Palin Pick Is (Was?) a Blow Against the Meritocracy

Sarah Palin had me at hello–or when she said, My husband and I worked with our hands. I was grateful that a different set of prerequisites was being applied to public service than scoring well on the SATs or being able to suck up to people in east coast institutions.

The Palin nomination has been a good thing for that fact alone: it has revealed faultlines in the meritocracy, shown that people don't want to be governed only by Ivy League dweebs. The meritocracy is 40 years old, and the elite's sense of dissociation from ordinary people has justly become a source of resentment to a lot of Americans. When I reread William Deresiewicz's Emersonian attack on Harvard and Yale et al in the American Scholar, I see anger in it: "The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from. The second disadvantage…is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth."

Palin had neither of those disadvantages. She's in the human mix, she doesn't take herself too seriously. The problem is that she's not intelligent enough to be vice president. She doesn't have an idea in her head. George Bush has ruined stupidity for the White House. The neocons gave him ideas and we're going to be recovering from his credulity for at least ten more years. You can't be stupid and get near the place these days–the issues are just too demanding.

Even if she goes (or when she does), Palin has struck a blow against the meritocracy. Americans know there's something wrong with the present order. The resentment isn't limited to the working class or the middle class, the poor slobs the media condescend to in stories about how hurting Americans are. It extends to well-educated independent types like Deresiewicz, who makes sure to attack John Kerry, Al Gore, George Bush, and Scooter Libby, all well-off and out of touch. "The
most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating
normalcy. Everyone feels pressure to maintain the kind of
appearance—and affect—that go with achievement." A lot of us loved Palin because she couldn't care less about all that stuff. She doesn't seem to care anything about money, she has taken risks in her life and had fun. 
"She has experienced more of typical American
life than either McCain or his opponent," David Brooks says, while agreeing that she should go because she lacks a political philosophy.

A lot of the attacks on Palin at Huffingtonpost are blue state elitist. So what that her husband had a DUI. So what that her daughter is pregnant. These may be qualifying experiences. There's something's afoot here, ordinary Americans may demand less condescension from the rich people who govern them and write about them. McCain's error was seeking out someone as ordinary in mind as Sarah Palin. Heck, there are populists out there who have good minds–Lindsey Graham, for instance.

(Is there a Jewish angle here? For me: always. American Jewish life is too invested in meritocratic values, from globalism to wealth to prestigious badges. I'm pushing for more bandwidth in the Jewish experience. One of the good things about Israel is that it provided many other modes of being to Jews than professional life: manual labor, agriculture, military service etc.)

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