David Frum isn’t usually my favorite pundit but recently he’s been posting too much common sense to ignore. He’s been at the forefront of conservative skepticism about Palin. One key Frum line is that Palin euphoria has moved the McCain platform from the home of straight-talking realism to a confusing land in which personal charisma, endearing backstories and competing aesthetics muddy each other. Thanks to the Palin pick,
it turns out that many conservatives care as little as ever about administrative skill and executive accomplishment. Our party and our movement overwhelmingly respond to symbolic cues.
It’s an argument other commentators have been picking up on all week and it’s got plenty of GOP loyalists worried. Peggy Noonan was embarrassed to be caught claiming that Palin only got the pick because
“I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives. Every time the Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and that’s not what they’re good at, they blow it”
The question that keeps coming up is where personal narrative belongs effectively in a McCain campaign. Paul Mirengoff puts it best
We conservatives have had a good time ridiculing the Obama phenomenon, especially its messianic feel — the willingness of its adherents to pour so much hope and belief into such an empty, or at least incomplete, vessel — and its elevation of “narrative” over substance.
It turns out that we were dying to have basically the same experience.
I’d question Noonan’s conviction that “Republicans can’t do narrative” - after all, what was Bush Junior’s 2000 race but the return of the prodigal son? It turned out there was a way to take those alcoholic frat boy stories and make them do good. But Mirengoff is right to point out that they can’t ridicule Obama’s campaign for being narrative-heavy and then turn the same trick themselves. Incidentally, it’s telling that he calls Palin “a vessel” - guess those passive views of femininity just gotta pervade the language mornin’ noon and night.
But there’s a specific literary reason why Palinites shouldn’t try fighting Obama when it comes to narrative in America. Some months ago I heard a truly great literary conservative argue that the truly American narrative is the narrative of the fatherless. As a Brit, I’m often stunned by how preoccupied my American friends are with matters of ethnicity - if a nation won’t provide centuries of history to help one root one’s identity, perhaps neurotically plotting one’s genealogy and racial composition can help fill the void.
Look at the great American novels: Huck Finn, the story of a parentless boy torn between escaping and yearning for a shiftless father; The Scarlett Letter, the plot entirely driven by a child’s fatherlessness; The Catcher in the Rye, told by a boy whose parents are all too absent but who spends his days wishing he could offer children the paternal protection he clearly craves himself; The Great Gatsby, whose dominant character desperately covers up his father’s lowly origins and tries to create a whole new lineage for himself, even though that same rejected father is one of the very few who’ll show up for his funeral…the list goes on and on, the literature of a nation defined by a sense of historical rootlessness, descended from no forbears and entirely self-begotten.
So it’s not a theory I can claim as my own work, but I like it. And when it comes to narratives of fatherlessness, Obama is always going to win hands down. Sorry Sarah, you got the pick because the media strategists hadn’t read enough American novels.
And while we’re at it, check out this older Frum post attributing the cold reception given to Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind on publication to the Old Right’s reluctance to privilege the power of romantic narrative.
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