Sarah Palin vs The Narrative

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Sarah Palin, like Ronald Reagan before her, threatens to change The Narrative and to empower the people and the states, reversing the trend of Americans and their states becoming increasing dependent upon the federal government:

The Narrative is the official story about America. It is a story composed by the political left, which entered American public life with the progressive movement in the early 20th century and was elaborated in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and ’40s.

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Occasionally political leaders arise who go outside the official story line. Ronald Reagan was one. He was a threat, and a very attractive, genial, and well-grounded one at that. He was a candidate who had the temerity to question The Narrative. Worse yet, if elected he actually threatened to do something about it. He threatened to roll back taxes, eliminate the Department of Education, and reduce the size and scope of the federal government. To add insult to injury, he made a point of holding American exceptionalism—the “shining city on a hill”—at the very center of his political views.

For this, naturally, Reagan was vilified. His views were not merely mistaken, he personally was “stupid,” an “amiable dunce.” His policy prescriptions were not merely wrong, but “dangerous,” “trigger-happy,” “out of touch.” Thirty years later, it is difficult to recapture the ferocity of the left’s attacks on candidate Reagan in 1979 and 1980 and on President Reagan in the first several years of his administration. Here was no go-along, get-along guy, like so many Republican presidential candidates before and since; here was a genuine dissenter from The Narrative. And with such dissenters there can be no logical disputation or rational argument; their penalty must be personal annihilation.

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Judging by its rhetoric, the left seems singularly threatened by Sarah Palin, but they can’t explain why. Because she’s attractive? So are most politicians, including the current president. Because she’s from Alaska? So are Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski. Because she lacks “experience”? So do lots of politicians, including the current president. Does anyone imagine that a few more years of “experience” will cause Sarah Palin’s critics to warm up to her? The left simply cannot supply a convincing rationale for its own mania. That a wife and mother is successful in public life and is also a conservative, populist reformer should not be possible. A political reformer opposed to the expansion of the federal government should be a contradiction in terms. Sarah Palin can undo by her simple existence every stereotype of the left’s Narrative. This creates a visceral threat. It cannot be permitted, or even laughed off—she must be destroyed. The threat to The Narrative is what provokes the name-calling and bizarrely substance-free personal attacks that have flowed relentlessly from Palin’s critics.

- JP