This is a fairly excellent comment on the present situation. It’s been pointed to by a variety of sources today and it’s probably worth reading. Below are some of the bits that make points quite similar to the ones I’m supposed to be posting over at that blog I once pretended to have.
The gloss of down-home authenticity - the mooseburgers, “snow machines,” and other rustic tat that figure so centrally in her instant legend. The young-Earther retreat from science and all its methods. The palpable resentment of coastal elites (even as this time around it doesn’t seem that term is shorthand, as it so often is, for “Jews”). The instinctual, immediate recourse, upon achieving even the most local and limited sort of power, to the heavy-handed suppression of free inquiry. The things that endear this onetime nowhere-burg mayor to Americans are, as clearly as can possibly be, indicators that a whole lot of people think tomorrow came too soon.
[…]
After my talks, I’m frequently enough asked about the comparative technical backwardness of the US, often in so many words. In such circumstances I invariably trot out Mimi Ito’s relativist line about “alternatively technologized modernities,” and the idea that different places, different polities arrive at - have to arrive at - divergent understandings about which technologies are appropriate for their given time and place. And I strongly believe that it’s a correct line..but it’s no longer true. What’s going on in the US isn’t, it’s clear to me, a measured and equally valid selection from the sheaf of available technosocial possibilities, but symptomatic, however subtly, of a headlong flight from contemporaneity.
[…]
The gobsmacking foolishness of our national discourse, the things which now seem to signify, the very person selected to act out these psychodramas on the national stage - these are all far surer signs that the future is deeply, and I mean pants-shittingly, terrifying to many Americans. They’ve read the tea leaves, all right, they’re not in the slightest bit stupid, and they know how things are shaping up. They’ve had their eponymous Century, and it ended seven years ago today; this one’s Injun Country by comparison, no pun intended.
Connecting that transmuted “anti-semitic” impulse and a fear or resistance to the future, particularly technological development, is especially interesting. To the extent that continued (post)modernization is unsettling and disrupts our good old ties to the land, of course the technocrats behind it are also the “liberal elite intellectuals who don’t know what it means to work with their hands.” This is the weird reactionary potential I mentioned a while ago, back when this whole pictures of cities thing started happening:
It’s a regression into that facile conviction of standing with the “authentic” against the “alienating” without concern over why which one is (or has come to be) which and whether it has to (or should) be that way. The architects living alone in their towers? Like the fluffy intellectuals left behind with their abstractions by those who are out there “really living their lives”?
It seems to hardly bear emphasizing at this point, and it’s a little sad for me to enthuse over seeing the same idea appear elsewhere. But connecting it to Palin, whose entire political identity seems to be about rallying her followers against all (us) “media” elites, is important to the extent that it reminds one that this really is a fight between the onward march of history and an attempt to secure forever what we (never really) used to have.
As always, it’s just fascists versus communists. “Democracy” isn’t an alignment, just a terrain of conflict…
