The Crossed Pond

I’ve spilt a lot of ink on this blog writing about the fetishization of the “Average Joe” in American political fantasy. I won’t rehash it all here. But I did want to pass on some fine musings from Ta-Nehisi Coates on the matter, in relation to Sarah Palin. He starts here and continues here. Read both. Coates has walked-back much of his post (a response to a post by Ross Douthat) as it pertains to Douthat’s specific point, but I think Coates’ reasoning is worth passing on even in a vacuum.

Sarah Palin Represents Real America. I know this because Mika Brezinski told me. I don’t think there’s anything serious to address in her point. There are a lot of hours to fill. Gotta say something. One interesting notion is that we’re seeing a kind of mirror-image of the Left in the 60s and 70s. Or maybe not, I wasn’t around then and my reading on the era isn’t as thorough as it should be. But my understanding is that a large part of our problem–or the New Left’s problem–was that we got weighted down in theory, and lost touch with actual people.

I get the same impression whenever I hear people pull out this hamfisted notion of Real America. It’s like there are no people in “Real America”–just cartoon cut-outs yelling “Don’t take our guns.” It is, as I said yesterday, the Al Sharpton analysis–distilling millions of complicated people through the lens of one person who happens to attract a lot of ink.

The worst part of the “Real America” analysis is that while it means to slap down “media elite”–much as the old radicals were aiming for the corporate elite–it’s offers nothing but elbows for the Everymen it claims to uplift. It turns him into a cartoon and fetishizes him. He is not a person. He is the beer track.

What Coates is talking about is a reflex snap judgment, amazingly persistent despite being baseless, that Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber sorts represent “real” America, while people like Barack and Michelle Obama represent a kind of “other”. This is at its heart a cultural critique, of course, and thus imminently fungible and non-quantifiable, but still, I’m with Coates’ first pass on this. I can’t measure it precisely, but I overwhelmingly get the impression that, at least among a certain political and pundit class, Sarah Palin represents a kind of mythological genuineness while Barack Obama represents a strange foreignness. The myth being, of course, that everybody can heart Sarah Palin even when it doesn’t make any sense and when she doesn’t appear to deserve it, but that Barack Obama remains a sort of cultural pariah outside the bounds of the “American experience”.

Coates goes after the racial read, and even on that I don’t think he’s wrong (anyone want to deny that the archetypal “American” is white?), but it’s more than that, I think, when you peel away the layers. It’s quite literally a celebration of ignorance as an American value.

Worth passing on, anyway.

There is in this critique, a kind of Al Sharpton analysis–Sarah Palin as a stand-in for all of her social class. Ross contends that her failures are not her own, but somehow the failures that would afflict anyone else presumably from her “social class.” But this only works if you think that most of working class America is as fucking inept as Sarah Palin.

There is more to be said about that, but I’d like to move to something more important–that being Ross’s definition of “Anyone.”

In the last ten months, we’ve seen the son of a single mother, son of an immigrant, roots in Kansas, roots in the quintessentially American South Side of Chicago, standing for the “traditional values” of family, and the lesson we take from this is is that American meritocracy is broken.

Conservative condescension toward working class America, works in tandem with racial blindness. I have tried, through a few re-readings, to avoid seeing that in Ross’s column. But it’s very difficult to process the notion that Sarah Palin is a better model of the all-American meritocratic ideal than Barack Obama, without believing that that judgment hinges on race.

I would like to see Ross’s point another way. But I can’t escape the fact that, at this very moment, there are two young girls living in the White House. In their veins, they have the blood of men who fought in World War II. They have the blood of women who fled the Aparthied South, made something of themselves, and helped build one of the country’s great neighborhoods.

Yet, in these times, having come this far, at this moment, we are told that the meritocratic ideal is broken. And, seemingly, it would be fixed by offering a candidate, who can’t name a single newspaper she reads, access to the nuclear launch codes. In that context, one wonders at what precise point, meritocracy worked? And then I recoil at the answer…

I’ve come to really appreciate Coates as a cultural critic, despite the fact that his posts (and the ones of mine that pass them on) tend to meander, are scattershot, and never really come to definite conclusions. But perhaps that is as it should be in cultural critiques. Anyway, go read his stuff on the Palin controversy from this angle. It’s worth rattling around in your head as you listen to cable news commentators.