"Hey, did Bill O'Reilly or someone on Fox do something with me in it tonight?"
"I dunno. I'm recording but not watching. Why?"
"My inbox just started getting deluged with hate mail a little bit ago."
"What time did it start?"
"About 7:30 [Chicago time]."
"Yep, that would be O'Reilly."
"I think they ran my picture. A lot of the mail is about how ugly I am."
That's a rough transcript of a phone call between Perlstein and Dave Neiwert the latter recorded on his blog, the second link above. What exactly did Perlstein write?
For decades it has remained a Republican article of faith: white, lower-middle-class, "heartland" masses, fundamentally socially conservative, were an inexhaustible electoral resource. So much so that Bill Clinton made re-earning their trust—he called them the Americans who "worked hard and played by the rules"—the central challenge in rebuilding Democratic fortunes in the 1990s. And in 2008 the somewhat aristocratic John McCain seemed to regard bringing these folks back into the Republican fold so imperative that he was moved to make the election's most exciting strategic move: drafting churchgoing, gun-toting unknown Sarah Palin onto the GOP ticket.
But beneath the surface, some Republicans have been chafing at the ideological wages of right-wing populism. In intel-lectual circles, writers like David Brooks and Richard Brookhiser have argued for a conservatism inspired by Alexander Hamilton, the least democratic of the Founding Fathers, over one spiritually rooted in Thomas Jefferson, the most democratic. After Barack Obama's victory, you heard thinkers like author and federal judge Richard Posner lamenting on his blog that "the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party."
Perlstein's entire article is nothing more than a chronicle of the division within Repulican ranks between the party's elites - in the guise of people like David Brooks and David Frum and Charles Krauthammer - and its far more strident base. Some incontestable facts that Perlstein includes - the rise of the violent fringe during various periods of liberal ascendancy; the actual violent outbursts including murders, bombings, and what have you; the promotion of various fringe conspiracy theories by people on FNS (and, one should add, CNN's Lou Dobbs recent promotion of birther nonsense on his show) - certainly seem to indicate that Republican elites treat part of the base of the part with a certain amount of disdain, courting them with a wink and a nod when necessary, dissociating from them when they fail to deliver the electoral goods.
Indeed, Perlstein's article is not so much a liberal elitist sneer at the lumpen proletariat in fly-over country as much as it is a careful examination of conservative elites and their attitudes toward those they regard as such (I would note that Bill Kristol's embrace of Sarah Palin as she deserts her post in Juneau is as much a bit of cynical elitism as, say, Charles Krauthammer's dismissal of soon-to-be-former-Gov. Palin as unfit for national office; Kristol still wants to woo those same voters so many Republicans view as necessary to victory). One thing Perlstein does not note, and should note, is that the cynical manipulation of socially conservative attitudes by elites misses an important fact noted a decade ago in a book entitled What's Wrong With Kansas? The book chronicled how much better this heartland state fares under Democratic governance, both state and national, yet it remains a bedrock of reliable socially conservative, Republican electoral hopes. This remarkable bit of information - that those who support Republican politicians because of the Party's voiced support of certain social and cultural values nevertheless vote against their own economic interests when supporting Republican politicians - is as much a part of the weird dynamics of the past 40 years of political history as anything.
Actually, this latter phenomenon sheds light on the very point Perlstein is making. Republican politicians, at least since Richard Nixon's successful 1968 Presidential bid, have attempted to harness the anger and frustration of a group of voters whose concerns with the varieties of changes the country has gone through would fuel the fires of victory for the party. That they never actually intended to carry through a socially conservative political agenda became clear early on; other than a devotion to tax cuts, both individual and corporate, and an attempt to dismantle the New Deal and Great Society, there was really no way to address the social and cultural changes the country has experienced through the legislative process. Republicans knew this; the senior party members really didn't care all that much about abortion or women's rights except that they could be used to strip away a segment of otherwise reliable Democratic voters, if they mouthed the platitudes of social conservatism enough.
The meteoric rise and fall of Sarah Palin is a set piece, in a way. The most cynical gamble in recent political history, she was placed on the national Republican ticket last year not for any virtues, electoral or otherwise, she may have brought, but rather because she represented what many Republicans believed to be part of the base of the Party. That she was intellectually vacuous, held few if any political views she could articulate effectively, was a poor administrator and was multiply-scandal ridden were all virtues in the eyes of some elites in the Party precisely because all of these could be placed at the doorstep of "liberal elites", rather than as personal and public faults Sarah Palin brought with her.
Were Bill O'Reilly more intelligent and less self-centered, he might have read Perlstein's article more carefully and realized that Perlstein was not insulting his viewers, or the Republican base at all. Rather, Perlstein was telling the world the same thing many liberal commentators (including me) have been saying for years: The leadership of the Republican Party holds the views of social and cultural conservatives in contempt, offering empty promises in return for electoral support. The end result of decades of such cynicism is now before us in the person and recent career of Sarah Palin. Her presence is a symptom of everything that is wrong with the Republican Party. That's all Perlstein was saying.
