Palin's Puritans, not Tea Partyers

When, at the first and probably last National Tea Party Convention, the rather unstable Andrew Breitbart introduced the even more unstable and thus more prosperous Sarah Palin as "the first person to tell us about the death panel," you knew we were in for some first-rate analysis ... say, from the seventeenth century.

Politicians, she said, sounding very much like Increase Mather, should "start seeking some divine intervention again in this country, so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again."

Now that's one helluva platform: Sarah Palin as the Great Conjurer, seeking, principally through prayer, to spare us from financial meltdowns, unemployment, natural disasters and Indian attacks.

Or was that Sarah Palin as Faust?

I don't know, but a dog-eared copy of such would have been far cheaper than Saturday night's admission price -- and far more enlightening.

But, of course, enlightenment was hardly the object of pursuit among the enthusiastically assembled. They came for the ancient, reactionary chestnuts, and got them by the truckload.

Let us pray and vote for "people involved in government," Palin continued, "who aren’t afraid to go that route" -- the theocratic, government-by-divine-magic route, that is -- "and also afraid of the political correctness that, you know, they have to be afraid about what the media would say about them if they were to proclaim their reliance on our Creator" -- Who, evidently, is politically correctly OK with the adjective "fucking," but not the noun "retard."

Yes, He works in mysterious ways, but thank God we have Ms. Palin to guide us, and sort out at least these etymological mysteries.

As well as God's economic policies, which just happen to comport -- although for Palin, this is modernizing progress -- with the eighteenth-century principles of Adam Smith.

To wit, Palin said to raucous applause that she will endorse candidates who "understand" and, presumably, support only "free market principles" -- unlike the poor Tea Partying slobs outside the event who were staging what Politico called a "guerilla news conference" to protest Palin's mercenary fee and the rather extravagant cover charge to cover it, as well as to enrich the organizers.

This clash between the monied organizers at top and the excluded poor at bottom reminded me of Oscar Wilde's magnificent musings on the dubious blessings of free-market principles and unfettered capitalism in general:

The "virtuous poor," he wrote -- and in this instance that term would refer to the poor fawning slobs inside the convention hall; in fact several hundred dollars poorer -- must be "extraordinarily stupid. I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under these conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance."

Acquiesce? For heaven's sake, they cheer it. They just can't get enough of the trickle-down abuse that mars and makes hideous their lives. These, authentically, are Thomas Frank's conservatives; perhaps a bit more exploitable than your average downscaling Kansan, but every bit as bewildered.

So where from here? What did it all mean? Sadly, even Ms. Palin comprehends the dark and stormy future of third parties in America.

Having opened her speech with the rousing, rip-roaring proclamation that "America is ready for another revolution!" and "this movement is the future of politics in America," Palin, in the Q&A session following, downplayed any third-party aspirations: "The Republican Party would be really smart to start trying to absorb as much of the Tea Party movement as possible."

Damn. I was hoping Ms. Palin would endorse the politically anachronistic, as much as she did the revival of colonial Puritanism and unrehabilitated Smithian economics.