PalinPorn: It's Not Just For Sara Any More

The other day I introduced the concept of PalinPorn; you might define it as, um, material to help conservatives retreat within their own cocoon of fantasy rather than participate in the actual conversations taking place to move the country forward. It's a good thing: one sign of a decrepit, declining ideological tendency is that its adherents worry more about reassuring themselves about the purity of their own symbolic identity as liberal-irritaters than on actually getting anything accomplished. And it's epidemic. PalinPorn has become the defining gesture of conservative in the Obama Age.

This, of course, is PalinPorn:

And so is this:

And this, naturally:

But here's the important point. This is PalinPorn, too:

PalinPorn: it's not just about Sara. It's about the entire involuted mindset that has infected the Republican Party, even, or perhaps especially, at its most rarified levels of leadership. It's the strategic decision to re-open the Terry Schiavo case [1] as a means of energizing opposition to eminently consensus-worthy Obama appointments for the Department of Justice. It's about a televised debate over who should become the next Republican National Committee chair moderated by Grover Norquist that descends into an argument over which candidate owns the most guns. [2] ("Blackwell owns seven, which he uses 'very well,' and Saltsman rapid-fire lists the guns he owns, ending with a 30 ought 6. 'And Ken, I’ll take you on any time.' He means hunting, not dueling, I think.")

What does the outbreak of PalinPorn mean for the liberal project? On the one hand, the fact that this is the only sort of, um, stimulus conservatives seem interested in seems great news for the fight ahead that we're tracking day by day at OurFuture.org's "An Economy For All" [3] page. But don't be lulled. Remember how the American constitutional system works. The right doesn't need a majority to block a progressive program. They don't even need a particularly strong plurality. They just need the right roadblocks up at the right place, standing firm with the proper stalwartness. It's a dangerous game: if they can't get above that obstruction-enabling threshhold, it's the New Deal all over again, when de facto liberal dominance of the levers of government lasted some thirty-five years, and fronting a coalition that gave us as its monument the world's first mass middle class society. [4] But if they do—well, a hard and embittered cell of whiners convinced that Joe the Plumber is a journalist and that Sara Palin can govern will have proven just enough to set back America for a generation.