"Personal responsibility" and other rightist shibboleths

Sarah Palin's book has a lot of political score-settling, which is not surprising, and a fair amount of grievance-peddling against those she believes wronged her. Frankly, I wouldn't blame her for wanting to waterboard Andrew Sullivan over the disgraceful Trig Truther garbage he peddled. I don't begrudge her a fair number of grudges, but the thing one notices about all this is how Sarah is almost never wrong, but almost always wronged. Thomas Frank writes in the Wall Street Journal:

The opinion-page equivalent of the Palinesque style is easy enough to imagine: I would use this space to recite the indignities the world forced on me over the course of the week--an effete-looking young person ignored me the other day--plus glimpses of heartland authenticity--I sure do like pot roast--before concluding, darkly, that the reason I suffer is because I am such a sterling American.

That's funny, because that's a pretty good approximation of what the Palin book is like. She's clearly spent a lot more intellectual energy dwelling on this stuff than on ideas. Frank picks up on something I noted in my review:

But amid all this score-settling, Ms. Palin wanders into some predictable traps. When explaining her political philosophy, for example, she tells readers that "conservatism is a respect for history and tradition"; on the very next page she instructs readers to accept the creative-destructive whirl of the market, which affects society the way "wildfires in Alaska burn away deadfall to make way for new growth."

Insofar as this book reveals Palin's political philosophy, it's incoherent (the philosophy, I mean). Like most Republicans, she pays lip service to history and tradition, but really believes in the unfettered free market over everything else ... except when it suits her political interests to support protectionism. It's a shame -- and I mean that literally -- because the Republicans could use someone who champions the values and the way of life of Main Street, versus Wall Street (by which I mean big business and finance). How much better this past year would have been spent had Palin used it to read and study (and, by the way, had Mike Huckabee done the same thing instead of hosting his Fox chat show). It's this unreflective quality that puts me off Palin, and you really do see that come out in her book. Again, she got roughed up in the national campaign, and I don't blame her for being raw over that. But Katie Couric, for pity's sake, did not manhandle her. She blew that interview herself, something she barely acknowledges in the book:

Needless to say, I have had better interviews. Out of the many, many hours of tape, I had bad moments just like everyone else. I choked on a couple of responses, and in the harried pace of the campaign, I mistakenly let myself become annoyed and frustrated with many of her repetitive, biased questions. What I didn't know was that those few moments would come to define the interviews; they were repeated and mocked so often that everything else has seemingly been forgotten. And that is unfortunate. ("Going Rogue," p. 271)

Got that? Palin made a couple of mistakes, like anybody else, and was tired from the campaign, and was blindsided by a journalist who asked biased questions (e.g., the brutal "What do you read?"). The only thing wrong with her performance, really, is that she put herself in a position to be taken advantage of by the media.

One of the things that drew me to conservatism so many years ago was the inability of my side, the liberal one, to acknowledge how the things we believed in and advocated for had failed, and would fail if people lived by them. We acted as if we ought to be judged by our intentions, not the results of our principles put into action. Conservatives, on the other hand, as a general rule believed in taking responsibility for oneself and one's failures. But it turns out it's not true. We're just as prone to blaming everybody and everything else for our failures as anybody else. I don't suppose I can expect Palin to have written a mea culpa for her own shortcomings, but I think it would have been something that made at least some people who had written her off reconsider her. As it is, she's written a screed that will only serve to reinforce some of the worst tendencies of her base to consider all criticism a form of unjust persecution. That's not something limited to the right, of course, but it's a shame to see this mentality having settled in just as strongly on our side as on the left. It has broader implications for a movement whose self-examination and self-recrimination consists only of "the only thing wrong with us is we didn't do what Reagan would have done." Clark Stooksbury notes:

One lesson from the last few years is that movement conservatives are never responsible--they are always victims circumstance, the Liberal Media, or of nefarious "moderates" and "RINOs" that nobody previously noticed being in charge in the GOP.

As has often been noted, in this way of thinking, conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed. Or betrayed. Same with conservatives.