Rethink.

Dear Gov­er­nor Palin:

After read­ing that awful non­sense by Peggy Noo­nan which seemed to assert you were Anti-Christ, and more mea­sured responses by Ron Radosh and Mark Barabak, I real­ized some­thing: it isn’t enough to take a mea­sured response in your defense. The attacks on you are far too per­sonal, unre­strained, and self-justifying: the peo­ple mak­ing them are not being held account­able, just as the Bush-bashers are not account­able for any­thing (i.e. mak­ing North Korea, pre­vi­ously con­tained, a real threat to us in a mat­ter of months).

We need a media that is account­able. This can­not hap­pen by cre­at­ing more alter­na­tive media, for that already exists and is ignored. It can­not hap­pen through our schools and uni­ver­si­ties, for pow­er­ful inter­est groups pretty much con­trol what is taught over a 12–16 year span. (It was sheer chance I ran into National Review my sopho­more year of high school, and was there­fore able to eval­u­ate what I was taught in His­tory, Eng­lish and later Phi­los­o­phy and Pol­i­tics courses for myself, with just a seed of doubt to start.)

Part of media account­abil­ity, of course, is doing what we’re doing now, lay­ing facts out there. In your announce­ment that you’re not seek­ing a sec­ond term, you helped all of us who saw you as a com­pe­tent pub­lic offi­cial make our case:

Here’s some of the things we’ve done:

We cre­ated a petro­leum integrity office to over­see safe devel­op­ment. We held the line for Alaskans on Point Thom­son – and finally for the first time in decades – they’re drilling for oil and gas.

We have AGIA, the gasline project – a mas­sive bi-partisan vic­tory (the vote was 58 to 1!) – also suc­ceed­ing as intended — pro­tect­ing Alaskans as our clean nat­ural gas will flow to ener­gize us, and Amer­ica, through a com­pet­i­tive, pro-private sec­tor project. This is the largest pri­vate sec­tor energy project, ever. This is energy independence.

And ACES – another bipar­ti­san effort – is work­ing as intended and indus­try is pub­licly acknowl­edg­ing its suc­cess. Our new oil and gas “clear and equi­table for­mula” is so Alaskans will no longer be taken advan­tage of. ACES incen­tivizes new explo­ration and devel­op­ment and jobs that were pre­vi­ously not going to hap­pen with a monop­o­lized North Slope oil basin.

We cleaned up pre­vi­ously accepted uneth­i­cal actions; we ush­ered in bi-partisan Ethics Reform.

We also slowed the rate of gov­ern­ment growth, we worked with the Leg­is­la­ture to save bil­lions of dol­lars for the future, and I made no lob­by­ist friends with my hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in bud­get vetoes… but liv­ing beyond our means today is irre­spon­si­ble for tomorrow.

We took gov­ern­ment out of the dairy busi­ness and put it back into private-sector hands – where it should be.

We pro­vided unprece­dented sup­port for edu­ca­tion ini­tia­tives, and with the right lead­er­ship, finally filled long-vacant pub­lic safety posi­tions. We built a sub-Cabinet on Cli­mate Change and took heat from Out­side spe­cial inter­ests for our biologically-sound wildlife man­age­ment for abundance.

We broke ground on the new prison.

And we made com­mon sense con­ser­v­a­tive choices to elim­i­nate per­sonal lux­u­ries like the jet, the chef, the jun­kets… the entourage.

And the Lt. Gov­er­nor and I said “no” to our pay raises.

But again, this is already being done, and is clearly not enough. We’re not ask­ing that every­one become con­ser­v­a­tive when we com­plain about the state of the media. We’re ask­ing whether con­ser­vatism can be given a chance, and not a chance merely from the fact that lib­eral poli­cies may fail. In a sense, the real dan­ger from lib­eral poli­cies is that they don’t fail: we become depen­dent on the wel­fare state, or bureau­cra­cies mak­ing deci­sions for us, and as we do we alien­ate our free­dom and our morals to the government.

It is your desire to pri­vately ener­gize con­ser­vatism in Amer­ica that has me intrigued:

…I’ll work very hard for oth­ers who still believe in free enter­prise and smaller gov­ern­ment and strong national secu­rity for our coun­try and sup­port for our troops and energy inde­pen­dence and for those who will pro­tect free­dom and equal­ity and life.

I’ll work hard for and I’ll cam­paign for those who are proud to be Amer­i­can and who are inspired by our ideals and they won’t deride them. I will sup­port oth­ers who seek to serve in or out of office, and I don’t care what party they’re in or no party at all, inside Alaska or out­side of Alaska.

Peo­ple are not tak­ing this res­o­lu­tion of yours seri­ously, but I’m tak­ing it very seri­ously and I want to know what you have in mind so I can help out in my own way. The op-ed piece you wrote in the Post about Cap and Trade was not only right on the mark, but hit the exact tone and lan­guage many of us need to hear. We need a gen­eral out­line of a given sit­u­a­tion, the argu­ments pre­sented, and the facts that sup­port one posi­tion or another: with­out any wasted words you made your case.

Many of your detrac­tors are “hung up” about your style — phrases such as “God gave us energy” in the speech above linked, as opposed to your own for­mu­la­tion in the op-ed:

Amer­i­can pros­per­ity has always been dri­ven by the steady sup­ply of abun­dant, afford­able energy. Par­tic­u­larly in Alaska, we under­stand the inher­ent link between energy and pros­per­ity, energy and oppor­tu­nity, and energy and secu­rity. Con­se­quently, many of us in this huge, energy-rich state rec­og­nize that the president’s cap-and-trade energy tax would adversely affect every aspect of the U.S. economy.

Still other detrac­tors won­der about your abil­ity to respond to the media, argu­ing that you actu­ally rep­re­sent some form of celebrity pol­i­tics awash in nar­cis­sism and self-pity (some of these detrac­tors, of course, voted for the cur­rent Pres­i­dent, who did not have any prob­lem imply­ing that because of his iden­tity he could heal America’s orig­i­nal sin).

I dis­like the con­cerns of pun­dits usu­ally; they’re on the level of those who observe media alone, and mis­take their feel­ings quite often for rea­sons because of a lack of sus­tained inquiry into what is seem­ing and what is sim­ply. But con­ser­v­a­tives need unity, and it is more than elec­toral unity; some of the con­cerns pun­dits may have about the base are cor­rect, to wit:

• Peo­ple who are into con­spir­acy the­o­ries (esp. 9/11 “truth”) at the tea par­ties need to be marginalized.
• There is no war with Islam: there are many in Mus­lims in Afghanistan and Iraq who have been dev­as­tated by rad­i­cals of all sorts, and are fight­ing for their secu­rity, their fam­i­lies, and yes, tak­ing bul­lets for Coali­tion sol­diers too.
• Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and oth­ers should be looked at as giv­ing cover to more extreme posi­tions that are not harmless.
• And yes, Cre­ation­ism is dan­ger­ous. There are many rea­sons to dis­like Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion and want to reform it; Cre­ation­ists might be the best rea­son for let­ting lib­er­als have com­plete con­trol of the sys­tem cur­rently. (There’s a bet­ter argu­ment for sub­mis­sion to Bib­li­cal author­ity: if God died for you, what do you owe Him? At what point is belief not knowl­edge, because it shouldn’t be?)

Of course, no pun­dit is even close to being this spe­cific: they’re not con­cerned about the rise of the BNP in the UK, or the surge in KKK mem­ber­ship here. But we’ll give them the ben­e­fit of the doubt that they see what I see: con­ser­vatism has gen­er­ally been hos­tile to edu­ca­tion over the last half-century or so, and we’re pay­ing the price. We can only “edu­cate” those in iso­lated, small com­mu­ni­ties, and our broader reach — our abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate that we have much of sub­stance to say — is com­pro­mised by our abil­ity to iso­late our­selves and buy into the worst sorts of con­spir­acy theory.

While you’re help­ing more con­ser­v­a­tive can­di­dates win office, while you’re push­ing for the cor­rect pro­pos­als for our econ­omy and energy/security pol­icy, it may be pru­dent to say some­thing about why one should even be Repub­li­can. One thing I argued a while ago is that both par­ties should be educa­tive — why can’t the RNC put up a link to a “book of the week” that might be “Cap­i­tal­ism and Free­dom,” or put together local lec­tures on things like Lincoln’s legacy? [I should note this could hap­pen sooner than I think: one thing I never expected was for the RNC to have a blogroll, and actu­ally rec­og­nize other con­ser­v­a­tives online — that was a good move. Now if the site is sim­pler when remade, with the blog front and center…]

Peo­ple need to know while it’s their party, it’s not just their place to vent or be told what can­di­dates to look at, but to be respect­ful of oth­ers and knowl­edge­able about what they’re join­ing. Which brings us back to the prob­lem of media today — the media is only about today, the present, about our con­cerns now. In a sense, it can never really grap­ple with the future, and cer­tainly not respon­si­bly with the past. Par­ties, strangely enough, can be that insti­tu­tion where we do delib­er­ate and fig­ure out what’s gen­uinely fea­si­ble as Amer­i­cans. It sounds strange to say that because we do have rep­re­sen­ta­tives, but once peo­ple are elected, the deed is pretty much done. It’s almost in how we con­duct our­selves pri­vately that pol­i­tics for each and every one of us exists, and by def­i­n­i­tion, pol­i­tics isn’t pri­vate. Hence, our attach­ment and work within a given party is a very valu­able thing, espe­cially if we are bet­ter for par­tic­i­pat­ing, and not a slave to the agenda com­mer­cial media sets because of our basest desires.

• An Open Let­ter to All Polit­i­cal Sci­en­tists: Does the Obama Cam­paign Rep­re­sent the Future of Politics?
• Re: “Some Open Ques­tions for Conservatives”
• Open Thread: Will the Next Pres­i­dent Be Abused as Much as Bush Has Been?
• Open Thread: Traf­fic at Major Polit­i­cal Blogs is Down (via Blog­gasm); does that mean anything?
• Abra­ham Lin­coln, “Let­ter to Ephraim D. and Phoebe Ellsworth”

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