The above-depicted ass-end of Sarah Palin’s command bus for her forthcoming political-religious revival tour puts all of the would-be positive elements of Palinism together in a format that seems well-designed for her fans to love and to nauseate everyone else. “Everyone else” notes the Christian Right code words and dog whistles, the ungodly pretentiousness and self-aggrandizement, the implicit claim that only Sarah’s crusade can lift us out of the un-American circle of Hell into which we have already at least half descended.
I think it might have “worked” in 2009-10. The whole thing could flop, or, equally likely, may be depicted and accepted as a world-historical success by One Nation, discounted or hardly noticed by Everyone Else.
I have some sincere questions:
Is it unique for someone or a group to actually rally around the word “fundamental”? And whether or not it’s unique, is that what the Palin group is doing here? Are they actually using a word close enough to fundamentalism as a positive? Is the message, “yes, we’re fundamentalists and proud of it”? Or am I giving them too much credit and they are just using a word without any sense of what it connects to from the perspective of everyone else?