The NA710N

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece here on the NA710N about what I saw as an impending feud between conservatives and libertarians within the Republican Party. The Bush Administration neo-conservative leftovers were never keen on sharing ideological space with the political shrapnel spraying around from the failed Ron Paul presidential campaign, but the Obama victory cornered all right-wingers into a collective time out. Their shared experience of defeat led to an initial identity crisis. The Tea Party movement, once a staple of young Paul followers, became the centerpiece of the conservative grassroots movement. Fox News, the flagship conservative media outlet, was now teeming with libertarians. As the year wore on and the Democratic tide subsided, it became increasingly apparent that warring factions had assembled within the ranks of the Republican Party, passions simmering to a boiling point, waiting for a sign to attack. Given the nature of post-Obama politics, we should have seen it coming that this war’s Franz Ferdinand moment would come from Saturday Night Live.

One can argue that “Palin 2012” is one of the funniest and most original political statements of this SNL season. To liberals, the momentum for a Palin-Beck ticket from the Right appeared to be snowballing out of control. Together, the two greatest conservative icons of the nation would be all but unstoppable. After all, even if the Right were not intentionally monolithic, those on the Left still believe that they have enough of a stranglehold on power to force them into working together, and their biggest fear—that the Right would succeed in organizing—seemed perilously close to fruition. The success of their frustrated parody should have been bad news for the former Alaska governor. It was a universal hit based on one simple premise: absolutely no one wants to see Sarah Palin be president. Not liberals, not conservatives, and certainly not Glenn Beck. The problem is that Sarah Palin didn’t seem to get the joke. SNL probably used a November 17 interview with Newsmax.com as inspiration for their parody, during which Palin offhandedly commented that she considered Beck a “hoot” and that she is considering him as a potential vice presidential running mate.

The silence from the Beck camp was deafening, especially after the parody. Beck had been hyping up his grandiose new plan for 2010, during which he threatened he would become more politically active. “I’m going to teach you how to be a community organizer next year, oh, because two can play at that game,” he told his audience on his WOR radio program last week. It seemed the carving of Glenn Beck’s political career had begun, with or without Sarah Palin. Palin’s response to his autonomous political threat was a little more coy flirting on his home television network:

Palin was asked during an interview with Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” about the chances that she “would run on a ticket with Fox’s own Glenn Beck,” as the conservative outlet Newsmax reported might be a possibility in 2012.

[…]

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

She then proceeded to call him and her and the whole idea of them running on a ticket together, once again, a “hoot,” probably hoping her folksy demeanor would disarm Beck enough to goad him into an answer. That much she did get from him.

“I don’t think things are hoots,” Beck commented on his WOR Radio program last Wednesday. “I don’t. I don’t think it’s a hoot. I would never use the word hoot, and I respectfully ask that every time my name is brought up she would stop using the word ‘hoot.’” As for the prospect of a Palin/Beck administration, he envisions a nightmare scenario for him just as much as the rest of us: “She’d be yapping or something, and I’d say, “I’m sorry, why am I hearing your voice? I’m not in the kitchen.” He went on to add that he had spoken to Palin about it and he “didn’t even know what she was saying.”

On first listen, this one appeared to be a political freebie for the liberals, who went into emergency victim mode—on Palin’s behalf, of all people— about Beck’s “sexist” comments. Had he been discussing an interaction with any other woman this side of Phyllis Schlafly, I would have agreed. But Beck, a master of disguise, is not showing off his misogynistic stripes—he’s playing Palin’s own game, and beating her at it. After touting the importance of the “American mom” and leading by example, making painfully obvious how subservient he is to his own wife, he has built up a significant amount of street cred among female conservatives. He knows all hope of ingratiating himself with female liberals evaporated long ago—he’s not trying to court them, anyway—but keeping the traditional housewives happy is a top priority. In fact, in some circles Beck is considered somewhat of an honorary mom. This is the only possible position from which it would be acceptable to criticize Palin for showing off her impressive body in what would become the cover of the November 23 edition of Newsweek. “What was she thinking?!” he wailed on his radio program. “How could she not realize they would attack her for this?”

Many will argue that this is the kind of unfair “she was asking for it” point of view misogynists often employ when a woman wearing a miniskirt late at night gets raped. Others more prone to assigning personal responsibility will argue that, well, she was asking for it. Guess which side the average conservative will tend to fall on.

This is the atmosphere in which Beck prepared his attack. This is the mood he put his listeners—many of them Palin fans—before enlightening them on how ridiculous he actually considered the idea of being under Palin’s authority. A regular Beck listener would have already been both staunchly convinced of Beck’s reverence towards the hardworking American housewife and slightly jaded about Palin’s promise to be the GOP’s savior. Couple her willingness to sell her body for political gain with what many conservatives would consider massive parenting failures and, really, does a woman like Palin deserve to be anywhere but the kitchen? And more importantly: is there anywhere liberals would rather put her?

Beck has not launched an attack against women in politics, but on his adversaries sharing space in the American Right wing. Having hammered the Obama administration to the ground all year, Republicans/conservatives/whatever they are calling themselves today have bought themselves the breathing room necessary to address their identity crisis. They know that they are capitalists, and they know they love America, but whether they are autocratic about their preferences is a more nuanced issue. Social freedoms fall under this category, as do respect for free media and foreign military activity. Palin’s wing of the party prefer to micromanage American lives, silence the “gotcha” media, and pray their way out of wars. Beck distrusts the government too much, no matter who runs it, to give it the power necessary to go about such activity, and he knows the first message to be manipulated under a Palin administration is his own.

The ideology of the conservatives makes it imperative for them to control the other half of their political wing, and libertarians don’t often warm up to being told what to do. Beck’s incendiary comments serve to highlight to the libertarians in his office what him selling out to a conservative administration would mean: conservatives yapping away at him while he irreverently fights the power, and eventually destroys himself. The alternative—a libertarian administration with conservative underlings—would function more smoothly by definition, because libertarians don’t nag. Turning the George Lakoff model on its head, Beck is making right-wingers choose between Palin’s Strict Mother—no drugs, no sex, and certainly no gay tomfoolery in her Christian vision of America—and his Nurturing Father, a concerned authority figure who guides his followers away from evil without ever stopping to judge them (who was the guy that said “let him who is without sin cast the first stone”? Probably not anyone Sarah Palin has read). Picking a fight with Palin will kick the latter’s victimization instincts into overdrive, but when the person she is trying to demonize has already run circles around her folksiness, incompetence, and hypocrisy, perhaps the only thing to do is put her tail between her legs and get back in the kitchen.

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