Stalin in Lipstick

Sarah Palin's folksiness is viewed by right-wing demagogues as being somehow natural, down-home and in touch with "Joe Six-Pack." Leaving aside this shameless exhibition of cheap populism and the unproven connection between how folksy you are and how qualified you are to be Vice-President of the United States (and quite possibly President), there is a sharper edge to the Palin persona than most observers will allow.

For every attempt to construct yourself as a small-town hockey mom involves the Othering of something else, in this case the vague image of the East Coast liberal elite. This is an old trope in American politics, as old as John Adams being portrayed as an aloof British royalist in contrast with Jefferson as the farmer. We need to look no further than the Folkster-in-Chief himself, George W. Bush, playing this game against the wind-surfing, French-loving, swiss cheese-eating John Kerry, who never stood a chance.

But the situation is fundamentally different four years later. Bush and Kerry were essentially the same: both patrician politicians from New England who went to Yale. Bush, scion of an American political dynasty, was cynically and hypocritically deploying a discourse of simplicity that Karl Rove had taught him. Palin, by contrast, is the Real Thing. She really does come from a small town, and one as peripheral to the nation's centres of power (Washington and New York) as you can possibly get. She really wants to bring some "Wasilla Main Street" spirit to the cocktail-party crowd, gosh darn it.

Here's where the Republican Party's ideology comes out from underneath all the political games and rears its ugly, ugly head. Rudy Giuliani's deplorable RNC speech included this remarkable statement: "I'm sorry -- I'm sorry that Barack Obama feels that her hometown isn't cosmopolitan enough." The use of the word cosmopolitan reveals, at long last, the Other the Republicans are attacking. It has both a cultural aspect (multiculturalism and the valuation of difference) and a spatial aspect (small towns vs. big cities), and I would go so far as to say that it's the organising principle of the Republican vision of America.

What does this sound like? Surprisingly, another set of ideologues constructed "cosmopolitanism" as their main enemy a long time ago...they were the Leninist-Stalinists. Consider this call to action from a 1949 article by one F. Chernov: "Bourgeois cosmopolitanism is chiefly aimed against patriotism. Therefore the goal of further education, development and cultivation of Soviet patriotism demands a resolute struggle against cosmopolitanism and absolute victory over such disgraceful vestiges of bourgeois ideology as cringing and servility towards the capitalist West." Anyone who lived in the Soviet bloc is familiar with this language, which did the same rhetorical work as the Giuliani-Palin discourse. The "rootless" big-city bourgeois interests (which often included familiar Others like the Jews) were pitted against the Soviet village full of patriotic peasants. Of course Soviet policies, which destroyed the Russian peasantry, were no better for the village than the Republicans' big business-friendly policies are for "Main Street." But that was never the point. The Soviet and Republican ideologies are not mere abstractions; both Palin and Stalin (who also hailed from a small town at the outskirts of the Russian Empire, in this case Georgia) believe every doggone word they say.

The attack on cosmopolitanism is at the heart of any attempt to build the kind of ignorant patriotism that allows a small band of poorly educated, mediocre bureaucrats to enslave a great nation and its people. This is what Stalin did, and this is what the Republicans are doing. What comes out of big cities and universities (freedom of expression in culture and the arts, intelligent political criticism) always threatens this project. This is why "Professor Obama" can't be President. The only acceptable leadership figures are truly mediocre bureaucrats like the mayor of Wasilla who not only exhibit but celebrate their mediocrity.
Stalin was a man of extremely limited intellectual capacity and brutish cultural taste. One need only compare the kind of literature he promoted, which came to be known as "Soviet realism," with Sarah Palin saying that her favourite author is a columnist for Runner's World Magazine and her inquiry about banning books at the Wasilla Library, to realise the danger we are in. Stalin, an embodiment of mediocrity, ended up ruling the country of Tolstoy and Chaikovsky. Palin could very well end up running a country as rich in culture and intellectual diversity as America, which has the best universities and the most Nobel Prize winners in the world. This simply cannot happen.

It's time to embrace cosmopolitanism and difference as the best way to resist the tyranny of mediocrity. It's time to stop eating Palin's bullshit, excuse me mooseshit, by the spoonful.