Not since Dan Quayle did the happy puppy dance at the side of the first George Bush have Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media, and the nonprofit, union and academic communities gone so completely off their rockers.
Actually, this has been even worse than the reaction to Quayle. Forget merely unbiased or unfair. The hateful vitriol and ridicule that has been spewed upon Sarah Palin and her family reached execratic levels almost before the sun set on her first day as John McCain’s vice-presidential running mate. And it’s still spewing forth.
How do we explain such spittle-laden purple outrage? It’s not merely that Palin is an attractive, immensely personable, patriotic and successful conservative politician, who happens also to be the wife of one man and the mother of five kids, including a Down syndrome baby.
No, vituperation of such intensity goes way beyond political calculation and straight into the realm of something closely resembling mass psychosis.
Nick Cohen, a Brit journo, noted in The Guardian that pre-Palin, the Obama campaign and the Democratic political establishment had every reason to be confident of a smashing victory in November. But when Palin was announced, “they succumbed to a spasm of hatred and threw the vase, the crockery, the cutlery and the kitchen sink at an obscure politician from Alaska.”
And he pointed to “the postmodern theories so many of them were taught at university” to explain the reaction:
“As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was ‘the other’ – the threatening alien presence they defined themselves against.” And having encountered the living, breathing embodiment of their worst nightmare, “they went berserk.”
Where Cohen is especially on the mark is in identifying this phenomenon as coming from the academy of recent decades. But it didn’t originate there. Disdain for Middle America has long been a staple of left-wing prejudice, especially among the elite. Think Levittown critiques in the 1950s and the Babbitt School of Mockery established by Sinclair Lewis in 1922.
But something happened in the 1960s when the baby boomers were on campus to transform the prejudice from the sophisticates’ dismissive critique to a bloody impatience. We can even track this in the life of William Ayers, Obama’s buddy in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
As a campus prophet of the New Left in the 1960s, Ayers and others of his ilk became dissatisfied with the Students for a Democratic Society because, they believed, merely demonstrating and organizing wasn’t bringing Amerika down fast enough. So they created the Weather Underground of the SDS and began planting and detonating bombs in public place, robbing banks and killing cops. In doing so, Ayers and his fellow travelers were giving in to the same dark urges that in its ultimate form moved Mao, Stalin and the Khmer Rouge to exterminate millions of “enemies of the revolution.”
But then in the 1970s and 1980s William Ayers – along with multitudes of other former SDSers and denizens of the 1960s New Left – cleaned up his act and became a credentialed member of the education establishment.
Why? Because bombing the Pentagon and living underground versus big salaries, fancy academic titles, classrooms stuffed with captive students and access to millions of foundation dollars for your pet projects is an easy choice.
The problem is that deep in the heart of every progressive beats the desire to remake society according to some abstraction or ideology. It always defines the present reality as some variant of the familiar oppressive-corrupt-capitalist machine that has made ignorant, alienated drones of the lower and middle classes (Such a litany has been standard fare in most classrooms on most campuses since the 1960s.)
Since he only wants to make things better and those who oppose him must by definition be profiting from the oppression he seeks to end, it is all too easy for the progressive to feel justified in employing even the most extreme measures to silence the opposition.
And the worst kind of opposition – the nightmare – is the surprise political star who epitomizes the oppressive ruling class and who has the potential of winning the hearts and minds of voters and thus obstructing “progress” and “change.”
That is why the intensely personal and groundless vilification of Palin was entirely predictable and will continue. Let us hope and pray she and her familiy are truly prepared because the worst may still be coming.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on dcexaminer.com.
