Sexism & Sarah Palin

If there were ever any doubts concerning John McCain’s political genius, his selection of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate has eradicated them once and for all.

McCain’s decision to put Palin on the ticket was a move of sheer brilliance, pure and simple.

The Democrats are on the ropes and they feel the ground slowly (or perhaps not so slowly) beginning to slip out from under them as America’s “newest sweetheart” endears herself to millions while eclipsing McCain, Joe Biden, and, most significantly, Barack Obama, in popularity.

I am no more immune to the awesome wave of energy that has charged the American Right than anyone else invested in defeating Obama and the Democrats. After all, the young Palin appears to be intelligent, vibrant, determined, articulate, and, considering the relatively short amount of time that she has spent holding public office, remarkably accomplished. In addition, the convictions that she has expressed in both word and deed appear to seamlessly coincide with those of most conservatives. If she is the emblem of the future of the Republican Party that many are making her out to be, then the future promises to be much better than the present.

There is, of course, the very real possibility that in the wake of a McCain/Palin victory, the future may not be nearly so rosy. Whether it is or not will depend not only on how faithfully our candidates handle our public trust but, at least as importantly, the manner in which those on the Right defend Palin against criticisms believed to be unjust.

“Political correctness” is the name associated with an incoherent cluster of ideas that form the orthodoxy that the Left has succeeded in imposing upon our public political culture. Central to this orthodoxy is the doctrine that, second perhaps only to “racism,” “sexism” is the most deplorable of sins. Yet as anyone tuning into “conservative” talk radio on any given day readily knows, it is precisely to this “politically correct” orthodoxy that the Right proclaims itself unequivocally opposed. However, in the wake of McCain’s announcement of Palin as his running mate and the truly outrageous attacks against her and her family that followed, those on the Right have proven themselves all too ready to play the card that the Left has been playing so spectacularly for decades, a card that many of us would like to see expunged from the deck altogether: the Right has charged their opponents with “sexism.”

My concern is that as long as right-leaning commentators and others insist on dismissing as “sexist” her detractors’ criticisms, including their (admittedly disingenuous) concern that her duties as a vice-president will interfere with her duties to her four-month old son, they will actually reinforce the very “political correctness” against which they have protested so loudly. In other words, far from inspiring in her party and country a love for all that is worth conserving in “conservatism,” and a corresponding aversion to left-wing orthodoxy with its idols of race and sex, Palin’s gender could play a pivotal role in strengthening the latter.

An infinitely wiser course of action for the Right, as well as America, would be for us to use the barrage of mostly silly and offensive criticisms against Palin as an opportunity to expose, not the “sexism” of the Left, but their phoniness and crass opportunism. The Left’s reaction to Palin’s nomination underscores what I have long suspected: “sexism,” like “racism,” is largely an ideological weapon whereby those who wield it seek to intimidate their opponents into doing their bidding.

It is this that the Right can now credibly establish.

If “the future” that Palin represents is a future in which “sexism” is recognized for the crude rhetorical device that it is, then that is a future that I would like very much to live in.

That is a future in which we would all be better off.