From The Federalist, of all places.






Donald Trump Is The Price We Pay For Sarah Palin

(Excerpts)

Sarah Palin has re-emerged onto the national political scene to endorse Donald Trump.

Well, this closes a big circle and explains how we got to this point.
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Here is the real essence of Palin’s endorsement, in two sentences.

Mr. Trump, you’re right. Look back there in the press box. Heads are spinning, media heads are spinning. This is going to be so much fun.

And:

Trump, what he’s been able to do, which is really ticking people off, which I’m glad about, he’s going rogue left and right, man, that’s why he’s doing so well.

Plenty of people have observed before that Trump’s candidacy is based on media celebrity. This endorsement speech reminds us that it’s a variety of media celebrity that people like Palin perfected. It’s a kind of political celebrity that is light on ideological substance or coherence and heavy on “ticking people off” and “making media heads spin.”
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How did we get from Sarah Palin in 2008 to Donald Trump in 2016? Because the Right has been tempted to sell its soul by putting personality over principle and emotion over reason. We have been tempted into embracing as our leaders and spokesmen a series of media personalities whose main selling point is that they are outrageous and controversial and like to stick a finger in the eye of the Mainstream Media and infuriate “the Establishment” and the “PC Left.”

All of which is well and good, if it is in pursuit of a coherent pro-freedom ideology, by which I mean a coherent view of the world and of the role of government as embodied in a broad and consistent political agenda.

But when we embrace these media personalities, the danger is that we will end up just having the outrageous and flamboyant personality, without the coherent ideology.

We’ve been flirting with that for years, with characters like Ann Coulter — who is so ideologically consistent she has gone from endorsing Mitt Romney to endorsing Donald Trump, and in fact endorsed a Trump-Romney ticket, which is the very essence of ideological incoherence.
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Palin, in retrospect, was just another step in this process. When she first came on the scene, she was viciously attacked by the mainstream media, and the more she was attacked, the more the “base” of the Right loved her. But this partisan interest blinded a lot of people to her real faults as a candidate, particularly the fact that she was ill-informed on some of the big issues. 
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As I argued back in 2008, what Palin really stood for in people’s minds was a kind of cultural populism, which denounces Hollywood and the Mainstream Media in the same way Bernie Sanders rails against Wall Street and billionaires. Which is fine as far as it goes. But without ideological substance, it just means defining yourself negatively: I am against whatever the Mainstream Media is for.

And if you let yourself be defined that way, you will end up looking for someone whose sole recommendation is that he says outrageous things that offend people.

http://thefederalist.com/2016/01/20/donald-trump-is-the-price-we-pay-for-sarah-palin/