Months before she endorsed the candidacy of Donald Trump, in a speech that will be long remembered for inventing the delightful word “squirmish”, Sarah Palin was asked to speculate about her political future. Would she serve in a Trump administration, and if so, what might she do? With characteristic sunniness she told CNN that she’d “thought a lot about the Department of Energy, because energy is my baby, oil and gas and minerals, those things that God has dumped on this part of the earth for mankind’s use, instead of relying on unfriendly foreign nations for us to import their resources.”
Palin’s inimitable phrasing and eccentric syntax – a deity “dumps” blessings on His people before he is displaced, mid-sentence, by Americans seizing “mankind’s” resources to wean themselves off hostile foreign oil – goes a long way towards explaining her appeal to a certain kind of voter. Aside from the awkward fact that the Department of Energy does not in fact do what she believes it does, and the further complication that her reform would be to “get rid of it and … let the states start having more control over the lands that are within their boundaries” – it is hard to fault her belief that it “would be a short-term job” and that “it would be really great to have someone who knows energy and is pro-responsible development to be in charge.”
Beneath the aw-shucks, let’s roll-up-our-sleeves-and-get-on-with-it talk, a large corps of disenchanted Americans hear one important thing when Donald Trump and Sarah Palin speak like this, namely that their political problems are a Gordian knot which could be got rid of, at a stroke, providing they choose leaders who are sufficiently brave, headstrong and clearsighted to bypass the bureaucratic mumbo jumbo of modern governance.
It is easy to sneer – as establishment Republicans have done, for months – at this sort of drivel, the off-the-cuff nonsense that Trump and Carson have uttered with impunity throughout their campaigns. But the old guard should also consider Palin’s enduring appeal before they dismiss these apparent clowns so lightly. Trump’s eagerness to forgo a televised debate, because of a feud with a Fox news, confirms his growing confidence that the norms of traditional campaigning may not apply to him. (Fortunately, in recent years, the McCain and Gingrich campaigns indulged in similar magical thinking shortly before they foundered.) While other candidates struggle to adapt their strategies to the new reality, Trump’s camp seems to be taking its PR quite literally and embracing the shoot-from-the-hip nonchalance that comes so naturally to their man.
At this stage it looks unnervingly possible that Trump may have the last laugh. Without him the GOP debate becomes a minor comedy, instead of a full-blown farce, aging white men squirmishing to display ever more reactionary and xenophobic attitudes to a jaded base. For despite its ironic complaint that “capitulating to politicians’ ultimatums … violates all journalistic standards” Fox news rightly fears the loss of political influence which the rise of a genuine populist like Trump would entail. If he has judged his support correctly, and succeeds in Iowa, the rise of Trump will likely signal the end of Fox’s stranglehold on the Republican Party.
Effectively, this means that one of the few remaining checks on Trump’s frightening progress into mainstream politics is an unapologetically alarmist propaganda machine which likes to share its misinformation under the Orwellian guise of being “fair and balanced.” This train wreck would be entertaining if so much wasn’t at stake. But instead of offering a clear alternative to the proto-Fascist in their midst, the GOP’s former favourites have desperately tried to creep into his limelight. In truth, they can only blame themselves for this sorry state of affairs, for they are the ones who have poisoned the political atmosphere by peddling pseudo-populist simplifications and divisive reactionary rhetoric for so long.
That Palin and Trump may even be considered a dream ticket in parts of America says more about the moral lapses of the political establishment, and the emasculated commentariat which hymns its praises, than it does about either individual. Having surrendered so much of its public sphere to political infotainment, Conservative Americans should not be surprised by the current trend towards candidates who are, as the old Texas saying goes, all hat and no cattle. If Trump defies the oracles and becomes the GOP candidate he will upset the political order as much as Barry Goldwater did two generations ago. Perhaps only with retrospect will the very people who are currently panicking at the disappearance of big-tent, common sense Republican arguments, and the party’s gradual collapse under the weight of its contradictions, come to terms with their responsibility for creating a culture that let him get so far.
