Is Palin the GOP leader of the future?

No, says Jim Manzi, in a sharp piece analyzing her convention address, which he rather liked. Manzi compares it to William Jennings Bryan's famous "Cross of Gold" speech, a magnificent example of populist rhetoric, but one voiced by a candidate who lost the presidency three times.

Jennings was reacting to the industrial revolution occurring all around him. This sweeping technological / economic change produced enormous flux in social, political and family relationships, and his search for permanence was emotionally understandable. One of the most painful things about markets is that they often make fools of our fathers. Sharp operators with an eye for the main chance often outperform those who carefully learn a trade and continue a tradition. This is especially true in times of rapid change, such as those occurring a hundred years ago, and those occurring today.

In the end, though, accepting his broad program would have meant opting out of the modern world, and no real electorate would do that for long.

[snip]

Today, tens of millions of Americans are conservative traditionalists. These people form a huge block that can be a major component of a governing coalition. But like farmers a hundred years ago, this is a shrinking part of the population. While psychological and religious commitments can be maintained, at some level of abstraction, in a wide variety of circumstances, the occupational categories and other objective attributes of day-to-day life that tend to create political interests are changing as rapidly as they were a hundred years ago. We are as fully committed to the Information Revolution today as were to the Industrial Revolution in 1896.

I wish that some of the social, moral and political implications of this were not so, but it is usually wise to segregate our hopes from our expectations.

Could it be, though, that Sarah Palin is, in fact, an avatar of a dispositionally conservative but functionally pragmatic change? As you know, I come from a small town in a part of the world where people like to hunt (my sister, the homecoming queen, used to come home from high school, get a shotgun and go sit on a deer stand till dark). Sarah Palin makes perfect sense to me as the kind of person I grew up with. She's my sister, actually, and I find that admirable, and more to the point, understandable. The people I grew up with are not ideologically conservative; their cultural conservatism is generally instinctive: they hunt, they fish, they go to church, they partake of pop culture, they go to their kids' ball games, they get on with life. Many of them have messy lives owing to divorce, teen pregnancy and the usual afflictions of modern life.

When Democrat Willie Brown says of Sarah Palin's speech:

She didn't have to prove she was "of the people." She really is the people.

...I know just what he means.

People like me see Palin as a culture warrior, but only because she's drawn so much incoming fire from her cultural enemies. In truth, I don't think there's much of a conscious culture warrior in her. She strikes me as a pragmatic Western Republican with a strong Evangelical streak that colors her politics but doesn't define it. Her Christianity is very much at home in the modern world, I think (I say "I think" because I really don't know: Palin needs to talk to reporters). I could be wrong about this -- we'll see once she does start talking to reporters -- but I'm more optimistic about Palin's role as a leader in the next iteration of the GOP than Manzi is. I say "optimistic," because in many ways I wish she were fully the kind of leader that Manzi thinks she is based on that speech.

But she comes from a small town, and knows that most small town folks don't share the concern of crunchy cons and others about the destructive nature of unfettered capitalism on traditions, communities and places. They want their Wal-mart, because it's a place where they can buy the stuff they want inexpensively. They're talking about putting a Wal-mart in my hometown; my dad is eager to see it come in, because it means he won't have to drive 20 miles to buy stuff. The philosophical, economic and cultural arguments pointy-heads like his son put forward against Wal-mart simply don't resonate; folks need to buy stuff to get through daily life, so why would they be against a store that made it easier for them to get the things they need coming closer to them? There's not much William Jennings Bryan there. Like it or not, these are folks who are, at least for now, at peace with the economic order and trends of our time. Whether they should be or not is another question.

It's like this: my folks are proud of me for having written a book that the Wall Street Journal loved, but -- and they love me too much to put it this way -- they think I'm full of shit. My kind of conservatism makes little sense to them. For better or for worse, Sarah Palin's does. Whether Palin intends to or not, she may be more forward-looking than Jim Manzi gives her credit for.