A libertarian perspective: Sarah Palin and the culture of liberty

We have this op-ed by libertarian Paul Benedict categorized under "Must Read":

Most of America, via the health care debate, has now been treated to a taste of the derision that Governor Palin has experienced on a daily basis. Though Americans will not soon forget they were fed such bitter fare by their elected leaders, the malicious slander sent their way is a badge of honor. Generation after generation of Americans have walked this same ground and have been scorned from far higher thrones than these.

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Although the intellectual lights in the varsity ranks of the educated ignorant have, of late, taken a pass on criticizing Reagan publicly, they have treated him like the great Black thinkers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. They, in keeping with their love of darkness, have simply excluded his words from "intellectual life." This is hardly a surprising tactic since it would be unwise to bring up, even in derision, the brilliance of his words as heard at Normandy or as thundered from the base of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps Reagan was "blind" educationally, graduating from a small unknown college deep in the Mid West during the depression years and holding no more intellectual ambition than to read and dog ear page after page of the great conservative writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If so, he was a modern Tiresias (line 430), and like the prophet, as independent of the lords of elite intellectualism as that ancient seer was of Oedipus.

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In late 18th century England, Edward Gibbon, penned his tome The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and blamed the end of Western Civilization on Christianity. During that same period, reading the same source material, Thomas Jefferson, in a rural obscurity so dense that England thought such men deserved little more than shackles, learned that the lack of checks and balances condemned liberty to Imperial destitution and eventual destruction. Without permission and without endorsement and without the approval of any elite English editorial panel, he authored the Declaration of Independence and the framework for the United States Constitution.

Sarah Palin's distinct accent and disinterest in the citadels of intellectual enlightenment are not disadvantages to the pursuit of American political liberty, they are, if history is to speak, prerequisites.

Benedict's writing is sheer political poetry. Only a minor detail prevents it from being the stuff of punditorial perfection. The author doesn't seem to have received word that Sarah Palin did not speak at the Ronald Reagan library.

That quibble aside, this most excellent and elegant essay from a Republican of libertarian philosophical bent reminds us that it is only Sarah Palin who can mend the breech in the GOP that sent many libertarian Republicans packing after the spending excesses and the total lack of interest in reducing the size of interest in limiting the growth in the size of the federal government that was part and parcel of the legacy of both Presidents Bush.

No other potential contender for the GOP's White House challenge save the party's 2008 vice presidential candidate evokes such positive response from the fiscal, libertarian, security and social conservative wings of the Republican household. If Sarah Palin can win back the long since departed independents and Reagan Democrats to the cause of the party of Lincoln, she will make history by becoming the first of her gender to hold the highest political office in the land if she wants it. 

- JP