Blogger and Crunchy-Con author Rod Dreher is reading Sarah Palin’s going rogue, and he makes a good point:
She’s a conflicted populist, and doesn’t understand that. It’s simply bizarre how she can write with passion about how badly Exxon screwed over the people of Alaska in the Exxon Valdez incident, and how the cozy relationship between Alaska’s government and the oil industry worked against the interests of ordinary hardworking people … and yet repeat shopworn GOP nostrums like this one:
In national politics, some feel that big Business is always opposed to the Little Guy. Some people seem to think a profit motive is inherently greedy and evil, and that what’s good for business is bad for people. (That’s what Karl Marx thought too.)
Somebody is not connecting the dots.
In linking to Dreher, columnist New York Times columnist Ross Douthat expands the diagnosis:
This isn’t a Palin-specific problem. From Glenn Beck to the Tea Parties, much of the energy in the post-Bush G.O.P. is with people who have grasped, albeit sometimes in inchoate ways, that big government and big business are increasingly on one team, and the champions of free markets and limited government are on the other. But they don’t know what to do about it, and what they do seem to know — cutting taxes, and letting the rest take care of itself — is often non-responsive, not only to the problems the country faces, but to the problems they themselves have diagnosed.
Douthat is correct that this problem is causing some distress for conservatives, who are used to defending business from the likes of Ralph Nader as a way of defending free enterprise and the profit motive. But as Obama increasingly brings business into the big-government fold, and in the wake of Bush’s bailouts, conservatives who depend on old boilerplates are getting confused.
