General David Brooks has declared war. And like General David Petraeus, he could well win it.
On October 10, the New York Times columnist and former Weekly Standard contributor proclaimed that Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin is a danger to the future of the Republican Party. In a column entitled “The Class War Before Palin”, Brooks asserted that Palin represented nothing more than the GOP’s embrace of anti-intellectualism: “…[O]ver the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.”
Brooks continued: “Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts. What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.”
Brooks noted: “The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions—Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.” He further argued that Palin was the epitome of this disdain for intellectualism: “Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the ‘normal Joe Sixpack American’ and the coastal elite. She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all—men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch. And so, politically, the GOP is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission—because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission—by telling members of that class to go away.”
Brooks is right for the wrong reasons. Palin could well destroy the GOP—because the
conservative opposition to her is so intense that the party cannot help falling apart.
Slowly, it is becoming obvious that a significant portion of the American right is filled with the same anti-Palin loathing that has occupied the entirety of the left. Brooks is merely saying what so many of these conservatives apparently feel—that Palin is unqualified, untested, unlearned, a GOP version of Obama.
Brooks is leading these conservatives into battle against what they see as the ignorant side of the right. His strategists in this war include George Will, David Frum, Ross Douthat, Charles Krauthammer, Kathleen Parker, Heather Mac Donald and other pundits who have cast doubt upon Palin’s ability to lead the GOP in the future. These are all wise men and women; their ability to win this ideological war should not be underestimated.
Yet the GOP itself could become the biggest casualty of this war. It’s heartbreaking to see the anger and hatred between the pro-Palin and anti-Palin factions of the right. It’s even more heartbreaking when one realizes that both sides are acting out of what they perceive to be moral principle.
While I strongly disagree with the Brooks/Will/Parker/Krauthammer vision of Palin, I cannot agree with those on the right who now consider these men and women traitors. These conservatives sincerely and legitimately believe that Palin represents an Archie Bunker/Elmer Gantry-style conservatism that is incompatible with the country’s future greatness and success. Their assessment is wrong, but it’s just that, wrong—not evil.
I also can’t blame Palin’s media supporters (such as Rush and David Limbaugh) for standing firm against what they see as raw elitism on the part of her conservative critics. Palin’s backers sincerely and legitimately believe that Palin represents a return to the conservative values of Reagan and Gingrich—the values that led the GOP to its greatest successes. Their motives are as pure as those of her skeptics on the right.
Even if “McPalin” defeats the ‘Bama-Biden bunch next month, the split of the GOP seems etched in stone. What is taking place now is full-on civil war; the fights over Terry Schiavo, Harriet Miers and Mike Huckabee in the mid-to-late 2000s were just skirmishes. Both factions of the party hold on to clear principles; one faction believes that defense and economic interests should be paramount, while another faction believes that the moral health of the country must receive primary attention. Both sides of the party have tremendous weight—but the GOP cannot bear this weight for much longer.
