Educated White Women REALLY Hate Sarah Palin, Part 5,231

The LAT has a column by Meghan Daum entitled "Why Sarah Palin Doesn't Get What She Deserves." Basically asking "Who Will Rid Me of this Meddlesome Priest?" Women really hate, hate, HATE, HATE Sarah Palin. Daum even tells us why. It's all about class and a certain kind of White person.


Daum is typical of her class. An NPR Commentator. Writer for the New Yorker, Harpers, and so on. As well as being a regular contributor the LAT. Daum tells us why she hates Palin:

She forces her critics to choose between the roles of merciless oppressor and guilt-ridden enabler.

But what it really is the hatred of a "lower class woman who does not know her place." This is what drives the hatred of Palin into overdrive. Donald Trump can say what he thinks, most of it far more radical (and therefore common-sense laden) than anything Palin says. Mike Huckabee is an unctuous former TV preacher who you would expect would drive the NYC literati up the wall. Complete with Southern Accent, and overt expressions of Christianity. Alan West all but calls Obama a traitor, and Herman Cain (both Black men, thus "traitors") actually does so. Meg Whitman ran against Jerry Brown, and Carly Fiorina against St. Barbara Boxer of the Botox, aka "Senator Ma'am." Chris Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Walker have cut and slashed Public Employee Union dues, and political organizing. Arizona Govenor Jan Brewer supports SB 1070, the anti-illegal immigration statute, so you'd think she'd be "Women's Enemy #1."

Nope. The enemy, the one that drives them insane with rage (and they're pretty much insane anyway) is Sarah Palin. A TV personality and minor GOP figure. Here's some of the flavor of it:

Even Palin's longtime champion, William Kristol, has said she's "unlikely to be" and "probably shouldn't be" the GOP nominee.

In other words, Palin-a-phobes, the danger is receding. The apocalypse may be averted. You might not need to move to Canada after all.

But even as she edges off the political stage, Palin still has the power not just to fascinate but to obsess us. The woman could probably disappear from public life, retreating to a yurt somewhere off the grid for a second career as a taxidermist, and still get tapped constantly as a cultural and political touchstone.
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Palin lacks the intellectual, analytical and rhetorical skills to have a competent discussion about policy or much else. She is handicapped not only by a lack of education, experience and curiosity about the world (wearing a Star of David in Israel doesn't count), but by a speaking style that often collapses under the weight of disjointed, undiagrammable sentences. She is, in terms of the political arena, easily outclassed.

Joe Biden had to go easy on her during the vice presidential debates so as not to look like the big bad wolf. Among professional journalists (as opposed to foaming-at-the-mouth partisans), there was a clear attempt not to come across like a browbeater. [Ed -- This would be the same Joe Biden who thought FDR went on Television for his fireside chats. Or many other idiocies no doubt issuing from his aneurism that has left him with the mind of a retarded child.]
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Traister offers a rigorous dissection of the hypocrisy and incoherence of Palin's platform and persona, but nowhere in the book does she swat Palin with the grizzly bear-like strength she could have summoned. She doesn't come close to doing what my friends and readers (and no doubt her friends and readers) want her to do, which is to rip the lady to shreds and move on.

Alas, we cannot. Not only because it would be cheap and lazy and unbecoming, but also because Palin is too well-shielded by her own incompetence. By casting herself as the less privileged, less polished outsider in the fancy school, she fashions the rest of us into playground bullies (ironic, given her predilection for bullying language) who taunt her with big vocabularies and book learning and obsession with nuance. By playing the victim (ironic, given how closely she associates victimhood with liberal whining), Palin forces her critics to choose between the roles of merciless oppressor and guilt-ridden enabler.

One thing I observed quite clearly was the class obsession of my female classmates at MBA school. To a woman, they were all obsessed with class, and social standing, and being the "correct" way to advance in both. I've since seen this in the workplace, and in the writings of pretty much every professional class (or those with that pretension) White woman in America.

To observe the dog that didn't bark, watch the reaction of Black women to Sarah Palin. They don't even know anything about her, and could care less. As much as Palin creates rage among College Educated White women, she creates mostly indifference among Black women of all stripes, College or not. Black women (and men) just don't obsess and foam at the mouth over Sarah Palin.

Really, the whole thing boils down to the class rage of College Educated White women who are livid that White women without their social standing "don't know their place" and bow to themselves. Nothing infuriates this class of woman more than those of their White peers who have perceived inferior status and don't bow and scrape. Being a College Educated White woman is why they put in all that effort at social climbing and at work, in the first place. So they could have social standing over their lesser (White) female peers.

Note the advice to "disappear" out into the boonies (because life is centered around LA and NYC). The taxidermy dig. And the repeated assertion that Palin is an uneducated dolt. After all, she said that America has 57 states. And called corpsman "corpse-man" twice. And noted that dead veterans were with us today, on Memorial Day. Oh wait. That was Obama!

What Daum is really saying, is that a woman who did not go to an Ivy, or at least Stanford or Northwestern (home of the Live Sex Show called the "F-Saw" [link NSFW, language]) is nothing but an uneducated moron. That University of Idaho, or University of Arizona, or University of Illinois, are all so inferior to the top universities in America (the Ivies, near Ivies like Stanford or Northwestern) that non-elite White women should not even bother. They're just dolts, not going to an Ivy like say, Vassar or Columbia (Daum's undergrad and graduate universities, respectively). Daum grew up in Ridgewood, NJ, so Wikipedia says. Median family income? A cool $147K, and almost 87% White, 1.64% Black, 3.8% Latino. We can assume Daum comes from a well-off to fairly rich (by most people's standards) family, with enough money to send her to both Vassar and Columbia.

What enrages Daum the most about Palin is really lack of deference. This class of women, larger than you might think, is angered by a lack of interest in say, the New Yorker, or the minutiae of the Upper East Side. For most of America, putting groceries on the table beats worrying about what movie Woody Allen will make next about screwing his step-daughter, or which gay designer is "in" this year. Much less maundering on about "authentic" Bolivian cuisine (fried grasshoppers! Yum!) and the tragedy of McDonalds available on the Champs Elysee. Few Americans can afford to go to France in the first place.

Meanwhile, most Americans have a hunger for knowledge outside the confines of political correctness. The Teaching Company, advertises quite often in the Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard. Not so much in the New Yorker or Atlantic. What would Daum know about Ike's views on coalition warfare, and its implications for Libyan policy? Did she even read his "Crusade in Europe" or Grant's Memoirs, or Churchill's "the River War" (about the Sudan)?

Of course not. No one is more ignorant and deluded than a College Educated White woman when it comes to military history. Particularly the books written by direct eyewitnesses to it. Not only the great commanders, but Daum (and women like her) haven't read anything along the lines of "With The Old Breed" by EB Sledge, or Pappy Boyington's autobiography, or Robert Leckie's "Helmet for My Pillow." Anything military is "icky" and gives these women the cooties, so they run away from it. I'm sure that Daum, however, would know exactly what fabulous gay designer is not shouting anti-semitic slurs this season.

Palin is what she is. A relentlessly lower middle class woman with a midwestern accent, who refuses to eradicate it or her own background. It is a sign of the elites degeneracy and semi-hereditary aristocracy that being lower middle class and refusing to bow, even symbolically, provokes rage. Like that of an aristocratic lady who whips an insolent servant.

An overlooked part of the conflict within White people is the battle of highly educated White women to beat down those of "lesser degrees" into the aspect of a cowed domestic servant. This is not going to end well.
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Why the Culture War Has Re-ignited

The selection of Sarah Palin as McCain's VP choice has re-ignited the Culture Wars. During the Emmy awards, Tina Fey opined she wanted Sarah Palin to be removed from public life. Laura Linney, Howie Mandel, Jeremy Piven, Stephen Colbert, and John Stewart all expressed their negative views of Sarah Palin. John McCain? He wasn't even mentioned. Even Saturday Night Live got into the act, with a skit suggesting that Todd Palin was molesting his daughters.

The Culture Wars, last seen in the 1992 election, are back. Sarah Palin is at the center. Instead of Murphy Brown. This time, of course, for her decision to have five children, with a blue collar, supportive man. But what drives the reason the Culture Wars are being fought? After all, much of this abuse directed at Palin is spontaneous, coming from people such as Sandra Bernhard. Who, to the acclaim of the Washington Post, declared that Sarah Palin would be "gang raped" by "some of Sandra's big, Black brothers" should Palin dare to venture into Manhattan.

What is driving this abuse? It's fear of demographics, and the need to control culture to make up for the demographic collapse of White Liberalism.

Simply put, White Liberals are not having many children. Philip Longman, in his "Return of the Patriarchy," notes that "Red" states that voted for George W. Bush in 2004, had a 12% fertility advantage over "Blue" states that voted for John Kerry. Liberals do know this, and it accounts for the fury over which they wage the Culture Wars, and also their support for illegal and legal immigration.

The story of Forty-Three year old Alexis Stewart, daughter of Martha Stewart, is fairly instructive. The forces of both urban anonymity, and Liberal Culture, encourage educated, urban, high income women to delay childbirth until radical (and risky, for both mother and child) means of fertility, which in the case of Stewart cost $28,000 a month, are required. Meanwhile, as Longman notes, Mormon and Evangelical Christians have many children.Mitt Romney has for example, five sons. Liberals know well that they will simply be outnumbered and shoved aside from power by sheer fertility (and their own lack of it) unless something is done.

Hence, the Culture Wars. Culture is the Liberal "Secret Weapon" for controlling political, social, and yes demographic power. Liberals bank on the power of Culture to transform, young men and women, from socially conservative, Evangelical, Mormon, and other "patriarchal" groups into well, Liberals. To a certain extent they have been successful. Young women in particular flock to urban centers, as Strange Maps points out. While commenters on Strange Maps have pointed out some possible errors in the map's assumptions, the main point that young women and men flock to urban areas is not disputed. As "Pick Up Artist" and blogger Roissy has noted, urban living imposes it's own dynamics. Including anonymity, endless choice, and a consumerist approach to relationships. The dynamic has not escaped the notice of Liberals, who bet on the dynamic and the omnipresent Media Culture to create their own Janissary Corps.

The Turkish Sultans, engaged first in the conquest of Anatolia, which at the time was overwhelmingly Christian, had a problem. A problem made worse by the final conquest of Byzantium in 1453, and the conquest of Christian nations in the Balkans, Southern Russia, and Southern Poland. Namely, revolt by Christians who outnumbered the Muslims, at least locally. The solution to this problem was the formation of the Janissary Corps, by the Sultan Murad I, around 1365. Local Christian youths were conscripted, forcibly converted as Muslims, and trained as elite soldiers who formed the Sultan's own personal army, as opposed to the tribal levies who were loyal to their own tribal leaders. The Janissaries were paid, regularly, as soldiers, and wore distinctive uniforms. Their loyalty was to the Sultan, not other leaders or groups. Their military prowess, and the ability of the Sultans to use them as an ever-expanding personal army, accounted for much of the Ottoman success, even as late as 1683 and the Second Siege of Vienna. Eventually, of course, the Janissaries became a rather debased Praetorian Guard, controlling the Sultans rather than acting as agents of his will. But for the better part of five hundred years the institution was successful.

Now, Liberals do not intend to impress and forcibly convert socially conservative young people. Rather, they believe that the Media Culture, and the signaling of what is fashionable and trendy, will work the same way in the anonymous, consumerist, status-driven urban culture that young men and women largely inhabit today. After all, they reason, the young men and women who leave small towns and suburbs, enter into large urban areas that are beyond daily contact with their parents, former friends, and social networks. Making these young men and women extremely malleable for new social norms, based on approval of taste-makers and fashions that determine relationship success, in a place where anonymity and endless choice abounds. Having the "correct" opinions are vital for relationship success. Reinforced of course by the Media and Culture which tells young people what attitudes are attributes of those successful in relationships and status and power in the urban mosh pit, and what attitudes are the mark of failures.

This is why the Culture Wars were fought in the first place, starting in the mid to late 1980's when the Baby Boomer generation early cohorts first reached their late thirties and early forties, and positions of cultural power. It's why Murphy Brown had a child on her own, with a father irrelevant. It's why nearly every television show, movie, and pop music artist all push the same social conventions of social liberalism. It is the weapon against fertility — the ability to "capture" young social conservative men and women and "convert" them to social Liberalism, when they move to large Urban Areas, outside the reach of their childhood churches, parents, and friends, and the social networks that shaped their views.

Sarah Palin, of course, just by example, threatens that ability to push a social consensus. Just by existing as an example of a woman who did not move to a large urban area, and pursue the kind of life that say, Alexis Stewart did, she is a threat, from outside Culture. Outside movies, television, and popular music, what Liberals see as the great social shapers of attitudes in the modern world. No less than George Clooney, after all, claimed it was Hollywood that helped end racism and sexism, through it's movies. If Sarah Palin has a successful political career, particularly if she assumes the Presidency at some point (a future viewed as pure horror by Margaret Cho and Tina Fey), she represents an "end run" around the Liberal Culture. A threat to the ability of Liberals to use Culture as a Janissary Corps to indoctrinate young men and women into their own worldview.

This threat is seen most clearly by those who use their Cultural monopoly, in movies, television, and popular music to enforce cultural mores. Hence the spontaneous and rage-filled venom spewed by movie, television, and pop music celebrities. Including Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and now, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford who dubbed Barack Obama "a Lightworker", presumably after watching one too many episodes of "Charmed" which also featured "White Lighters" with magical powers.

Even the Media people like Morford absorb without question the culture produced by television:

Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

It is also why people like Morford hate that Palin could threaten this cultural monopoly by her success:

Every white woman I know is positively horrified.

Wait, that's not exactly true. It's more accurate to say that every thoughtful or liberal or intuitive or open-minded white woman I know worth her vagina monologue and her self-determination and two centuries of nonstop striving for equal rights and sexual freedom and exhaustive patriarchal unshackling is right now openly horrified, appalled at what the addition of shrill PTA hockey-mom Sarah Palin seems to have done for the soggy, comatose McCain campaign -- that is, make it not merely remotely interesting and melodramatic, but aggressively hostile to, well, to all intelligent women everywhere.

Truly, among women in the know and especially among those who fought so hard to bring Hillary Clinton to the brink of history, nausea and a general recoiling appear to be the universal reactions to Palin's sudden presence on the national stage, stemming straight from the idea that there's even a slight chance in hell such an antagonistic, anti-female politico could be within a 72-year-old heartbeat of becoming the most powerful and iconic woman of all time.

They say: You've got to be kidding me. They say: This is what we get? This could be our historic role model? Two hundred years (OK, more like 2000) of struggle, only to have this nasty caricature of femininity try to hijack and mock and undermine it all?

It cannot be true, they say. The universe must be joking, would not dare dump such a homophobic, Creationist evangelical nutball on us, this anti-choice, God-pandering woman who's the inverse of Hillary, this woman of deep inexperience who abhors birth control and supports abstinence education and shoots exhausted wolves from helicopters and hates polar bears and actually stands for everything progressive women have resented since the first pope Swift-Boated Eve.

This cultural monopoly in the English speaking media, is also why Liberals support illegal immigration, and increased legal immigration as well. They assume that the mostly Mexican immigrants, legal or not, will be absorbed into the cultural assumptions of the Urban professional class: PETA, Greenpeace, "Lightworkers" and other New Age nonsense, and of course Global Warming and the Gaia religion. Along with the endless pursuit of status and consumerist relationships. Mostly, the White young men and women who make the journey from the hinterland into the Big Cities have been absorbed into that Cultural monopoly.

What the Liberal Elite don't understand, of course, is that particularly for Mexican Immigrants, legal or not, this absorption simply does not take place. Like Sarah Palin, they stand aside. Not by living in small-town Alaska, but by living outside the English speaking Media. Just in the last few years, Nielsen has listed Univision, in addition to ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and the CW, in broadcast networks. As can be readily discovered by the casual observer, Nielsen shows that Hispanics don't watch the same things Whites or Blacks do. During the Summer Olympics, both Whites and Blacks mostly watched the Olympics on NBC. For Hispanics, it was shows like "Sabado Gigante." The Olympics did not make the top ten for that demographic.

Hispanics in the US (and we are largely speaking of Mexican Immigrants, legal or illegal, and their children) have not one but two broadcast television networks offering Spanish-language content, Univision and Telemundo. Anyone watching their shows, will find radically different ideas about the place and role of women in society, treatment of animals, romance and relationships, concerns about the environment, and much else. Though Hispanics vote reliably Democratic, they hold vastly different attitudes towards, say gays and gay marriage, than the Liberal Culture of the English speaking elite. They remain, decades after large scale immigration into the US, legal or otherwise, largely distinct and separate culturally from their English speaking contemporaries. This is true even of English speaking children of Mexican immigrants. Who remain loyal to Spanish language media, culture, and mores. Even if they are outside daily contact with their parents, churches,and social network. The vast ocean of English speaking Liberal Culture holds little attraction to them, and they remain immune to it's function of absorbing and acculturating newcomers to the large urban centers of America.

Large Urban centers such as New York or Los Angeles can have two separate, distinct, and largely exclusive populations, the White Yuppie professional class, and the largely Hispanic working class, that rarely if ever interact. While the effect of Liberal Culture in English language outlets is powerful, it has no effect whatsoever on those who live side by side with it, but separate to it. This outcome of course, is something that Liberals cannot see, just as fish in the middle of the ocean cannot fathom where the shore begins and the sea ends.

This blindness, and the battle for supremacy over the fertility of socially conservative Whites through the "Janissary Effect" of Liberal Culture is what drives the fury over Palin by those who drive that culture. They see their power slipping away from them, by the existence of an alternate model. Ironically, they fail to see (as do European elites who vastly overestimate the power of assimilation by culture with their own, separate Muslim population) that the real threat comes not by the example of Palin but the numerical supremacy of the Immigrant population they have welcomed as allies against more fertile and conservative Whites.

A Mexican origin majority voter State (California is majority Mexican, but not in registered voters who are still overwhelmingly White), would outlaw gay marriage, and likely benefits for "registered partners." Since gay rights and gays remain deeply unpopular among Mexican nationals and those of Mexican origin. Dog fighting and cock fighting would be legal, since those are popular past-times for Mexican nationals and Mexican origin citizens. As the effect of English-language Culture in remaking socially conservative White men and women in large urban centers into largely child-less yuppies becomes stronger, ironically the more fertile Mexican origin citizens will wield far greater voting power, and remake society to their liking.

Largely undoing many of the key aspects of the White Liberal Society.

No one said that the Cultural gate keepers of English language media were smart. Merely powerful.
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Sarah Palin vs. Buffy: Why They Hate Her Part 2

In my post Sarah Palin: Why They Hate Her Part 1, I discussed how the political hatred of Palin's positions stems from the age-old conflict between the Eastern elites, who favor expensive land and cheap labor, and the Western populists, who favor expensive labor and cheap land. But there is something new, and personal, in the hatred of Palin, that is not political at all. It's related to her personal life.

There's been a lot of straight out hatred, directed at Sarah Palin, often from people who have not felt the need to unburden themselves of any particular issue relating to the Presidential election before her selection as McCain's running mate. Singer Pink says Sarah Palin hates women and is not a feminist. Faded actress and sex tape entrepreneur Pamela Anderson says she can't stand Palin and tells her to "suck it." Forgotten movie critic Roger Ebert weighed in on Palin's glasses, dress, and general appearance (he's since taken it off his website). Forgotten cheesecake 1970's actress Lynda Carter confesses her hatred and fear of Palin. "North Country" screenwriter Michael Seitzman lets us know how much he he also hates Palin for being ordinary and "stupid."

Added to this are constant smears, insinuations, and lurid tales, about Palin's pregnancy, her daughters, sons, husband, and marriage, from the most "enlightened" side of the aisle, the Left. Which is instructive. It is not just, or even mostly, her politics that some "liberated" women and men feel threatening. Rather it is her life itself that is the most threatening, and creates the most bile since that vitriol directed at first, Andrew Jackson, in 1824, and again in 1828, and Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Sarah Palin is a direct and pressing threat to the current model of female empowerment, probably best symbolized culturally by television's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Worse, Palin could actually slay Buffy's model of female empowerment, just by example. Hence the venom.

Like Andrew Jackson, orphaned at 14, and from a poor family, and Abraham Lincoln, another poor and up from his bootstraps politician, Palin comes from a modest background (though not quite as poor as either Jackson or Lincoln). Her parents, like most "middle class" Alaskans, hunted regularly to supplement their food budget. While good money can be made in Alaska, high transport costs make it more like the Tennessee in the 1780's or Illinois frontier of the early 1800's. Hunting is not a mark of wealth and leisure, but a matter of economic necessity in a place where a jar of Skippy Peanut Butter can cost $12. Both Sarah Palin's parents were school teachers who coached track on the side, but lacked money and connections for expensive schools like, for example, Occidental College, and then Columbia (where Barack Obama attended as an underclassmen and transfer, respectively). Like both Jackson and Lincoln, Palin steadily climbed the socio-economic ladder, working a variety of jobs, but that does not account for the rage directed at her. Americans are familiar with all sorts of politicians from modest backgrounds. Neither ex-Wrestler Jesse Ventura (of Minnesota) or celebrity-actor-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger generated this level of bile. Despite being larger than life, outlandish characters from modest backgrounds. Initially, most found them entertaining. No, it is not Sarah Palin's modest beginnings and rise up the social and economic and political ladder that enrages her mostly non-political critics.

Rather, it is her choice of husband, and her decision to have five children, starting at an early age, that really enrages her critics. Who find that a dagger aimed right at the heart of the traditional view of female empowerment. Simply because people can see her advantages in her choices, and might seek to copy her path.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-California, has five children. However, not only was she born to wealth and power (her father, Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr), was a Maryland Congressman and Mayor of Baltimore, but significantly, she married into wealth and power. Her husband Paul Pelosi is a wealthy businessman. Significantly, Todd Palin is not a wealthy businessman. Though a champion snowmachine racer, he remains blue collar in appearance and status, as a seasonal oil field worker and commercial fisherman. He even retains his United Steelworkers union card.

Unlike TV's Buffy, Sarah Palin married her High School sweetheart. And not to a man resembling hunky TV-vampire "Angel" either, source of much misery mixed with romance and passion. Nope. Sarah Palin married "Xander." Todd Palin's Wikipedia entry may be found here and the actor Nicholas Brendon's (Xander on Buffy) entry may be found here.

Whether it's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," or "Sex and the City," or pretty much any female oriented television show, the model for female empowerment is pretty much the same. Have a boyfriend, but for heaven's sake don't get married young (Palin married at age 24). Make sure the boyfriend is powerful, or wealthy, or both. Don't have children, particularly when you're young (Palin's first child was born at age 25). Since youth is best spent "exploring" in eternal adolescence. Above all, avoid supportive, steady men in favor of volatile, but high in status and power alternatives. Make sure your parents and family are kept at a distance, since they only limit your endless romantic life and professional growth. These are the rule of female empowerment, adopted by cultural consensus over the years.

Palin violates all those rules. Unlike TV's Buffy (and also Sex and the City's Carrie), she chose a supportive, steady man whose character and good points, flaws, and idiosyncrasies were well known to her. Rather than sacrifice career for family, she chose family first over career. Buffy, like most of TV's empowered heroines (Xena, Veronica Mars, Carrie on Sex and the City), is often alone, between vampires boyfriends, and has no prospect of a family of her own. Even worse, the advantages Palin had over Buffy were obvious. Her husband was steady and supportive, not competitive with her own efforts. Though their family still had to hunt, as most Alaskans do, to supplement their food budget, Todd Palin's financial and emotional support was critical to Sarah Palin's advancement (much as Rachel Jackson's emotional support was critical to Andrew Jackson's political rise in the chaotic politics of Tennessee). Politics, particularly in the rough and tumble small town Alaskan variety, is not easy. Those most successful in it, usually need a supportive partner. The parallels with other career paths for women are obvious, and threatening.

Thus Palin committed three great "sins" against the conventional wisdom of female empowerment. She first chose to marry, not a powerful, "impressive" short-term romance that brings constant heartache. Buffy is often noting that love for her equals physical passion mixed with pain and misery, and reliably chooses men who will give her the heartache she craves. Sarah Palin compounds this by putting family first, starting hers early, when it's much easier to conceive, and also care for, children. But even worse, she becomes a full adult, early in her life. Instead of age 35, or later. Trading testosterone and power for comfort, stability, and support; choosing family over career; and becoming adult early. These are her sins.

They are considerable, given the threat her existence poses to the Buffy model.

Just taking her decision to have children early, which is a massive challenge to the status quo. By having her children at a relatively young age, her parents are still young enough to help out with child care, and they do by all accounts, along with Palin's sisters and brother, who are all close by. The value of the extended nuclear family, as contrasted to the chaotic, divorce-driven single, lonely family of Buffy (or TV's Veronica Mars) is striking. Palin could afford as many children as Nancy Pelosi (five), with a tiny fraction of her wealth. Rather than the prison that feminism and in particular, Buffy the Vampire Slayer depicted, the nuclear family enabled Palin to have her children first, and later her career. "Having it all," is indeed possible, but only if your parents stay together, you have a sibling or two, and you have children at a relatively young age with everyone in the same geographic area, willing to help out as part of a close-knit family.

Then, there is Todd Palin. Sarah Palin's husband. A blue collar man who earned enough working the oil fields and fishing boats, to support a family early. A man who quit his job of 17 years in the oil fields to both avoid conflict of interest (when Palin was elected Governor) and help care for the children while Palin focused on her transition to Governor. Todd Palin later took considerable time off (without pay) to help care for the family when Trig (Palin's Down Syndrome child, her youngest) was born. Todd Palin no less than Sarah Palin is a threat to the model of female empowerment, which panders to the idea that there are no trade-offs in pursuing the high-status, high-powered, high-testosterone men, or no advantages to be found in choosing comfort, stability, and character instead by women considering marriage.

Can one imagine Bill Clinton, John Edwards, or San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome acting in any similar manner? Much less any of Buffy's high-powered but unreliable boyfriends? Hollywood no less than politics has a stake in this election and the prominence of the Palin family. It's why so many made so many negative, personal, and mean spirited comments. They felt profoundly threatened by Palin's examples, and their own choices seemed shallow and shabby.

Pamela Anderson's disastrous personal life, rivals fictional Buffy's for depressing chaotic sadness and bad choices. Lynda Carter married Washington DC attorney and fixer Robert Altman, who was tried and acquitted by Jury in connection with the BCCI securities fraud scandal. Carter has admitted she has undergone treatment for alcoholism. Pink is divorced from Motocross racer Carey Hart, and rumored to be involved in Scientology. Both Roger Ebert and Michael Seitzman work in an industry that is built on pushing positive images of the choices of women like Anderson, Carter, and Pink, and negative ones of the nuclear family choice that Palin made.

Sarah Palin and her family, by demonstrating without a doubt that the nuclear family, and the stability and comfort it brings, can allow ambitious women to achieve great things instead of preventing it, is a massive threat to the conventional idea of female empowerment. She just might slay Buffy's standard in that regard. No wonder Hollywood reacted so badly. People might have to start working for a living, instead of vomiting out the old, stale ideology of 1968. We can't have that!
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Sarah Palin: Why They Hate Her, Part 1

It's surprising, the amount of sheer hate directed at Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain's pick for the VP slot. Hate, over and above that directed at George W. Bush, or John McCain himself. Viewed without context, it's inexplicable, since Palin herself is fairly obscure, and relatively uncontroversial. While Palin certainly has attacked Barack Obama's qualifications for the Presidency, the attacks were certainly expected, and in line with normal partisan appeals in past elections. Nothing Palin has said, for example, would be surprising to anyone who followed Lloyd Bentsen's attacks on George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988, or Al Gore's in 1992. Palin has been absent from the great political battles of the 2000's era. Not an advocate of the Iraq War, nor a participant in any of the debates on the proper bounds for the NSA, Guantanamo Bay, or any other hot-button issue, can account for all sorts of people expressing such a strong dislike of Palin. Nor the spontaneous admiration by many people for her either.

Politics as conventionally understood, don't explain why Palin generates such rage by her political opponents, the Media, and the Cultural Left. There are really two main reasons for such rage (and various personal attacks). This post will focus on one reason, which is the eternal struggle in American politics between East and West.

Europeans and Eastern intellectuals often have a hard time understanding what really drives American politics. What they fail to understand is that the conflict between Easterners and Westerners, broadly understood, has shaped American politics since the adoption of the Constitution in 1788.

Easterners, since the first few settlements in Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, have wanted expensive land, and cheap labor. Expensive land, since they already owned land, a great deal of it, and hoped to use the land to generate even more wealth. By use of cheap labor. Slaves, Indians in forced labor, and indentured servants (such as Benjamin Franklin), could be used in the fields or nascent factories, producing everything from corn, to molasses, to tobacco, to firearms, for export to England and the Continent. Easterners wanted money spent by the government to improve their own lot, including their ports, cities, factories, and subsidies in one form or another for their export-oriented businesses.

Westerners, from the first, rebelling against the men who ran the first colonies, favored cheap land, and expensive labor. Ideally, the land would be "free," and taken from Indians who could not hold it, while their own labors would be expensive. Thus the relatively poor Westerners hoped to raise their own station in life. They favored restrictions on imports of labor, and generally despised taxes and regulations that fell upon them and took money from them to interests in the East. The Shays Rebellion, in President Washington's first term, epitomizes this conflict. Western Pennsylvania farmers wanted no taxes on Whiskey, made from the corn they grew themselves (and far more profitable to ship than the perishable raw corn). Easterners wanted taxes raised, and certainly not on themselves. Thus the conflict.

While other issues such as Slavery, Segregation, and the Cold War have colored the domestic US political struggles, this conflict remains at the heart of what Americans really argue about. Westward expansion, starting before the War of Independence, after the defeat of the French in the French and Indian War, meant a loss of influence and political control for the Eastern elite. Which fought Westward expansion at every turn. Without the threat of French allied Indian tribes posing serious threats to settlers, men and women streamed West to settle new lands and pose competitive threats to the Eastern Plantations and Estates, at least as far as agricultural exports were concerned.

This conflict came to a head, in the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. Jackson's supporters wanted Westward expansion, which meant spending money on Westward transportation and communication links, and expelling the Cherokee Indians from the Southeast, the current states of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Easterners wanted to keep the Indians in place, for obvious reasons. Easterners also wanted the strong, centralized Bank of the United States. The Bank of the United States provided expensive credit, to only the most credit worthy. Which was generally, the Eastern elites, who held title to expensive Eastern Seaboard property. Westerners, who lived often a "cash-less" life of barter, wanted inflationary currency (easier to pay off their debts).

Jackson, as the symbol and leader of the Westerners, was subject to personal attacks familiar to any who've followed those on Palin, and fought a number of duels over this matter before assuming the Presidency. Jackson's wife, the state of their marriage, speculation about his adopted children, and other rather base attacks, even by the standards of the 19th Century, portrayed Jackson as an uncouth, unlettered, barbarous, and vile Westerner, unfit for office and lacking the sophistication of such men as John Quincy Adams. Sound familiar?

That is the case today. Palin, like Jackson, is a Westerner. Thus, she is certain to favor policies that Easterners hate. Such as cheap land. This means, in practice, relaxation of federal regulations restricting the use of federal lands, and a general opening of the lands for resource extraction, including fishing, lumber, ranching, and of course oil and gas exploration and drilling. All of which will shift money and power from the East to the West. Diminishing the power of places like New York City and Washington DC, and raising in importance cities such as Boise, Idaho, or Fairbanks, Alaska.

Palin is also likely to oppose immigration amnesty and "reform" that would allow any more immigrants into the US. Her Alaskan power base consists of mostly Blue Collar and lower White Collar workers, who absolutely require expensive labor (meaning, effectively, limiting the supply of workers) to raise their living standard. McCain's "radio silence" on the subject of Immigration, Amnesty, and so on, reflects the reality of his mostly Western base, Obama's promise to enact "Immigration Reform" shows the priorities of his own, Eastern base. Eternally, cheap labor and expensive land.

Palin is also likely to favor greater transportation links to the West, especially Alaska. Anyone who has followed National Geographic Channel's "Tougher in Alaska" with host Geo Beach, knows that living expenses are quite high in Alaska. Remote villages endure sky-high prices, such as jar of Skippy Peanut Butter at $12. Given the extreme Winter cold, much of Alaska's cities cannot have water mains (which would simply freeze) and thus expensive water delivery trucks fill home tanks. Alaska's rail, air, highway, and sea links with the rest of the United States are limited, making exports of their resources more difficult. Just as Lincoln, domestically, was elected in part in 1860 because he favored more railroads to the West, Palin is likely to favor spending more money on transport links to the West and Alaska, instead of Eastern cities. Meaning less money for block grants (aka patronage in Eastern Cities), welfare, etc.

Westerners of course are often characterized as "libertarian" and favoring small government. This is false, Westerners simply want money spent on things they favor, rather than on Eastern cities and the interests of Easterners. This includes regulations. Westerners do not like regulations that hurt their own economic interests, such as forbidding drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. However, they are quite happy to see quotas on imports from foreign agricultural or commodity competitors that lower the prices they can charge and thus reduce their wealth. Westerners almost always favor regulations to make labor expensive (agricultural businesses are the exception here).

[The Pacific Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington, are odd beasts. Part "Eastern" and part "Western." California's population center, roughly from Santa Barbara south to San Diego, reflects the oddity of the Pacific Coast. Only the coastal zone is desirable, the inland areas are too hot and dry for comfortable and high-density housing, unlike the East Coast. This makes the coastal counties very "Eastern" and like the metro areas of New York City and Washington DC. Meanwhile, the inland areas of California such as Temecula are solidly "Western." Oregon and Washington repeat this pattern — expensive coastal areas of cheap labor, high land costs, and interiors of cheap land. To the extent that the Front Range limits Denver and Boulder and Colorado Springs expansion, this also characterizes Colorado, and explains why it is an exception among it's Mountain West neighbors of Utah, Arizona, and Wyoming. A look at the 2000 and 2004 electoral maps of the Pacific Coast states and say, Utah are instructive. Salt Lake City voted solidly Democratic. As did Los Angeles County, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. The difference between Utah's overall vote for Republicans in both elections and that of California, Washington, and Oregon's Democratic votes is that in Utah, the majority of the population lived in smaller cities and suburbs. Thus tipping that state solidly "Western."]

This conflict is as old as the struggle between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. The struggle, however, in the long run favors the Westerners. The "center" of American population has been moving ever Westward since 1755. Exceptional Eastern politicians and political coalitions may be able to delay this process, but it is only a delay. The Wikipedia link to the mean center of US population shows how people have moved ever-westward.

Westerners, with cheap land and expensive labor, are able to form LARGER families than Easterners. Steve Sailer's "Affordable Family Formation" formula in action. This forms the other basis for the complete horror that Sarah Palin and her family induces in the Media, Democratic Party, and Cultural Left (but I repeat myself). This will be discussed in greater detail in Part 2.
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