Just as Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times on 9 September said, I never thought to see the day when I would be retailing some of The Thoughts Of Sarah Palin. They are about what government we have in our modern “democracies” and who controls it.
For some of us in the UK do these ideas strike a chord? It is a pity that because of the UK media such views are unlikely to be given any coverage in our own. Hat tip to Some Assembly Required one of the liberal web sites of the USA.
Quote from NYT:
So here is something I never thought I would write: a column about Sarah Palin’s ideas………………..There was plenty of the usual Palin schtick, words that make clear that she is not speaking to everyone but to a particular strain of American. ………But when her throat was cleared at last, Ms. Palin had something considerably more substantive to say.
She made three interlocking points.
First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people.
Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.”
Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).
In supporting her first point, about the permanent political class, she attacked both parties’ tendency to talk of spending cuts while spending more and more; to stoke public anxiety about a credit downgrade, but take a vacation anyway; to arrive in Washington of modest means and then somehow ride the gravy train to fabulous wealth.
She observed that 7 of the 10 wealthiest counties in the United States happen to be suburbs of the nation’s capital.
Her second point, about money in politics, helped to explain the first. The permanent class stays in power because it positions itself between two deep troughs: the money spent by the government and the money spent by big companies to secure decisions from government that help them make more money.
“Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done?” she said, referring to politicians. “It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’ve got a lot of mouths to feed, a lot of corporate lobbyists and a lot of special interests that are counting on them to keep the good times and the money rolling along.”
Because her party has agitated for the wholesale deregulation of money in politics and the unshackling of lobbyists, these will be heard in some quarters as sacrilegious words.
Ms. Palin’s third point was more striking still: in contrast to the sweeping paeans to capitalism and the free market delivered by the Republican presidential candidates whose ranks she has yet to join, she sought to make a distinction between good capitalists and bad ones.
The good ones, in her telling, are those small businesses that take risks and sink and swim in the churning market; the bad ones are well connected mega corporations that live off bailouts, dodge taxes and profit terrifically while creating no jobs.
Strangely, she was saying things that liberals might like, if not for Ms. Palin’s having said them.
“This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk,” she said of the crony variety. She added: “It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest, to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners, the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70 percent of the jobs in America.”
Is there a hint of a political breakthrough hiding in there?
The political conversation in the United States is paralyzed by a simplistic division of labor. Democrats protect that portion of human flourishing that is threatened by big money and enhanced by government action. Republicans protect that portion of human flourishing that is threatened by big government and enhanced by the free market.
What is seldom said is that human flourishing is a complex and delicate thing, and that we needn’t choose whether government or the market jeopardizes it more, because both can threaten it at the same time.
Ms. Palin may be hinting at a new political alignment that would pit a vigorous localism against a kind of national-global institutionalism.
On one side would be those Americans who believe in the power of vast, well developed institutions like Goldman Sachs, the Teamsters Union, General Electric, Google and the U.S. Department of Education to make the world better.
On the other side would be people who believe that power, whether public or private, becomes corrupt and unresponsive the more remote and more anonymous it becomes; they would press to live in self-contained, self-governing enclaves that bear the burden of their own prosperity.
No one knows yet whether Ms. Palin will actually run for president. But she did just get more interesting.
Unquote.
Ms. Palin has had some rough handling by the US and World media and indeed may not be amongst the intellectuals or even those who are best educated. But perhaps her critics have been protesting too much.
I listened to Sarah Palin's speech all the way through. Allowing for the difference of rhetorical style, she could have been addressing our problems here. No wonder she is so well hated by the state collectivists of the Left and the crony capitalists of the right who, as she says, are on "corporate welfare" of one sort or another. It was an impressive effort.
ReplyDeleteI see there has been a recent outbreak of allegations about her private life and am not surprised at the timing.
As I remarked to a "liberal" friend the other day, if I were an American I would sooner have a President who can skin a moose than one who will skin the public.