Why Alaska Is a Mystery to Liberals

Over at ThePalination.com (a blog to which I occasionally contribute, although most of my contributions have been technical in nature), "gamsbo" has reposted an excellent 2008 article about Alaska and Sarah Palin.

It explains much, including why the East Coast illiterati have decided that Sarah Must Be Stopped.

Here's an excerpt:

"The frontier — the possibility of packing up and moving on to make your own life as you wish to live it — was enormously important, and generations of American historians have recognized its significance. Indeed, the great Frederick Jackson Turner pondered with profound alarm the significance of the closing of the frontier in the 1890s. He feared American democracy would not survive the results of the most recent census, that showed there was no longer a vast expanse of virgin land.

[...]

"For the first time in memory, we have a major candidate who comes from the frontier, and it’s not surprising that the pundits are having a hard time coming to grips with this phenomenon. For Sarah Palin’s world is not defined by the major media or by the glossy magazines; she hunts and fishes, she’s unabashedly patriotic, her son is in the Army, her husband races across the snow. Unlike the other three candidates, she is not a member of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body. When she talks about shattering the glass ceiling, she actually means it; it is not a mask for yet another ideological program. Some of her supporters sense this when they call her “authentic.” It’s the wrong word, however; Barack Obama is an authentic radical, for example. Palin is a frontierswoman. Her state capital, Juneau, cannot be reached on the highways of Alaska. If you want to get there, you must either fly or sail. And for much of the year, sailing isn’t smart. No subways in Juneau, but lots of bars. The main bookstore caters mostly to the tourist trade, with a small selection of used paperbacks and a few recent best sellers.

"It’s not so much authenticity as independence, and self-reliance, which have always been the basic characteristics of frontier people. They think for themselves. They have to think outside the box, because there’s no available box for them to think in. If they accepted the conventional wisdom they wouldn’t be on the frontier, they’d be in some city and they’d brag about their degrees from the failed institutions of higher education. They’re not big on “conflict resolution,” they prefer zero-sum games. If you go up against a grizzly, you’re poorly advised to look for a win-win solution.

"She comes from a world that’s almost totally unknown to the pundits, which is why so much of the commentary has been unhelpful."

Read the whole thing, as they say, here.