Paglia: Ugly liberalism, shoddy elitism and Sarah Palin

One of the oddities of political writing, at least from the classical liberal/conservative point of view, is finding your own arguments and feelings best articulated by the opposing side. Mickey Kaus has a gift for zinging in a two-sentence, brisk blog post what many conservatives couldn’t do with copious verbage and a 1,000 words – at least some of them.

Leave it to Camille Paglia to expose, and set straight, the downright unreasonable and illintellectual nastiness in regard to Sarah Palin. Paglia was one of Palin’s few defenders outside the mainstream right before the election and continues to get grief for her support. In one simple Q and A column, she takes on the echelon warfare toward the middle class and the ugliness behind it all.

Regarding your observations about the rehabilitation of Sarah Palin and the insufferable snottiness of Dick Cavett and other good liberals: Is it possible that there might be something really ugly at the core of contemporary liberalism? You call yourself a liberal, and you vote liberal, yet you are under constant attack by your liberal compatriots. Why? Because of your open-mindedness and your “real feminism” (as opposed to faux leftist feminism).

In the meantime, the torching of Sarah Palin’s church in Alaska (children were inside when the fire with accelerant was set) evokes a collective shrug in the mainstream media and other liberal precincts (if you can find any reference to the event at all). Why the all-too-frequent and downright nasty face of contemporary liberalism?

Timothy Condon
Tampa, Fla.

Yes, something very ugly has surfaced in contemporary American liberalism, as evidenced by the irrational and sometimes infantile abuse directed toward anyone who strays from a strict party line. Liberalism, like second-wave feminism, seems to have become a new religion for those who profess contempt for religion. It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power.

The problems on the American left were already manifest by the late 1960s, as college-educated liberals began to lose contact with the working class for whom they claimed to speak. (A superb 1990 documentary, “Berkeley in the Sixties,” chronicles the arguments and misjudgments about tactics that alienated the national electorate and led to the election of Richard Nixon.) For the past 25 years, liberalism has gradually sunk into a soft, soggy, white upper-middle-class style that I often find preposterous and repellent. The nut cases on the right are on the uneducated fringe, but on the left they sport Ivy League degrees. I’m not kidding — there are some real fruitcakes out there, and some of them are writing for major magazines. It’s a comfortable, urban, messianic liberalism befogged by psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Conservatives these days are more geared to facts than emotions, and as individuals they seem to have a more ethical, perhaps sports-based sense of fair play.

Probably the main reason for my unorthodox view of politics (as in my instant approval of Sarah Palin) is that I had much more childhood contact with working-class life than appears to be the norm among current American columnists. One of my grandfathers was a barber, and the other was a leather worker at the Endicott-Johnson shoe factory in upstate New York. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, my father was able to attend college, the only one in his large family to do so. I was born while he was still in college and mopping floors in the cafeteria. Years later, he became a high-school teacher and then a professor at a Jesuit college, but we never left our immigrant family roots in industrial Endicott. To this day, I have more rapport with campus infrastructure staffers (maintenance, security) than I do with other professors or, for that matter, writers. Don’t get me started on the hermetic bourgeois arrogance of American literati!

That the literati believes its disconnect with the working class, either through political bias in news or otherwise, isn’t a major problem in the newspaper industry, shows how truly it’s separated from reality.

The discriminatory and dismissive attitude of people with common roots, be it Palin, Joe the Plumber or anyone of the speckled masses, continues on, even five months past the election. This from the L.A.. Top of the Ticket blogger Johanna Neuman, on Palin being replaced by Newt Gingrich as speaker at a Republican function.

But maybe the selection has nothing to do with politics. After all, as one writer to the Washington Post put it, maybe the senators and congressmen just wanted to hear from Gingrich, a man of ideas with a PhD from Tulane, and not Palin, a passionate defender of Joe the Plumber who graduated from her fourth college.

Be warned, those outside the ivory towers. As Kurt Cobain said, are you paranoid if they are really after you?

The entire column is a hoot. Paglia takes on Obama’s frat-house administration, Rush Limbaugh and “Barack the Magic Negro,” all along with a reader-submitted evisceration of Kate Winslet and her Victorian character in “Titanic.”

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