Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

The Anchoress

Home
Catholic
Beer, Boots and the GOP Base

Beer, Boots and the GOP Base

Last updated on: December 29, 2014 at 7:56 pm by Ben Conroy

Beer, Boots and the GOP Base 2014-12-29T19:56:22+00:00 Ben Conroy

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I always figured I appreciated a tragic female — Mary, Queen of Scots, the Black Dahlia, Edie Sedgwick — as much as the next ghoul. But when it comes to Sarah Palin, I seem to have overlooked a deep seam of tragedy that my colleagues in the Fourth Estate have been mining for years. Quite by chance, I discovered that not one, but two articles titled “The Tragedy of Sarah Palin” have appeared in high-profile publications over the past thirty-one months.

Both say basically the same thing — that Palin, had she contrived to present herself as something other than a conservative culture warrior, could have made a better impression on swing voters in 2008, and would have a better chance than a snowball’s in Phoenix of doing so in 2012. In the words of John Ridley, writing for the Huffington Post in October, 2008:

Over the past eight years, the Republican Party has imploded. In this election cycle, the conservative intelligentsia has effectively split from the “base,” that portion of the party that is seemingly “excited” or “energized” not by issues of war or oil or the economy but by those that forge a social wedge. Add to that the shifting demographics of America and the Republican Party’s woeful inability to attract people of color, and there is a very real possibility that for the foreseeable future the Republicans will be reduced to a nonentity within politics.

The Republicans desperately need their Barack Obama.

It could have been Sarah Palin.

In this June’s Atlantic, Joshua Green makes the point that, not only should Palin have courted the center, she had a resume and a skill set that could have made the courtship succeed. After praising Palin for leading a bipartisan campaign to raise the state tax on oil revenue, he asks, rhetorically:

How did someone who so effectively dealt with the two great issues vexing Alaska fall from grace so quickly? Anyone looking back at her record can’t help but wonder: How did a popular, reformist governor beloved by Democrats come to embody right-wing resentment?

Ridley regards conservative values voters with brazen contempt. On first reading, Green sounds more thoughtful, but the phrase “right-wing resentment” carries a whiff of paternalism, a sense of “the natives are getting restless.” It’s an attitude that has always seemed to lend itself to a self-flattering logical fallacy. Ever since the 2008 elections, it’s become fashionable — frankly, a bit of a cliché — to explain disaffection among conservatives by citing “The Paranoid Style in American Politics. In analyzing the tropes of early 1960s John Birch-type rhetoric, Hofstadter writes:

RegardingBut the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

The right-wingers Hofstadter has in mind were the ones who believed that the U.S. government was being run by communist cells — cells that some swore included both Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. That type has by no means perished from the earth. We’ve seen birthers, we’ve heard Glenn Beck warn that a concern for social justice is the first step on a very short and slippery slope to fascism. And it’s pretty self-evident that many conservatives are upset that their values and opinions are, in many cases, no longer the dominant ones. But just because some of the self-perceived dispossessed resort to conspiracy theorizing, doesn’t mean their sense of dispossession is no more valid than a conspiracy theory.

In a 2008 blog entry titled “No Laughing Matter,” Times columnist Judith Warner finds hersel taking these feelings of marginality more seriously than she ever expected to, or even wanted to. While attending a Sarah Palin rally, hoping for mockable material (“A Harold and Kumar Escape the Barracuda storyline was the idea,”), she learned that “Palin Power is about making yearnings come true.” Without actually validating these yearnings — they include “respect and service, hierarchy and family,” each word loaded like, well, like a rifle — she warns that the “empathy barrier” may play into conservative hands.

“Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,” she quotes University of Virginia professor Jonathan Haidt as saying.

I don’t expect that Sarah Palin will be the front-runner in next year’s GOP race, but not because she addresses the disaffected portion of the base as one of its own. On the contrary, whoever does win the nomination, will only be able to win by doing his or her best Sarah Palin imitation. If any empathy barrier stands in the way, he or she will have no choice but to scale it or breach it.

This isn’t an easy thing. Members of the GOP base are not fools; appearing as a fellow traveler in their eyes is not easy. The code that defines the marks of authenticity is easy to spoof but hard to crack. I learned this over many years posting on a right-wing message board — possibly the best of its kind, whose members formed lasting friendships. Some tenets of orthodoxy were just what I’d have guessed. For example, everyone who worked for the government was held in general contempt — except, of course, for members of the armed forces. (Members of the Air Force formed an exception within the exception. On the great social usefulness scale, they seemed to rank far above schoolteachers, but slightly below firefighters.)

But on those cultural issues that boiled down to a matter of taste, I got some real surprises. There weren’t too many opera buffs, but neither were there any country fans. No, the mark of the all-American boy or girl was an encyclopedic knowledge of classic guitar rock – Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith. To be able to quote the lyrics from quirky, cerebral performers like Bob Dylan and Ray Davies was considered a sign of the highest breeding. The line was drawn at punk, I suspect because punk amounts to whining with bravado, which popular opinion considered the definitive activity of liberals.

The second surprise was food and drink. Not once in the seven years I hung around the place did I see anyone post, “I can’t get enough of Applebee’s baby-back ribs” or “There’s nothing like Kraft macaroni and cheese for building a strong republic.” On the contrary, gastronomy is another one of those areas where conservatives put the “hip” in “citizenship.” Maybe because so many people had served in overseas postings while in the military, it was considered excellent form to like sushi, turtle soup, snake, or even the Fillipino delicacy balut — to my taste buds, more a practical joke than a real meal.

It was the same story with booze. Though I didn’t meet too many wine-sippers, anyone would have blushed to say, “This Bud’s for you” or “Tonight, let it be Lowenbrau.” The only person who claimed Jack Daniels as her brand was a culturally anxious African-American girl who also liked to say, “Thank God for the boat,” and once posted a picture of herself wearing a bikini decorated with the Confederate flag. Among conservatives, in my experience, the comme il faut drink is good imported beer — and by “good,” I mean those Belgian lagers that look like maple syrup and sell for $15 per pint. When I admitted liking Stella Artois, people treated me like I had the palate of a billy goat. Before bellying up to a bottle of Yngling, President Obama demanded confirmation that it was brewed locally. He needn’t have bothered.

Now we arrive at the most sensitive subject of all: women. If you were impressed or alarmed to see America’s hockey moms close ranks for Palin, all I can say is, you should have seen the dads. Whatever pro forma endorsements conservative men may give to traditional gender roles, nothing gets them hot and bothered like a forceful conservative woman. In what I call the Iron Maiden Syndrome, women who plug tax cuts, unilateral military action or marriage protection laws reduce conservative men to such puddles of reverence that the effect verges on kinky. Not only does it work for women like Palin, Bachmann, Condoleeza Rice, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin, attractive by anyone’s standards, it works, retroactively, for Margaret Thatcher. Whether Hillary, had she switched parties and husbands, could have become a pin-up, is one of those what-ifs that could keep people up all night arguing.

So here’s my free advice to any GOP hopefuls: to bring the base into line, don’t pull a Howard Dean and start talking about pickup trucks with gun racks. Pour yourself a glass of Chimay and come out singing “Ape Man.” And if you’re a girl, wear those go-go boots.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRkovnss7sg

Uncategorized

2012 presidential race

Previous Post

May 14, 2011

Stop the New Movements, I Wanna Get off!

Next Post

May 16, 2011 Rick Welts Comes out of the Locker Room

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category "Remaking" Ourselves 'Remaking' America 9/10 Mindset 9/11 trials Abortion ACORN Adoration Advent Advent 2008 Advent 2009 Advent 2010 Alternative Energy Alternative Media America American Catholic Church American Church American Genius Ameridolatry ANCHORESS BOOKSHELF Anglican-Roman Reconciliation Answers & Questions Anti_Semitism Archbishop Hilarion Ayn Rand Bad Mass Barack Obama Baseball Benedict Benedict & Islam Benedict in UK Benedict XVI Benedictine Bill Whittle Birth Control Blogs and Blogging Blogs and Blogging Bloodless Coup Bobby Jindal Bookchat Breitbart Bride at every wedding... Bride at every wedding... Buckley Bullies Bush Bad? Bush Good Buster Capitalism Catholic Fiction Catholic Vocations Catholicism Celibacy Chaput Charitable Stuff Chesterton Chile Chris Christie Christians in Exile Christine O' Donnell Christmas Christmas Gift Ideas Church Hates Science? Church hates women Communion of Saints Compline Conclave 2013 Confession Constitutional Stuff Conversion Crisis & Opportunity Critical Thinking Crooks and Liars Crucible of Faith Cuba Culture of Life Culture of Life/Death Culture of Treason? Dancing Death Dialogue re Islam Dick Meyer Divorce and Remarriage DOJ Domestic Terrorism Dominican Order Don't try me too high Dowd Dumb Democrat moves Dumb GOP moves Economic woe Education Egregious Harry Reid Elder Son Elder Son's Sweet Girlfriend Elderly Election '10 Election '12 Election '16 Election 2004 Election 2006 Election 2008 Election 2010 Election 2016 Elena Kagan Elitism Embryonic Stem Cell Research End Times? English language Enhanced Interrogation Erosion of Rights Eucharist Euthanasia Exorcism Extraordinary Synod Facebook Faith Faith and Reason Faith Friday Faith Perspective Faithful Friday Fascism Again Fascism in America Fatima FCC Feminism Film First Things Forgiveness Fr. James Martin Francis and Islam Francis in America Frassati Fred Thompson Free Speech? Freedom of Worship FutureChurch Global Pandemic GOP Congress Haiti Head Covering Health Care Here and Queer Hermits Heroes Hitchens Holy Spirit Holy Week '09 Holy Week '10 Hoo-Hah & BS Hoo-Hah & BS Icons Illegal Immigration In The Arena Interviews Interwebz Iran Uprising Iraqi Christians ISIL ISIS Islamic State Islamification/Islamofascism Islamification/Islamofascism Isra-El It's all about me! Me! ME! James Burke Jerry Lewis Jesus Christ Joblessness John Boehner John McCain John Paul II John XXIII Juan Williams Just Words Katrina/Rita King is a Fink Latin Mass Leadership Lectio Divina Lent Lent '08 Lent '09 Lent 2010 Lent 2011 Limbaugh Listen to Lizzie Litigious Society Liturgy Liturgy of the Hours Mainstream Media Manliness Marriage Mary Media Excess Medical Merton Michelle Obama Mighty John O' Connor Misc. Miss Ella Missionaries Mitt Romney Monasticism My brother S My Irish Aunties Mystic Monks Nanny Statism Nature NEA Neri New Media Newman Noonan Notre Dame NPR Stuff Nun News Obama Bad? Obama Good? Obama White House Oil Spill Online Retreat '08 Online Retreat Days Oratory Orthodoxy Our Hillary! Parenting Passionists Patheos Patheos Book Club Patrons Paul Ryan Penance Penn Jillette Philosophy PJTV Podcasts Poetry Politics-free zone Pop Culture Pope Emeritus Pope Francis Prayer Predictions Priesthood Pro-Life Public Sector Unions Purgatory Questions about Catholicism Quotes of the Day Quoting the News Race in America rants Recipes Remarried Catholics Reposts by request Retreat thoughts Rome Rudy Giuliani Russia Saints Sarah Palin Scandal Scott Brown SCOTUS Scriptural stuff Secularism Send in the clowns Serving up hot links Sexuality Sherrod Shroud of Turin Sisters and Nuns Social Entrepreneurship Social Media Social Security Socialism doesn't work Sports and Faith Stem Cells Strange Gods Suffering Synod Tea Parties Tea Party Terri Schiavo The 9/11 Commission The Catholic Answer The Constitution The Desert The Fourth Estate The Pelosi The Perpetual Adolescents The Rosary Third Party? Timothy Dolan Touch of evil TSA Tsunami TV/Pop Culture/Music TV/Pop Culture/Music Twitter Uncategorized Unemployment Unintended Consequences US Military Vaginal Musings Vatican Vespers video faves Vile Joe Biden Voter Fraud War by Litigation War on Terror War, What it good for? Why can't weeee be ... World Youth Days Year of Faith Year of the Priest

Select a Month August 2016 July 2016 April 2016 March 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 August 2004

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What does "Gad" mean in Hebrew?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Chosen One Fortune Warrior Joyful