does, but it's going to be hard for any of us to parse policy differences this fall. In a long, thoughtful post reacting to Palin's speech, Megan McArdle -- who is not politically sympatico with Palin -- predicted that from here till November, it'll be all culture war, all the time. Yep.

In a subsequent post, McArdle quoted the libertarian Will Wilkinson (who loves Palin but won't vote for McCain) and others talking about the power of Palin as a symbol. I found this comment from a libertarian atheist friend of McArdle's striking: