“I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is
the most important in the world. I further believe that the
struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same
struggle reproduced on another level.”
— William F. Buckley
Take a listen.
The lines below from several recent attacks on Sarah Palin are
as revealing as they are memorable.
Here’s a sample:
* South Carolina Democratic Chairwoman Carol Fowler: John McCain
has chosen a running mate “whose primary qualification seems to be
that she hasn’t had an abortion.”
* Washington Post reporter Sally Quinn: “My first
reaction was shock. Then anger. John McCain chose a running mate
simply because she is a woman and one who appealed to the
Republican’s conservative evangelical base. McCain’s choice of
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate is a cynical and
calculated move….I find it insulting to women, to the Republican
party, and to the country.
* Actor Matt Damon: “I need to know if she really thinks
dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago, that’s an important…I want to
know that. I really do. Because she’s going to have the nuclear
codes. I want to know if she thinks dinosaurs were here 4000 years
ago. Or if she banned books or tried to ban books. We can’t have
that.”
* Daily Kos blogger: “There are quite a number of extremely
troubling links between Sarah Palin and neopentecostal dominionists
— enough that, in truth, she may be ultimately as much of a ‘dream
candidate’ for the dominionist movement as Mike Huckabee was. Even
worse, she’s running in a manner that has been frighteningly
successful for dominionist groups since the early 80’s —
specifically, as a ‘stealth candidate.’”
* MoveOn.org: “So Governor Palin is a staunch anti-choice
religious conservative. She’s a global warming denier…xxxx”
* Mark Benjamin, Salon.com: “With a disdain for science that
alarms wildlife experts, Sarah Palin continues to promote Alaska’s
policy to gun down wolves from planes.”
* Andrew Sullivan, the Atlantic: John McCain “threw
caution to the wind and with no vetting whatsoever, picked a woman
who, by her decision to endure her own eight-month pregnancy of a
Down Syndrome child in public, that he was going to reignite the
culture war as a last stand against Obama. That’s all that is
happening right now: a massive bump in the enthusiasm of the
Christianist base.”
* Cindra Wilson, Salon.com: “Sarah Palin is a bit comical, like
one of those cutthroat Texas cheerleader stage moms. What her Down
syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove,
however, is that her most beloved child is the antiabortion
platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the
conservative right.”
ALL OF THE ABOVE and so much more (there isn’t room for the all the
gallons of vitriol being tossed in Governor Palin’s direction by
the now Really VERY Angry Left) can be boiled down to the simple
observation above made decades ago by Mr. Buckley (who had an
assist in the thought from his friend and later National
Review colleague, Yale Professor Willmoore Kendall).
This election is now being fought openly between, as Whittaker
Chambers once described the same fight in a different era, “those
who reject and those who worship God.” Between those who believe
“if man’s mind is the decisive force in the world, what need is
there for God?” — and America’s own Joan of Arc, Sarah Palin.
Sarah Palin not only believes in God, she belongs, to the horror
of her liberal critics, to the Assemblies of God, an evangelical
church. For many liberals this is the equivalent of The Making
of the President meets Invasion of the Body
Snatchers. Worse she lives out in practice what Dr. Josh
Moody, the senior pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in New Haven,
calls, in his book by the same title, The God-Centered
Life. Which is to say, in the now abruptly famous case of her
Down syndrome son Trig, Palin knowingly refused to opt for an
abortion. Nor did she respond to the news of her 17-year-old
daughter’s pregnancy with anything other than loving acceptance of
a new life and encouragement of marriage. Twice over in two now
ongoing and very public situations, Sarah Palin has focused on the
love of God rather than herself. To those who have vested their
life and career comfortably believing there is little need for God
because what of what rolls around aimlessly in their heads and
those of their like-minded friends at any given moment, to those
who view government and the power of the state as an object of
worship, this is taken as a serious, gut-level threat. A threat to
the existence of their own very carefully structured non-religious
secular value system.
They may say they are opposing Sarah Palin. What they really
want to defeat is the idea of God.
The Governor also quite vibrantly exemplifies something else, a
something else that rattles the American left to its very core. She
is indeed a feminist. In the words of Obama supporter and feminist
Camille Paglia, Palin represents “an explosion
of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her
startling debut on that day [of her selection by McCain], she was
combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen
before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously
reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of
redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin
has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna
channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and
rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy,
victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.”
This is another way of saying that Palin terrifies the left
precisely because her election to the vice-presidency — and
potential later elevation to the presidency — would not simply
shatter the glass ceiling but redefine feminism itself as the glass
explodes. Gone for good would be the image of the pant-suited,
pro-abortion, secular-centered Powerful Woman. In her place would
be a skirt-wearing, vibrantly pro-life, God-centered woman who is
neither afraid of her own femininity or, importantly, ashamed of
her working class roots and the religious values that come with
them. She loves her husband, is thrilled by her kids and is not in
the least intimidated by the pretensions of those who hilariously
presume to be her betters, whether that be intellectually, socially
or politically. Most dramatically, she enthusiastically loves and
worships God.
THE LIBERALS WHO have gone on record with the kind of quotes listed
above are relentlessly secular. Which is to say, in the struggle
that William F. Buckley noted so many years ago, were a line to be
drawn in the sand they would instinctively jump to the
atheist/collectivist side of the line, gaping in horror at the
crowd of people they believe to be the
Christian/religious/individualist primitives standing on the other
side.
Come to think of it, a line has been drawn, and it isn’t in the
sand. The line comes by a variety of different names. Roe v.
Wade, abortion and partial-birth abortion, same-sex marriage,
military service, American exceptionalism, pacifism, isolationism,
community organizing and entrepreneurship are just a few of the
ways this line is drawn. It is reflected daily in cultural choices:
talk radio over NPR, hockey or windsurfing, Fox over NBC, Reese
Witherspoon in the hugely successful Legally Blonde
instead of Reese Witherspoon in the bomb that was
Rendition.
Since the advent of the Culture War conservatives have known
instinctively that there are millions of American women who share
Sarah Palin’s views and values. As no less than Geraldine Ferraro
has noted, her own 1984 rallies as the first woman on a Democratic
ticket drew lots of enthusiastic women. But come election day the
majority of women voted for Ronald Reagan. The ranks of the Right,
from the trenches of the Republican Party and the conservative
movement to the so-called Religious Right to the world of business
to the waitress in the local diner have always been filled with
Right Thinking women. Yet it has been, for the most part, liberal
women who have captured the headlines. From Gloria Steinem to
Hillary to a seemingly endless parade of media stars, the message
was always that “woman equals liberal.” Worse, it defined “woman”
as economically well-to-do professionals with a fistful of graduate
degrees all obtained from some elite East or Left coast university.
It was a massive untruth, a political conceit that liberal
politicians in particular came to believe at their own eventual
peril.
Sarah Palin’s threat to the left is that she has shattered more
than one glass ceiling. She has taken a shotgun to the glass
ceiling that kept God-fearing, child-rearing, gun-owning, non-Ivy
League, pro-life, working women from so visibly rising to the top
rungs of American society. This is why the vitriol that pours forth
to be dumped over her political head. Palin is a personal threat to
the very core image liberal Democrats have of women, of feminism
itself. The idea that Hillary Clinton can work her much proclaimed
35 years for liberal feminist causes only to find at the last
moment that the first woman to walk through the doors of the White
House on her own is a wildly popular conservative Christian hockey
mother of five from Alaska who got elected on her own without
benefit of marriage to another liberal politician — is something
that will take Clinton and her immediate circle of liberal feminist
friends more than a shot and a beer to recover from.
THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE at work here as well. Let us not leave out
of the Palin phenomenon the real world masculinity of the “First
Dude,” Palin’s husband Todd. This is a guy who works with his hands
as a “sloper” in the oil business and as a commercial fisherman. A
union member not of, say, the elite Writers Guild but the gritty
United Steelworkers. He is a champion
snowmobiler…er…snowmachiner (as they say in Alaska.) Matt Damon
is a man’s man — in the movies. Andrew Sullivan couldn’t and
presumably wouldn’t carry Todd Palin’s backpack even if it were
filled with every elite magazine for which Sullivan writes. Glutted
with Hollywood pate’ Al Gore would have a coronary trying to keep
up with Palin, who probably wouldn’t be bringing along any
seriously good wine as he races through the backwoods. Once off the
basketball court, Obama would be clueless on snowshoes with a gun
and a charging moose. And Keith Olbermann? Beyond laughter at the
image, enough said. The combination here — the womanly woman who
unabashedly worships God at the same time she’s a chief executive
and a Mom AND has a hot time with the working man’s man who has
fathered her five kids — is truly terrifying for the world of
non-churchgoing metrosexuals for whom the idea of “God” means Simon
Cowell.
Make no mistake. The vociferous attacks on Sarah Palin — on her
views of abortion, family, work, the environment, science, the role
of women and all the rest — are about much, much more than they
seem. A lot of them aren’t even about Sarah Palin at all.
Their real target doesn’t even have His name on the ballot.
Jeffrey Lord is an author and former Reagan White House
political director. He writes from Pennsylvania.
