Дым развеялся, и стали появляться все более интересные тексты, рассматривающие феномен Палин в прошедшей кампании.
Palin’s social conservatism had never been the core of her political identity in Alaska. She always expressed general support for traditionalist views in interviews and debates, and it was widely known that she had also chosen to proceed with her fifth pregnancy after discovering the child had Down syndrome—a discovery that in about nine of ten cases leads parents to opt for abortion. But Palin never went out of her way to raise abortion or other social or cultural issues, and in her first two years as governor had not sought to change state policies in these areas. She was a good-government reformer with social conservative leanings, not the other way around.
But this was not how Palin was received on the national scene. Instead, her views on matters of cultural and social controversy very quickly became the chief focus of media attention, liberal criticism, and pundit analysis. Palin was assigned every view and position the Left considered unenlightened, and the response to her brought into the light all manner of implicit liberal assumptions about cultural conservatives. We were told that Palin was opposed to contraception, advocated teaching creationism in schools, and was inclined to ban books she disagreed with. She was described as a religious zealot, an anti-abortion extremist, a blind champion of abstinence-only sex education. She was said to have sought to make rape victims pay for their own medical exams, to have Alaska secede from the Union, and to get Pat Buchanan elected President. She was reported to believe that the Iraq war was mandated by God, that the end-times prophesied in the Book of Revelation were nearing and only Alaska would survive, and that global warming was purely a myth. None of this was true.
Особенно интересна та часть, где объясняется про причины ее неприятия интеллектуальной элитой: отказ говорить на том же языке.
What she lacked was not intelligence—she is, clearly, highly intelligent—but rather the particular set of assumptions, references, and attitudes inculcated by America’s top twenty universities and transmitted by the nation’s elite cultural organs.
Собственно, этот текст надо цитировать целиком, он внятен, целен и объективен.
Лично для меня после всей этой истории отношение к Палин стало одним из очевидных индикаторов. Человек, разделяющий ту лефтистскую культурную паранойю, о которой говорится в статье, воспринимается мной как человек сильно зашоренный и некритично податливый к давлению mass media.
Опубликовано в Записках Часовщика. Комментировать лучше там, но можно и здесь.
