The meaning of Sarah Palin

Yuval Levin tries to explain. He concludes:

Palin’s potent combination of cultural populism and social conservatism might provide the roadmap a Republican politician will need in the future to make headway against the Democratic tide. But that roadmap will only take that Republican politician so far. The rest of the journey requires the articulation of a broader vision for American families, American prosperity and freedom, and American security; a vision of conservatism, not only a nimbus of populism.

There is every reason to believe Palin will try to accomplish just this in a future national election. It may be, however, that other ambitious Republicans will be better suited to the task of perfecting the formula for electoral success she introduced last fall.

Either way, the Palin moment shed a powerful light on the power, the potential, and the ultimate inadequacy of a conservatism grounded solely in cultural populism. It also exposed the vulnerability of the Left to a challenge to its most cherished claims—as the sole representative of the interests of the working class and the only legitimate path to political power for an ambitious woman.

And, perhaps even more telling, it revealed the unfortunate and unattractive propensity of the American cultural elite to treat those who are not deemed part of the elect with condescension and contumely.

Conor analyzes an earlier part:

What I fail to understand is why, if I value “sound instincts and valuable life experiences,” I should be so enamored of Governor Palin that I imagine her to be the future of the Republican Party, or a plausible VP choice.

Senator McCain’s life experiences include seven decades on earth, combat duty in Vietnam, being tortured in a Vietnamese prison cell, having his instincts tested in that time of crisis and passing the test, a long career studying matters foreign and domestic, an ethics scandal that chastened him forever after, fact finding trips all around the world, etc. If it’s instincts and life experience you’re after, he’s your guy. But somehow, these supposed “instinct and life experience” voters weren’t at all excited by Senator McCain, whereas they were thrilled by a youthful first term governor who lacked any experience in the military or a corporation, who seldom traveled outside Alaska, and whose instincts haven’t ever been tested in a time of crisis. This isn’t to denigrate Governor Palin. It is only to say that neither her life experiences nor her instincts are particularly notable, even compared to other Republicans like Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Duncan Hunter, and all the rest.

On a more general level, this stood out to me:

The Republican party has been the party of cultural populism and economic elitism, and the Democrats have been the party of cultural elitism and economic populism.

I guess this makes us libertarians elitists on both economic and cultural grounds.

Who'da thunk? Populism -- understood as the use of government force to redistribute wealth or regiment homogenized cultural norms -- has always been a bad idea.