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Sarah
Palin announced her endorsement of Republican candidate Donald Trump for
president in a rally Tuesday at Iowa State University in Ames.
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The Alliance of the Aggrieved. By David Frum. The Atlantic, January 19, 2016.
Donald Trump Rally in Ames, IA with Sarah Palin (1-19-16). Right Side Network, January 19, 2016. YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube. Transcript of Sarah Palin’s speech at BuzzFeed.
Frum:
Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Donald Trump is a bet on the triumph of identity over ideology.
Sarah
Palin’s star may have dimmed since 2008. Republican pundits and donors may have
wearied of her. But Republican pundits and donors don’t typically vote in the
Iowa caucuses. To many, many of the people who do vote there, Palin remains a
heroine and a martyr. Endorsements are usually said not to matter much in
today’s politics—but if any endorsement in any contest ever can matter, Palin’s
endorsement in the Republican Iowa caucuses will.
In
2012, Romney and Santorum finished only 34 votes apart in Iowa. If Palin tips a
few hundred votes toward Trump in 2016’s neck-and-neck Trump-Cruz contest, she
could set in motion a dynamic where Trump may win both Iowa and New Hampshire—a
stunning and once-unimagined result.
But
Cruz has vocal friends, too. Radio talkers Rush Limbaugh, circumspectly, and
Mark Levin, more explicitly, have made clear that although they like Trump,
they prefer Cruz. The Texas senator has collected endorsements from Glenn Beck,
James Dobson, Brent Bozell, and Ginni Thomas, among many other conservative
luminaries. In the contrast between Cruz’s support and Trump’s, one sees
something truly new and disrupting—a battle between those for whom conservatism
is an ideology, and those for whom conservatism is an identity.
Since
Donald Trump entered the race, one opponent after another has attacked him as
not a real conservative. They’ve been right, too! And the same could have been
said about Sarah Palin in 2008. Palin knew little and cared less about most of
the issues that excited conservative activists and media. She owed her
then-sky-high poll numbers in Alaska to an increase in taxes on oil production
that she used to fund a $1,200 per person one-time cash payout—a pretty radical
deviation from the economic ideology of the Wall
Street Journal and the American Enterprise Institute. What defined her was
an identity as a “real American”—and her conviction that she was slighted and
insulted and persecuted because of this identity.
That’s
exactly the same feeling to which Donald Trump speaks, and which has buoyed his
campaign. When he’s president, he tells voters, department stores will say
“Merry Christmas” again in their advertisements. Probably most of his listeners
would know, if they considered it, that the president of the United States does
not determine the ad copy for Walmart and Nordstrom’s. They still appreciate
the thought: He’s one of us—and he’s standing up for us against all of them—at
a time when we feel weak and poor and beleaguered, and they seem more numerous,
more dangerous, and more aggressive.
Talk
radio uses those feelings, too, of course, and has used them for years. But the
more ideological stars of conservative talk—the Limbaughs, the Levins—try to
use those feelings in service of a more-or-less coherent set of political
ideas. Speaking to the feelings of persecution is only a means; some vision of
a revitalized free-enterprise system is the end. For Palin, though, her
personal grievances were always what the whole commotion was all about. She was
effective, to the extent she was, because millions of people agreed that her
personal grievances sometimes also represented theirs.
Although
Palin did finish college, her life story resembled the lives of non-college
white America in a way that the personal lives of the Bushes, of John McCain,
of Mitt Romney, or of Paul Ryan never did or could. The themes and commitments
that define Movement Conservatism—free-market ideology, organized
religiosity—are increasingly upmarket themes … and increasingly remote from
downmarket America. Sarah Palin did get rich in the end, but like Donald Trump,
she didn’t get wealth or enjoy wealth in the way that the hated elite got and
enjoyed wealth.
Meanwhile,
Trump is battling against Ted Cruz of Princeton and Harvard Law School, a
Supreme Court practitioner married to an investment banker, who insists that
the dividing line between “us” and “them” is not life story, not personal
experience, but ideas and values. His conservatism is defined not by personal
wrongs but by a complicated set of principles, that connect opposition to
abortion to support for the gold standard; missile defense to cuts in the
budget of the Environmental Protection Agency; and gun rights to a lower
corporate tax rate.
Ideology
versus identity: That’s going to be the ballot question in Iowa on the first of
February. A lot more than the Republican presidential nomination may depend on
the answer.
Transcript excerpt, starts at 36:18 [Real Clear Politics]:
PALIN: Telling us we’re not red enough? Coming from the establishment. Well, he being the only one who’s been willing, he’s got the guts to wear the issues that need to be spoken about and debated on his sleeve. Where the rest of some of these establishment candidates, they just wanted to duck and hide. They didn’t want to talk about these issues, until he brought them up. In fact, they’ve been wearing this political correctness kind of like a suicide vest.
Enough
is enough. These issues that Donald Trump talks about had to be debated. And he
brought them to the forefront. And that’s why we are where we are today, with
good discussion, a good, heated, and very competitive primary is where we are.
And now, though, to be lectured, that, well, you guys are all sounding kind of
angry, is what we’re hearing from the establishment. Doggone right, we’re
angry! Justifiably so! Yes. You know, they stomp on our neck and then they tell
us, just chill, okay? Yeah, just relax. Well, look, we are mad and we’ve been
had. They need to get used to it.
