"A few isolated groups in the backwater of American life"

The NAACP has this week proposed a resolution which will condemn the Tea Party for its tolerance of racism within its ranks.

At the risk of this blog turning into Gipper-and Palin-watch*, I was interested in the former Alaskan governor's Facebook riposte which, yet again, evokes Ronald Reagan:

President Reagan called America’s past racism “a legacy of evil” against which we have seen the long struggle of minority citizens for equal rights. He condemned any sort of racism, as all good and decent people do today. He also called it a “point of pride for all Americans” that as a nation, we have successfully struggled to overcome this evil. Reagan rightly declared that “there is no room for racism, anti-Semitism, or other forms of ethnic and racial hatred in this country,” and he warned that we must never go back to the racism of our past.

This opened a straightforward denial and evasion of the issue which the NAACP provocatively addressed, reinforced by an avowal of personal colourblindness - which, like Reagan, she expressed as founded in her family experience.

Palin found in Reagan's 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, known most for its "evil empire" line, his declaration of a post-racist America. She might have also noted his horror at "the resurgence of some hate groups preaching bigotry and prejudice" and his call for the audience to "use the mighty voice of your pulpits and the powerful standing of your churches to denounce and isolate these hate groups in our midst". Still, she is generally accurate in her representation of Reagan's belief in America's triumph over its racial division. This was a self-deception, albeit one that was practical and politically useful - allowing Reagan to incorporate the Civil Rights Act he opposed into a narrative of American exceptionalism, and ignore the southern strategy which he employed.

More appropriately, Palin might have quoted Reagan's speech in 1981 to the NAACP's annual convention:

A few isolated groups in the backwater of American life still hold perverted notions of what America is all about. Recently in some places in the nation there's been a disturbing reoccurrence of bigotry and violence. If I may, from the platform of this organization, known for its tolerance, I would like to address a few remarks to those groups who still adhere to senseless racism and religious prejudice, to those individuals who persist in such hateful behavior.If I were speaking to them instead of to you, I would say to them, "You are the ones who are out of step with our society. You are the ones who willfully violate the meaning of the dream that is America. And this country, because of what it stands for, will not stand for your conduct."

The speech went on to acknowledge continued African-American economic inequality, but emphasised that the answer lay in tying the NAACP's goals to achieving general economic independence and ending reliance on federal intervention. In light of, amongst other issues, Reagan's opposition to the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, the speech met a chilly response - and Reagan never returned. Later in his presidency, the chair of the NAACP , William F. Gibson, would call the administration "anti-black, anti-woman, anti-minority and anti-civil rights", and Reagan personally as "reactionary and racist".

Reagan's attacks on racism extended only as far as the extremist fringe, never to those he counted as his political base or allies. Palin echoes his political evasion. Still, the NAACP's resolution suggests a tendency to view any conservative movement as a resurgence of massive resistance, and to attack it, vigourously, politically and symbollically - evading any possibility of aligning African-American advancement with conservative aims, or effectively isolating truly racially-motivated activists.


*I have discovered another site which has taken on this role enthusiastically.

Palin at Simi Valley?

An Alaskan blogger is reporting the possibility that Sarah Palin is planning to announce her candidacy for president on Reagan's centennial at the Reagan Library. This is the second rumour concerning Palin's announcement and its likely appropriation of Reagan's memory, though now with a new location.

The Reagan Library has become a traditional stopping point for Republican presidential campaigns. George W. Bush, John McCain and Stephen Forbes all visited in the run-up to the 2000 election, and in 2008, the opening and closing primary debates were held there. No candidates have announced there yet, and I personally find it unlikely that the library would allow such an appearance of endorsement - let alone on February 6th, when it may be unwilling to share the limelight. Moreover, this brings to mind another incident, when Palin's people had to deny that she was making her first gubernatorial appearance in Simi Valley last year.

Nothing is truth therefore anything goes.

Again we turn to Sarah Palin and her frequent associations with Ronald Reagan in her apparent quest for the presidency. Palin recently spoke at a fundraising event at California State University, Stanislaus. The invitation generated considerable controversy over her speaking fee and contractual demands, but it seems to have paid off for the university.

The content of the speech has attracted some interest as well, as have the accidentally recorded comments made by technicians and reporters after the speech. Most reported has been her comment: "perhaps it was destiny that the man who went to California’s Eureka College would become so woven within and inter-linked to the Golden State". Eureka College is, of course in Illinois. It does seem an odd mistake if Palin is really considering Eureka as the place to launch her presidential bid next February.

The speech, though, makes some more explicit associations with Reagan, and his view on education. A transcript, which has been written to emphasise Palin's chaotic, rambling delivery, can be found here. Firstly, she recalls Reagan's confrontations with California's revolutionary student body in the 1960s, comparing them to her own attraction of protest and scrutiny on campus. More broadly, however, she echoes Reagan's belief in the need for patriotic, civic education, and the basis of freedom in the generational transfer of American values and wisdom.

And some might say there is a contradiction here perhaps. They’d argue that academic freedom is incompatible with our need for a civic education that instills in young people the wisdom and the patriotic grace necessary for the survival and the success of liberty but I think that they are wrong. I think that they are dangerously wrong. The fact that we allow, or should allow for, a healthy and free academic debate of all ideas doesn’t mean that we have to believe that all ideas are equally valid. Unfortunately, too often, that turns into just one small step away from claiming that, well there just isn’t just one right answer to the question what is right what is good or just or true. To saying that well, uh, there are no right answers to these questions there’s, that’s where relativism comes into play and that turns into nihilism. And then we find people saying well then nothing is truth therefore anything goes. Just, just do it, every things permitted. There’s no truth.

If this cultural relativism is confined merely to just a few individuals, the exceptions to the norm, well that’s one thing but we have seen before what happens when whole sections of society fall into that trap. Take note of this, uh, consider that would the brutality of communism have lasted as long as it did if there hadn’t been a large group of people here in the west who were willing to essentially accommodate it for fear of daring to even condemn it. For a long time, folks it was kinda consider, considered sophisticated to take a position somewhere between freedom and communism.

And it took a supposedly unsophisticated graduate from lowly Eureka College to bring Communism to its knees. And he did it by simply calling an evil empire what it was, evil. There’s an important lesson here for us today. A free republic can only survive if its citizens are willing and able to defend it ideologically and to stand up for its founding principles.

Reagan made a call for the reinstitutionalisation of patriotism and "more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual" in his farewell address. In 1971, he also wrote to his almer mater's newspaper, the Eureka Pegasus, defending his record on education and the importance of tradition:

True ed[ucation] is societys [sic] attempt to enunciate certain ultimate values upon which individuals & hence society may safely build. When men fail to drive toward a goal or purpose but drift the drift is always toward barbarism. You have every right to ask the reason behind the mores & customs of what we refer to as civilization. Challenge we can afford. You have no right & it makes no sense to reject the wisdom of the ages simply because it is rooted in the past.

Palin gave her address in front of the university's motto, "Vox Veritas Vita": "Voice, Truth, Life", or, as wikipedia has it, "Speak the Truth as a way of Life". Irony aside, the concept of truth was a theme of this speech.

Ask parents what they want in their child’s education and they’re probably gonna tell you that they don’t care much for all this political stuff. What a parent desires for their child’s education it’s basic you know they want the three R’s and they want true history taught. Our country, our laws, our traditions, our arts, and our literature, and our heroes, and our statesmen.

This is an appeal for a democratic approach to the content of higher education, not dissimilar from Reagan's stance when he ran for governor. Palin does not ask for an overhaul of the curriculum, though, (nor indicate in any specific way what is wrong with what is being taught) but assumes that "common sense" will result in the identification and promotion of "true history" and the resultant eradication of scepticism and "relativism". I trust that Palin, like Reagan, will be satisfied with merely encouraging the adoption of "common sense" in academia, and not attempt its enforcement.

Incidentally, Palin lambasted nameless "politically correct intellectuals" for considering Osama bin Laden a "freedom fighter". The highest profile person I can think of who considered the mujahideen in Afghanistan "freedom fighters" was Ronald Reagan.

The Next Reagan and the Next Thatcher

The Daily Mail reports that Sarah Palin has approached Margaret Thatcher in hope of a meeting/photo-op. If a UK trip is really on the cards, it seems typical of Palin's style - vague and symbolic. An unnamed source remarked that "Palin’s people haven’t said anything about meeting Cameron. Their main interest is getting a picture of her with Lady Thatcher. I’m not sure they know who David Cameron is." In other words, if Palin is planning a foreign trip in advance of a presidential run, it will focus on the iconic, rather than the substantial (unlike Reagan's own meeting with Thatcher in 1978, perhaps).

The same, or another, unnamed source goes on to reflect on the purpose of the overture: "Palin’s big hero is Ronald Reagan. In US Republican folklore Thatcher and Reagan brought down the Soviet Union between them. That’s why Maggie is so important." An excitable Washington Examiner columnist has also represented this in terms of Palin's claim on the Reagan mantle. The suggestion of her meeting Thatcher seems to further confirm her as the "heir to Ronald Reagan". There is, though, more than this association to Palin's interest in the former PM. Thatcher is occasionally held up in Going Rogue as both a heroic proponent of the free market and "creative destruction", and implicitly as a model of female leadership. The blessing of the West's most famous and successful stateswoman might bestow Palin with some new gravity and credibility.

Žižek has compared Palin's style with that of traditional female leaders such as Thatcher:

Earlier generations of women politicians...were what is usually referred to as "phallic" women: they acted as "iron ladies" who imitated and tried to outdo male authority, to be "more men than men themselves."...Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out how Sarah Palin, on the contrary, proudly displays her femininity and motherhood.

It is bound to be a curious meeting, if it ever happens.

Palin in Illinois

There is a suggestion from Conservatives for Palin that the Alaskan news analyst may start her presidential campaign with an overt attempt to claim the memory of Ronald Reagan.:

Twice in the last month we’ve had the sincere and unbelievable privilege of watching the Palins up close as the Governor delivered two important addresses in our home state of Illinois. In both speeches, Palin cited President Ronald Reagan as a driving influence in her life and political career, drawing great attention to the fact Reagan was born and educated in Illinois — the state in which we believe Palin will officially launch her 2012 presidential bid on February 6th, 2011…Reagan’s 100th birthday. She’ll do it – we betcha – in either Tampico or Eureka, two cities in our state intimately connected to Reagan.

As far as I have read and watched, Palin has never said anything substantial about Reagan, his career or ideology, his policies or leadership style. Instead, she waves him like a flag, and he and his legacy are reduced to a bundle of clichés. Beginning her campaign on his birthday, in his birthplace, would likely be an extraordinary escalation of glibness. The suggestion, though, may well be idle speculation. Palin's plans often seem haphazard, and the writer here appears relatively unhinged, frequently slipping into rants about the leftist media. From Andrew Sullivan:

This creature of News Corp will run against the media - in the name of Reagan, the man from Hollywood and General Electric. Yes, history can repeat itself as farce.

Podhoretz and Palin and Reagan

Sarah Palin has not been shy of associating herself with Ronald Reagan. She quotes him often, she named her book after his book, and her current activities echo the choices Reagan made in his own wilderness years, maintaining her public profile as a freelance campaigner and a "news analyst".

Arch-Neoconservative Norman Podhoretz has also looked back to this period to find similarities between the two prospective presidential candidates, but in the common reaction to them by conservative intellectuals. Except Podhoretz, of course.

It's hard to imagine now, but 31 years ago, when I first announced that I was supporting Reagan in his bid for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, I was routinely asked by friends on the right how I could possibly associate myself with this "airhead," this B movie star, who was not only stupid but incompetent. They readily acknowledged that his political views were on the whole close to ours, but the embarrassing primitivism with which he expressed them only served, they said, to undermine their credibility.

"I knew Ronald Reagan," he says, "and Sarah Palin is no Ronald Reagan," but her dismissal by the likes of David Frum and Christopher Buckley is akin to the elitism with which conservative intellectuals met Reagan's candidacy. Except it wasn't, not really. Reagan not only had the long time backing of William Buckley, he also garnered after 1976 the support of the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute. This is part of the essential difference between Reagan then and Palin now. Reagan's media presence had a broad syndication on radio and in the papers, while Palin is tied to the Fox machine and the Facebook choir. Reagan set out to lead a coalition of conservative interests - elites and common folk, intellectuals and dumbasses - while maintaining an independent voice. Palin is positioning herself to lead a distinct populist movement, hostile to any compromising alliance, which will limit her appeal. It might as well be said that Reagan also used his time to travel and meet foreign leaders and counterparts such as the Shah and Margaret Thatcher. Maybe Palin will seek out an audience with Hamid Karzai or David Cameron, but I can't see it appealing to her base.

Of course, Reagan was something of an elite in the late seventies, with tons of money and a Hollywood address book, while Palin is defnitely not. However disingenuously she claims not to be a politician, she can fairly claim to be an outsider. But if conservative intellectuals don't like her, it needn't be because of who she is, but because she does not like them - or represents a movement which does not like or want them, and which seems to have contributed to an atmosphere of constraint over conservative thought. Reagan was never so self-limiting