Monthly Archives: August 2009

On elites, ordinary barbarians, and the willingness to accept help

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The Anchoress linked back the other day, in her Ted Kennedy retrospective, to a 2005 Peggy Noonan column (one of her best, I think) expressing her foreboding about America and its future:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it’s a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with “right track” and “wrong track” but missing the number of people who think the answer to “How are things going in America?” is “Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.” . . .

I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there’s no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we’re leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma’s house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding—the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn’t think so.

But this recounting doesn’t quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there’s a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.

Now, there’s a lot I could say about this. If I wanted to analyze Noonan, I could talk about this being the seed of her infatuation with Barack Obama that would bloom three years later—that his general and amorphous promise of “hope” and “change” offered her a psychologically irresistible escape hatch from her worry that “things are broken and tough history is coming.” Or I could look at it theologically and express my agreement with her, my belief that in fact, things are broken, and tough history is coming, that we have dark times looming ahead before the final return of Christ. Or I could consider her point from an historical perspective, with the reminder that many had a similar sense in the 1960s; one example would be Allan Drury, whose foreboding of the brokenness of American society caused the series of novels he began with Advise and Consent, a straightforward work of political wonkery, to evolve into something that can only be called political apocalyptic.

As it happens, though, I’m more interested in where Noonan went with this, with her analysis of the elite response to the situation she limns.

Our recent debate about elites has had to do with whether opposition to Harriet Miers is elitist, but I don’t think that’s our elites’ problem.

This is. Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it. . . .

That’s what I think is going on with our elites. There are two groups. One has made a separate peace, and one is trying to keep the boat afloat. I suspect those in the latter group privately, in a place so private they don’t even express it to themselves, wonder if they’ll go down with the ship. Or into bad territory with the trolley.

I lack the advantages of Noonan’s insider position, but I think she’s right about what’s going on; at least, that’s certainly how things look from out here in the hinterlands. I do not think, however, that she’s right about elitism being a problem. I think elitism is a problem for our elites; I think we saw it to some degree in their response to Harriet Miers, and I think we see it in a much larger way in their response to Sarah Palin—and I don’t think you have to believe in the particular ability and fitness of either woman to see that. (In retrospect, I don’t think they were wrong about Miers; but that doesn’t mean they were right for the right reason.)

For those who have made their separate peace, whose unspoken motto is “I got mine, you get yours,” this elitism is rooted in the simple, very human but very juvenile desire not to share. They believe they’ve earned what they have, and they don’t want anyone pushing into their little club from outside. This is the attitude common to the worst of the aristocracy in every human civilization throughout history; we need not be surprised to find it in ours.

That said, it’s the elitism of the second group that’s more dangerous, for a reason very similar to what I called last week “the leaven of the Pharisees.” It’s their elitism that Noonan herself expresses, that is the root of her disdain for Gov. Palin, with her assertion that “Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us.” The unspoken corollary to this is that it’s only our elites who are supposed to do that, and how dare anybody else try to horn in? It’s a big job, and at some level they’re worried (most of them, anyway; I have the sense our president doesn’t share this humility) that they aren’t going to pull it off—but by jingo, it’s their job, and they aren’t going to share it.

Why? Because they know that whether they’re up to the task or not, they’re the best possible people to be doing it, and certainly nobody else could possibly be. They have all the proof they need for that complacent certainty in the fact that they are the ones who are rich and educated and accomplished and famous, and nobody else is; their worldly accolades are all the evidence they could require of their own superiority to the rest of the world.

The only problem with this attitude is, it’s pure and utter bunk. The science-fiction novelist Elizabeth Moon explains this well in her book Against the Odds, where she has one of her characters observe,

Any system which does not give ample opportunity for talent to displace unearned rank will, in the end, come to grief. . . .

My point is that every time society has given it a chance, it’s been shown that talent exists in previously despised populations. . . . Over and over again, it’s been shown that an ordinary sampling of the population, including those considered inferior or hopeless, contains men and women of rare intelligence, wit, and ability. Just as ponds turn over their water yearly, revitalizing the pond’s life, so a good stirring of the human pot brings new blood to the top, and we’re all the better for it.

The reason for the elite opposition to Gov. Palin is that she’s from “an ordinary sampling of the population”—not from an elite family, not from an elite school, not from an elite profession, but a journalism major from the University of Idaho (her fourth college, no less) who lived in a small town on the edge of civilization who actually worked (and killed things!) with her hands. She’s an ordinary barbarian like most of us in this country. As such, they refuse to believe that she could possibly be a woman of “rare intelligence, wit, and ability”; the very idea creates severe cognitive dissonance for them.

This prejudice—for it’s nothing less than that; in its extreme forms, we may fairly call it bigotry—is highly unfortunate, because it only worsens the difficulty of getting the trolley back on the rails. For one thing, it aggravates the distrust that already exists between us ordinary barbarians and the elites of this country; this makes us less likely to follow them when they have a bad idea, to be sure, but it also makes us less likely to follow them when they’re right. It makes our politics more reactive and more divided, which inevitably makes them less productive.

And for another, whether our elites want to admit it or not, they’re simply wrong in their belief that they and only they have the talent, skills, perspective and character to right the trolley. There are many ordinary barbarians in this country—on the right and on the left, both—who would have a great deal to contribute to the leading of this nation, if they only got the chance. Gov. Palin is in many ways their avatar, someone who has already created that chance for herself and demonstrated prodigious talent as a leader and politician, and who I hope will create opportunities for others to follow suit.

What America really needs (one thing, at least) is for others to rise up and follow her into leadership roles in this country, to turn over the water in the pond and bring “new blood to the top”—new blood with new ideas, new experiences, and a new perspective on our nation and its problems. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see that happening on any major scale as long as the elites resist—and they will continue to resist, both out of their sense of their own superiority and out of their desire not to share their baubles. The latter is probably the easier to overcome; the former is harder, because it can be very, very difficult to admit that we need help, and especially to admit that we need help from those we’ve been accustomed to regarding as less capable than ourselves. As long as our elites can continue to see the rest of us that way, they’re not going to be willing to make that admission.

Which means that the only way to improve our situation is a grassroots revolution; the levers of power and of media influence may be in the hands of our elites, but the levers of the ballot box are still, ultimately, in ours. If we, the people want to force a path for ordinary barbarians into the halls of the elites, we have the ability to do so, if we will band together and use it. But in the meantime, we need to support the ones we have—with Sarah Palin at the head of the list.

Now, if your political convictions are simply too different from Gov. Palin’s for you to support her, then so be it; those matter, no question. In that event, though, I’d encourage you to look for ordinary barbarians who do agree with you, whom you can support. I firmly believe that the domination of our politics by one class of our society is, in its own way, as serious a political issue as any we face; and it’s one which we need to address, and soon, if we want to keep the trolley from going clean off the rails. Our elites aren’t up to the task by themselves, whether they’re willing to admit the fact or not; they need our help, and we need to provide it. Wanted or otherwise.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

 

Run to win

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Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.

—1 Corinthians 9:24-27 (ESV)

I had a Sunday-school teacher one time who talked about Paul describing the life of faith as a race; and at some point during that class, he declared, “And Paul says, don’t run in order to win.” I argued with him (opinionated? Me? Whatever gave you that idea?), but he wouldn’t listen to me, and he wouldn’t look it up—he told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, changed the subject, and went on with the class.

Now, there are some mistakes I understand, but that one made no sense to me. I’m sure differences in temperament played in to this, since I can be a pretty competitive sort, but why would you want the Scripture to say, “Run, but don’t try to win?” If you aren’t trying as hard as you can to win, why are you bothering to run? Especially when you consider that in the life of faith, if we win, that doesn’t mean that everyone else loses—we can all win together, and in fact, the better each of us runs our own race, the more help we are to all those around us as they run theirs.

I suspect Paul saw things much the same way, since he clearly likes athletic metaphors. I imagine, from this and other aspects of his writings, that he had a pretty strong competitive streak; sure, he was a saint, and a brilliant man, and God used him powerfully to do amazing things in and for the body of Christ, but he can’t have been easy to live with. As well, he clearly had considerable respect for how hard the athletes of his time worked and how completely they focused themselves in order to give themselves the best chance possible to win the prize at the Games; it’s understandable why he saw them as a model for the Christian life.

The amazing thing, as he notes here, is that the prize for which those athletes competed was nothing more than a laurel wreath! Given a week or two, their prize would be no more. If they could work as hard as they did, if they could dedicate themselves as completely as they did, to win a prize they wouldn’t even be able to keep, shouldn’t we as Christians be at least as focused on the prize of eternal life which God has set before us? Shouldn’t we be running to win, rather than dawdling along by the side of the road, wandering off to explore the thistles?

Paul certainly thinks we should. Run the good race, he tells us; run well, run hard, run with all you have—run to win. Run to win, and stay focused on the prize before you; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called—it’s already yours, but you need to grab hold and live into it. Don’t let anything else sidetrack you or slow you down, but let everything you do be focused on running as well as you possibly can, to the glory of God and the accomplishment of his purposes.

(Adapted from “Run to Win”)

 

Social networking and online anonymity

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According to Paul Mah on TechRepublic, they don’t mix. If I understand him correctly, the problem is that sites like Facebook leak personal information through their ad networks, and also through third-party apps (the games and quizzes that proliferate). Combined with the use of tracking cookies, the results of this could be quite far-reaching:

The implications are sobering and call for a reexamination of how we interact with the Web. Since tracking cookies have been in use for years, it is entirely possible that aggregator sites with historical records could theoretically link our social networking profiles with all our past accesses in its database.

Which, again assuming I’m tracking him correctly, would result in the sort of thing we saw in the movie Minority Report, with full profiles of our activities, associations, interests, and (of course) purchases available online to anyone who cared to pay for them. Something to think about.

Remember: we don’t speak for God

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hIKPKjl0-pg

I guess this video has been bouncing around a bit, and has generated some opprobrium for the officer featured here. For my part, I’m troubled by the fact that this officer appears to be forcing this protestor to take down his sign with no justification but the threat of force—this is not how we want our police to behave—but in all honesty, I can’t say I like the protestor’s attitude much, either. I do, however, appreciate Alan W.’s reflections on this:

God has been doing a number on me with how many times what I want, believe, think and feel are simply reflections of the fall in Genesis 3 and trying to be “like God.” . . .

I feel for Officer Cheeks much as I do about Joe the plumber. They are folks caught up in the moment and demonstrated the fact that they are humans. And Americans will make them pay the price for that too.

Here are two prophetic words for the Body of Christ. Treat people with GRACE and of course Matthew 7. I have a second word for the People of God, don’t be a butt about things. If we don’t like something fine but don’t confuse what we like with what God likes.

Well put.

Run to Win

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(Isaiah 6:1-5; 1 Timothy 6:11-16, 20-21)

As I think I’ve said before, it’s funny the things that stick in your head. I remember a Sunday school class sometime during junior high school, taught by the father of a friend of mine, in which he was telling us about Paul describing the life of faith as a race; and then he declared, “And Paul says, don’t run in order to win.” I argued with him, because that’s simply not true; Paul says quite emphatically, “Run in such a way that you may win.” If you want to look it up for yourself, it’s 1 Corinthians 9:24. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t listen to me, and he wouldn’t look it up—he told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, changed the subject, and went on with the class, and I perforce shut up; but I didn’t pay much attention after that. Instead, I was off in my own little world; and if Mr. Mouw noticed, he didn’t feel the need to say anything about it.

Partly, I’m sure, my ego was hurt; but more than that, I was taken aback, and I needed to take time to think about it. For one thing, I was surprised that my teacher had gotten that wrong, and even more surprised that he hadn’t even checked, when I challenged him, to see if he’d made a mistake. More importantly, though, the mistake made no sense to me. I’m sure differences in temperament played in to this, since I can be a pretty competitive sort, but why would you want the Scripture to say, “Run, but don’t try to win?” If you aren’t trying as hard as you can to win, why are you bothering to run? Especially when you consider that in the life of faith, if we win, that doesn’t mean that everyone else loses—we can all win together, and in fact, the better each of us runs our own race, the more help we are to all those around us as they run theirs.

Now, as you may have noticed, Paul likes athletic metaphors. I suspect, from this and other aspects of his writings, that he probably had a pretty strong competitive streak; sure, he was a saint, and a brilliant man, and God used him powerfully to do amazing things in and for the body of Christ, but he can’t have been easy to live with. Besides that, though, I think when he looked at the athletes of his day, he had considerable respect for how hard they worked and how completely they focused themselves in order to give themselves the best chance possible to win the prize at the Games—and as he notes in 1 Corinthians, that prize was nothing more than a laurel wreath! Given a week or two, their prize would be no more. If they could work as hard as they did, if they could dedicate themselves as completely as they did, to win a prize they wouldn’t even be able to keep, shouldn’t we as Christians be at least as focused on the prize of eternal life which God has set before us? Shouldn’t we be running to win, rather than dawdling along by the side of the road, wandering off to explore the thistles?

Certainly Paul thinks so, and so he encourages Timothy here. That’s not clear in the NIV, which reads “fight the good fight” in verse 12—but while that is what Paul said back in chapter 1, where he was encouraging Timothy to go head-to-head with the false teachers in Ephesus and not back down, that’s not actually what he says here. Rather than the military metaphor he used earlier, this is the language of athletic competition which he uses in so many other places. Run the good race, Paul tells Timothy; run well, run hard, run with all you have—run to win. Run to win, and stay focused on the prize before you; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called, which is already yours but which you need to grab hold of and live into. Don’t let anything else sidetrack you or slow you down, but let everything you do be focused on running as well as you possibly can, to the glory of God and the accomplishment of his purposes.

What that looks like, Paul lays out in verse 11. First he tells Timothy, “Flee from all this”; reject not only the false teaching going around Ephesus, but reject the motives driving the false teachers. Reject their desire for gain, reject their desire to serve themselves and feed their own desires, and pursue a different way. It’s interesting how Paul lays that way out. First, he says, pursue righteousness and godliness. These represent the two dimensions of the Christian life, the vertical and the horizontal—our relationship with God and our relationships with those around us. This is the global statement: rather than living for yourself, focus on being right with God and being right with others. Live your life in such a way as to please God—make that your top priority; and part of the way you do that is to do right by the people you meet in this world. This, of course, looks back in part to some of the things we’ve talked about in the past few weeks, such as taking care of the powerless and the needy, and keeping our relationships pure.

Next, Paul tells Timothy to pursue faith and love. These aren’t virtues exactly, but something deeper—they’re the foundations of the Christian life. This is a strong contrast with the false teachers. Clearly, they weren’t living by faith in God, they were putting their trust in money, and in all the other things in which the world puts its trust. That’s easy to do, since we can see these things and know exactly what we have; we can see our money, we can look at our bank account and know precisely what’s in it, and we can figure out just what we can afford to do. We can’t see God, nor do we have any way to know for sure how or when he will provide for us—or even, some might say, if he will provide for us. To live by faith in God isn’t easy for us, because it seems much riskier than putting our faith in things we can see and touch and hold and count. And yet, this is what Paul says Timothy needs to do, and what we need to do—to set aside the worldly-mindedness of the false teachers and put faith in God. Otherwise, whatever our other virtues, we aren’t living a Christian life in any meaningful sense.

Along with that, Paul tells Timothy to pursue love. Now, the world would agree with that one, but it would mean something very different by it; there are a lot of folks out there who will tell you they’re living their lives for love, when what they’re really pursuing is romance, or lust, or someone to make them feel better about themselves. What Paul’s talking about is something very different—it’s the self-giving love of God, the love which gives of itself for the good of others. The love of God isn’t about getting for ourselves, unlike so many of our human imitations, it’s about giving ourselves away; and so, where the false teachers were all about the profit they could make off the church, Timothy’s call is to give himself away, to lay down his life, for his brothers and sisters in Christ, for the people of God—for the church. To which we may imagine Timothy protesting, “But Paul, look how badly they’ve treated me—they don’t deserve it!”; and in return, we might well imagine Paul saying, “Look how badly they treated Jesus—at least they haven’t crucified you yet. He loves us anyway; you love them anyway.”

In line with this, Paul says, “pursue gentleness.” It can be easy to justify being hard on people by calling it “tough love”; certainly there are times when there’s a need for firmness, and certainly that will usually provoke squawks of opposition. But even when the time comes to lay down the law, as it certainly had for Timothy, it must be done with gentleness, taking care to give no unnecessary hurt. There was no doubt a part of him that would have liked to punish the false teachers who had made his life so difficult—to make them pay for the trouble they had caused. As Paul reminded him, however, there was no place for that in his call to ministry. Whatever he did, he must do with gentleness, seeking only to restore those who had wandered away from Jesus, not to claim even the smallest measure of vengeance for himself.

The other item on Paul’s list is endurance. This is a mixed metaphor, since I’m not sure how you can pursue endurance, but the point is clear: Timothy is not to be one of those who goes a little way and then gives up. This is a critical part of running to win, because it’s not enough to set the pace—you have to be able to keep it up. The best illustration of this I can think of comes from the life of the great Oregon long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine. Growing up in the Northwest, I heard a lot about Pre; and part of his story was the Munich Summer Olympics. He was always an aggressive runner, and running the 5000 meters at the ’72 games, he shot out of the gate, setting a pace that would have won him not only the gold, but a world record, if he could have sustained it. Unfortunately, he couldn’t, and in the last 150 meters, having led the whole race to that point, he was passed first by Lasse Viren . . . then by Mohamed Gamoudi . . . and then, 15 meters from the finish line, by Ian Stewart. He led most of the way, but he finished fourth. Winning the race isn’t just about doing well for a while, it’s about sustaining the effort, doing well all the way to the end.

This is the key, because it’s not enough to pursue righteousness and godliness for a while, then take a break and chase your own desires for a bit; it’s not good enough to pursue faith and love for a while, then slide back into the materialism and self-absorption of the world for a spell. It’s not good enough to be gentle until things get hard, then give it up. If we’re going to run the good race of faith, if we’re going to run in such a way as to win the prize, we need to be like the Energizer bunny—we need to keep going, and going, and going. What’s more, we need to realize that God doesn’t just call us to run when it’s easy, he calls us to keep running even, and especially, when it’s hardest.

Of course, we can’t do this alone; that’s why athletes always train with partners, and why they have trainers. To grow in endurance, we have to push ourselves beyond our own idea of how far we can go—and we can’t do that alone; we need people to urge and encourage us to keep going, to keep pushing, to go further. I learned this during my last year in Colorado, taking a couple classes from a veteran personal trainer who had semi-retired to Grand Lake and opened a little fitness business to keep herself busy. There were a couple times I keeled over right there in class, but by the time I had to stop I had a much, much better sense of what I could actually do than I had ever had before. Without her example and direction, and without the desire to keep up with her and the others in the class—there’s that competition thing again; running to win is a very different thing when you’re doing it in a group—I never would have done that. I never would have pushed myself, again and again, beyond what I thought my limits were, and so I never would have discovered that I was wrong.

We see the reason this is so important in verse 20, where Paul writes, “Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you.” What has been entrusted to him? The gospel, and the responsibility to lead the church to live it out. Remember what I’ve said all the way through this series—the heartbeat of this letter, which we hear over and over again, is that we have been given the mission to bring the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ to all people in all the world, and everything we do must be to that purpose. The race we run isn’t something we run by ourselves, and it’s not just about us as individuals winning our own prizes; it’s about all of us running together, encouraging each other on, helping each other out, and it’s about the people we attract to run with us. If we stop running for a while, we aren’t the only ones affected—everyone around us is, too. Run to win, not just for your own sake, but for everyone else’s.

The Palin Revolution, one year on

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One year ago today, I was going bonkers, and so was my blog traffic, as the whole political world was going mad at John McCain’s selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. After the truly awe-inspiring disinformation campaign Sen. McCain and his staffers ran to keep his pick a secret, and the wondrous overnight thread on Adam Brickley’s site, with Drew (who turned out to be a staffer with the McCain campaign in Dayton) dropping hints that Gov. Palin would be the pick, to have the news come out and be confirmed was the greatest joy I’ve ever had in politics (not that there are many competitors for that particular honor).

One year later, I don’t take any of that back. I’m sorry for the hammering Gov. Palin and her family have taken, much of which has sickened me; I’m sorry for the lies and smears she’s had to deal with, and for what that says about the state of our political culture. But my respect for her, and my sense that she’s the best leader this country has to put forward, haven’t changed, even through a fairly bumpy year.

Some might say that’s unreasonable of me; but in proper perspective, I don’t believe it is. That perspective, I think, is supplied by a long article Stephen F. Hayward posted a couple days ago on NRO entitled, “The Reagan Revolution and Its Discontents.” It’s a good and thoughtful piece, and I commend it to your attention for a number of reasons. Hayward wrote it, by his own statement, to clear away some of the fogginess of nostalgia from the conservative memory of President Reagan and his accomplishments, and also to remind us, almost thirty years on, of the political reality the Great Communicator faced in his day; the piece succeeds quite nicely in both aims, in my judgment. I was particularly interested, though, in this section for its application to the current political situation:

Both [Reagan and FDR] had to battle not only with the other party, but also with their own. Both men by degrees successfully transformed their own parties, while at the same time frustrating and deflecting the course of the rival party for a time. This, I suggest, is the heart of the real and enduring Reagan Revolution (or Age of Reagan).

Liberal ideologues who despaired over the limits of the New Deal overlooked that FDR had to carry along a large number of Democrats who opposed the New Deal. Reagan’s experience was similar, as he had to carry along a number of Republicans who were opposed to or lukewarm about his conservative philosophy. This problem would dog Reagan for his entire presidency. Robert Novak observed in late 1987: “True believers in Reagan’s efforts to radically transform how America is governed were outnumbered by orthodox Republicans who would have been more at home serving Jerry Ford.” . . .

Reagan’s dramatic landslide election in 1980 posed two problems: Democrats had to figure out how to oppose Reagan; Republicans, how to contain him. . . .

The lesson of FDR and Reagan is that changing one’s own party can be more difficult than beating the opposition.

As Hayward says, understanding that lesson is critical to a reasonable and meaningful evaluation of President Reagan, or for that matter of Gov. Reagan; and as has been pointed out here before, it’s also critical to a reasonable and meaningful evaluation of Sarah Palin.

This is true in two ways. In the first place, of course, it’s true of her career before last August 29; even more than President Reagan, her political rise was a rise against the establishment of her own party. If you’re not familiar with the story, R. A. Mansour’s post “Who Is Sarah Palin”offers an excellent sketch. Sarah Palin ran for mayor of Wasilla as a political insurgent against a good old boys’ network that was running the town for its own benefit; once in office, she continued to show the guts to buck the town establishment.

Later, having been named as ethics commissioner and chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission—her big break, and her first big payday—when she discovered that one of her fellow commissioners, Randy Ruedrich (who also happened to be the head of the Alaska Republican Party) was misusing his position, she blew the whistle, even though it meant resigning her job. Then she ran against the Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, who had appointed both her and Ruedrich; in retrospect, we can say “of course she won,” but it was anything but an “of course” at the time.

Like Gov. Reagan, she was not the choice of the party establishment, but was launching a takeover from outside that establishment; as with President Reagan, her dramatic victory posed as big a problem to her own party, who saw her not as their leader but as someone they had to contain, as to the theoretical opposition. President Reagan never told the Congress “All of you here need some adult supervision!” as Gov. Palin did (earning herself the lasting enmity of the Republican president of the Alaska State Senate, Lyda Green), but I’m sure he would have appreciated the line.

This is why she spent the first part of her term in Alaska working as much with the Democrats as with her (supposed) own party: she had to, in order to accomplish things like chopping up the backroom deal Gov. Murkowski had worked out with Big Oil to replace it with a workable new severance-tax law that would be good for Alaska, not just for Big Oil, or to put a bill together that would finally get a process moving to build a natural-gas pipeline from the Northern Slope to the Lower 48.

Now, of course, her opponents like to minimize her accomplishments and carp about this or that, but they’re missing the point: given the fact that she was governing in the teeth of opposition from her own party, working to transform that party as much as to enact policy, it may well be possible to say of her as we can of President Reagan that Gov. Palin did less than she had hoped and less than people wanted—that doesn’t change the fact that, as Gary McDowell said of the Gipper, she did “a **** of a lot more than people thought [she] would.”

This is a point which is especially critical to bear in mind in considering this last calendar year for Gov. Palin. Where before, she was able to work with the Alaska Democrats to get legislation passed—after all, her initiatives were popular, and her war with her own party establishment only helped them in their efforts against Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young—her performance in the presidential campaign made her Public Enemy No. 1 for the national Democratic Party, meaning that the Alaska Democrats could no longer afford to do anythingthat would give her good publicity. (Given the close connections between prominent Democrats in Alaska and the Obama White House, there’s no doubt in my mind that that imperative came all the way from the top.)

This, combined with the time- and energy-wasting barrage of ludicrous, transparently malicious ethics charges, combined to hamstring her administration. The #1 goal of the Left was to keep her from accomplishing anything (yes, I believe that was even ahead of bankrupting her through legal bills, which I figure was #2), so as to be able to portray her in future races as a lightweight who was overmatched by her office. Now, in a rational world, this wouldn’t have worked, because by the numbers, the Republicans had sufficient votes in the legislature to pass her agenda into law; but as already noted, this isn’t a rational world, and a large chunk of the Alaska GOP wasn’t on her side, but rather sided with the Democrats against her. This is the sort of thing that can happen when you’re faced with having to try to transform your own party.

To complicate matters, this struggle in Alaska has been mirrored on a national scale. The GOP is referred to as the party of Reagan, but it isn’t in any meaningful sense; indeed, I think Heyman overstates the degree to which it ever really was. One can point to Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution of 1994 and the Contract with America as evidence of a Reaganite legacy, but Rep. Gingrich himself was an insurgent in the party, and the conservative principles of the Contract didn’t really last long; perhaps the most telling thing is that the party didn’t nominate a conservative as its standard-bearer in 1998, but an old warhorse of the pre-Reagan Republican establishment, Bob Dole. Indeed, to this date, for all his success, Ronald Reagan remains sui generis among Republican presidential nominees.

As a result, the national Republican establishment reacted (and keeps reacting) to Gov. Palin in the same way they reacted to Gov. Reagan—belittling her intelligence, mocking her ideas, trying to deny her credit for her accomplishments, and generally trying to tear her down in any way they can, while still trying to make as much use as they can out of her popularity. This, combined with the hostility of the party’s state organization in Alaska, left her with little structural support or cover against the attacks of the Left (an understatement, actually, given that some in the party actually piled on). Collectively, this put her in a very unusual position for an elected official: having her office become a hindrance to her effectiveness and ability to function rather than an advantage.

As such, Gov. Palin’s utterly un-telegraphed resignation is one of those events that was shocking at the time but in retrospect seems almost obvious—we should have seen it coming. We would have, were it not the sort of thing that professional politicians never do. Your typical politician, after all, holds on to power with the awe-inspiring single-mindedness of the clinically obsessed; we knew Gov. Palin to be anything but a typical politician and a woman who could say, “Politically speaking, if I die, I die,” but our expectations are too well shaped by the normal course of events to be truly able to predict that she would defy that norm as she did. Had we been able to join her in thinking outside the box (or perhaps I should say, the straitjacket) of those expectations, though, we would have seen what she saw: that the only way for her to carry on effectively with her mission was to step down from office and go to work as a private citizen.

Which, of course, she has, with verve and gusto and considerable effectiveness. (Google “Facebook ‘Sarah Palin,'” and you’ll get “about 9,520,000” hits.) As Gov. Reagan did, so Gov. Palin has found it necessary to go “into the wilderness”—which is to say, back into the real world outside a government position—in order to carry on with her efforts to shift the institutional GOP back toward its conservative base. The Juneau statehouse was too small, remote and encumbered a platform for her to be able to work effectively; she needed to create a better one for herself. In her use of Facebook, she’s demonstrating her ability to do exactly that—yes, she’ll need to go beyond Facebook as well, but it’s proving a mighty fine place to start—and though she’s dragging much of the GOP elite with her kicking, screaming, and complaining, she is dragging them nevertheless. No matter how much they might protest or wish it were otherwise, she is the one who has set the agenda for the party’s opposition to Obamacare; she is the one who played the biggest part in stopping the administration’s energy-tax agenda cold; and increasingly, she is recognized as the Republican whose leadership matters the most in this country, regardless of official position or lack thereof.

Of course, there are many people in both parties who have a vested interest in changing that reality—Democrats who oppose her, and Republicans who want to contain her—and so the resistance continues. As such, though Gov. Palin’s resignation outflanked them, the efforts to use it against her continue as well. Most of those efforts are pointless and ineffective, since they rest on the assertion that Gov. Palin is finished in politics because she no longer holds office; that doesn’t hold water, both because of their continued attacks and because the American people don’t value being elected to office as highly as politicians do. There is one question, however, that does linger with many people: if she resigned from office once, how can we be sure she wouldn’t do it again if she won the White House?

The answer to that is found in considering both halves of the problem she faced in Alaska. One, the state’s executive-ethics law, does not exist on the national level; were she elected president, she would not be vulnerable to a barrage of bogus charges as she was as governor. The other, the absolute opposition she faced from a majority of her own party in Alaska, is as I said part and parcel of the work of transforming the GOP, and would be a problem for President Palin to some degree as it was for President Reagan. However, there are two good reasons to think that it would be a problem which would be far easier for President Palin to overcome than it was for Governor Palin.

One, if she does in fact end up running and winning in 2012 (or at any later date), she will by virtue of that simple fact have a demonstrated national support base of some 60 million voters. As Barack Obama has already shown, being able to remind people that you won gives you considerable political leverage. That’s leverage far beyond what she had simply by virtue of winning a single gubernatorial election in a low-population state, because that’s a vastly greater number of voters. (Had things played out differently in Alaska, had she had a couple of terms, her re-election and her ability to influence the re-election campaigns of other Alaskan politicians would have started to give her that sort of leverage on a state level, but that leverage would always have been affected by events on the national scene.) As such, she would have a lot more political capital to use to deal with recalcitrant members of her own party, as well as with more conservative members of the Democratic caucuses.

And two, Gov. Palin has a tremendous opportunity ahead of her in the 2009-10 elections. By campaigning for Republican candidates around the country, she has the chance to build a constituency for herself in the national party institution, in three ways. The first, most basic, and most important, is by working to get people elected who share her principles, and who thus will tend out of their own political beliefs and instincts to support the same things she supports. By campaigning, especially in House elections, for the election of true conservatives—and I hope she finds good opportunities to do so not just in the general election but in primaries, working to win nominations for conservatives over establishment types (as for example, dare I say, Marco Rubio in Florida?)—she has the chance to shape the congressional Republican caucuses into bodies which will be more likely to follow her lead, should she run and win in 2012.

The second way is dicier, but still essential: by campaigning for other Republican candidates and helping them win elections, she’ll earn good will and put them in her debt. As the recent behavior of Saxby Chambliss shows, this isn’t as reliable a way of building support as it should be—you just can’t count on most politicians not to welch on a debt—but it’s necessary all the same. You might not be able to count on them returning the favor if you help them, but you can surely count on them not helping you if you don’t.

The third comes back to that whole question of leverage. As I said, if Gov. Palin becomes President Palin, she will have shown by that fact that she has a strong political base; but that will be much more impressive to folks on the Hill if she’s already shown that her base won’t just help her get elected, but also translates into downballot clout. If she flexes real political muscle during the mid-term elections, if she shows that her support is broad enough and strong enough to influence House, Senate and gubernatorial races across the country—if she makes it clear to everyone that being endorsed by Sarah Palin is a good thing for Republican politicians—then the GOP will get the idea that opposing her is not likely to be a good thing for Republican politicians. That will make the congressional GOP and the rest of the party establishment much more likely to follow her lead.

All of which is to say, the next key stage of the Palin Revolution, if it is to come fully to fruition, is the next election cycle; that will be the point at which her leadership will, I believe, really begin to take hold in the party in an institutional way, and the necessary groundwork for the future Palin administration for which we hope. It’s been a hard year for Gov. Palin, but it’s been a year which has produced many good things, too; and as startling and controversial as her resignation was, she has proven that it was not the beginning of the end of her political career, but rather the end of the beginning. The best, I believe, is yet to be; and for that, I am thankful.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

 

Reflections on the case of Mark Sanford

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Down in South Carolina, the calls continue to build for Gov. Mark Sanford to resign his office. It’s a long fall for a man once considered a possible running mate for John McCain last year, and a serious presidential contender in 2012, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any shorter—as much as anything, because Sanford just doesn’t seem to be able to let go and accept the full consequences of his actions. There are those in South Carolina who would excuse him because they don’t trust his lieutenant governor, Andre Bauer, and don’t want to see Lt. Gov. Bauer succeed Gov. Sanford; but if Gov. Sanford is that concerned about Lt. Gov. Bauer, he should have thought of that before having an affair. He has dishonored himself and disqualified himself from office; honor demands that he step down, regardless of whether he finds his successor satisfactory or not.

The truth is, at this point, Mark Sanford reminds me of Pete Rose (if not as scummy). Mike Schmidt made a telling comment recently about Rose:

If it were me, and I had lived a lie for 14 years, and I went up to tell the commissioner that I was sincerely sorry for what I’ve done to my family, to the sport, etc., I probably would be back in baseball now and in the Hall of Fame—because I would have been a tremendously remorseful individual. And I would have felt the burden of that the rest of my life, in everything that I did. And I would have, in my travels, been a totally different person.

My lifestyle would have changed. I would have felt an obligation to change and to become someone that the baseball world would once again learn to love after forgiving me. I would have been that guy. And I don’t think Pete has been.

So far, Gov. Sanford hasn’t been that guy either. Had he been willing to confess, step down, take it like a man, and actually take the time to put his life back together to where it really was what he had always presented it to be, his political life would probably already be in the recovery phase; after all, that sort of behavior is so rare among prominent politicians, it would have impressed a lot of people. But instead, he’s trying to hang onto everything he possibly can with both fists, and all he’s doing is making matters worse for himself in the long term. As a result, in the long term, Mark Sanford will matter most in this country as a cautionary tale of how you just never know with politicians, and how they can always let you down.

That doesn’t mean, though, that they always will; there are those who are honorable and faithful, people of true character who can be trusted to keep their word if they give it. The hard part is separating them out from the gifted liars who’ve internalized Groucho Marx’s crack that sincerity is the key, and if you can fake that, you’ve got it made; and the only way to make that separation is to let time, exposure and opposition do their work. The great difference between Barack Obama and John McCain last November wasn’t ideological, because Sen. McCain doesn’t have an ideology; the great difference was that, for good or ill, we knew who Sen. McCain is, because over the years it’s all been made very, very clear—but we really didn’t have a clue about Sen. Obama. That’s why there are such an astonishingly large number of people (for this early in his term) coming out and expressing regret for voting for the guy: he isn’t who they let themselves believe him to be.

Now, take this truth, and on the first anniversary of Sarah Palin’s elevation to the national stage, look back in the light of this truth at the battles she’s had to fight this past year. Look back at the PDSers and the plague of anklebiters, the oppo researchers parachuted into Wasilla and the media misrepresentations, and ask: What have they really done? Have they destroyed her? No; they’ve managed to convince a lot of people who would never have voted for her anyway, and they’ve planted concerns in the minds of a lot of potential supporters, but they haven’t done any damage she can’t undo, given time and exposure. What they havemanaged to do, though, is to establish pretty clearly that even given the combined efforts of thousands of motivated people backed by all the money they need for all the digging they want to do, there’s simply no real dirt to be dug up on Sarah Palin.

In other words, all they’ve managed by their efforts is to demonstrate that they can’t bring Gov. Palin down with the truth, because they’ve had to resort to lies, invented stories, misrepresentations, and unjustified charges. I don’t think most people who looked at her in an unbiased fashion had any doubts that she is who she presents herself to be, but at this point I think we can take that as proven—because if she weren’t, we’d have heard about it by now. (And oh boy, would we have heard about it.) If she had had any real skeletons in her closet, they’d have been out of the closet and line dancing on the front lawn of the Juneau statehouse long since. In short, no one needs to worry that Gov. Palin is going to pull a Sanford on us, or that she’s a fake, or that she will in any way prove to be not substantially what we thought she was, because the likes of Celtic Diva, Andree McLeod, David Axelrod and the ADN have done yeoman work for us in ruling out that possibility—not that that’s what they intended to do, but it’s what they’ve accomplished.

The intensity of Gov. Palin’s exposure and of the opposition she’s faced has made this clear in record time: she is, truly, one of the honorable and faithful people in our politics, one of those of true character who can be trusted to keep their word if they give it. For all the clouds she’s had to endure, that’s a remarkable silver lining.

(Adapted from a post on Conservatives4Palin)

Homosexuality and the roots of division

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Jared Wilson makes a very important point—one on which I’ve been intending to comment for several days—on the decision by the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a seriously misnamed denomination) to allow self-affirmed practicing homosexuals to be ordained as pastors:

When concerned folks raise voices of protest and warning, when they say adamantly “This isn’t right,” they are accused of singling out the sin of homosexuality for special treatment, laser-focusing in on the homosexual as a sinner above all sinners, worse than the rest of us.

But I actually think it’s sort of the other way around. It is the proponents of gay clergy who single out homosexuality. It is they who are pressing us to respond to this issue. Nobody is pushing for resolutions on the allowance of adulterous clergy, of gossipy clergy, of alcoholic clergy, of p()rn-addicted clergy, or what-have-you.

It is not those who protest who are singling out this sin. It is the proponents of the sin as normative—or at least, passable—who are singling it out. . . .

And it isn’t those who believe the Bible when it says homosexual behavior is a sin that are being divisive; it is those who are introducing the idea that it isn’t. If you push a decision on something that innovates on the Bible’s testimony, you’re creating the division. But, sure, many of us will oblige in parting ways with you. If pressed—as when votes like this go the way they did—we will cooperate in division.

Read his whole post, because he has more to say beyond what I’m highlighting here, reflecting on the nature and origin of the historic creeds (and, I would argue, the confessions as well); I want to focus, though, on this point, because it’s an important one to understand. The division over the issue of homosexual behavior is the creation of those who want to change the church, and it has been created deliberately to accomplish that purpose; for them to blame that division and the fighting that goes with it on those who disagree with them, as if we should have just surrendered as soon as they made their first demand, is wildly unjust.

It’s interesting, if you hang around in mainline circles, you’re bound to hear folks on the left complaining that “they” (meaning the biblically orthodox) want to take “our” church away from “us.” Which would make sense if the church had taught for 2000 years that homosexual sex is just fine with God, and the view that it isn’t was the innovation. But that’s not how it is; it is, in fact, the exact backwards of the truth (as Mike Callahan might say). If anyone is trying to “take the church away” from anybody, it would be those who are trying to change the established teaching of the church going all the way back through the history of Israel to the writing of the book of Genesis.

Now, I do not say that the singling-out of homogenital contact as a particularly awful sin is the creation of the contemporary Left; that singling-out is itself a sin, and there’s no question that it didn’t originate in the years following Stonewall. But then, that’s not unique to homosexual activity, either; as G. K. Chesterton rightly protested in one of his Father Brown stories, the church has always tended to have fashionable sins, for which it makes excuses, and unfashionable ones, on which it comes down with excessive and graceless force; what they are changes with the times, but the tendency rolls on unabated. I do believe, though, that the way in which the Left has pursued its agenda on this point has served to exacerbate this problem among many on the Right, as counter-reaction pushes those unwilling to surrender biblical orthodoxy toward viewing homosexual activity as uniquely awful, and thus uniquely to be despised; and that does no one any good.