Bubbleheads: Not Getting Sarah Palin and the Evangelicals

A perceptive (as usual) comment from Peggy Noonan:

Let me say of myself and almost everyone I know in the press, all the chattering classes and political strategists and inside dopesters of the Amtrak Acela Line: We live in a bubble and have around us bubble people. We are Bubbleheads.

And again we know this, we know this is our limit, our lack.

But we also forget it.

And when you forget you’re a Bubblehead you get in trouble, you misjudge things. For one thing, you assume evangelical Christians will be appalled and left agitated by the circumstances of Mrs. Palin’s daughter. But modern American evangelicals are among the last people who’d judge her harshly. It is the left that is about to go crazy with Puritan judgments; it is the right that is about to show what mellow looks like. Religious conservatives know something’s wrong with us, that man’s a mess. They are not left dazed by the latest applications of this fact. “This just in – there’s a lot of sinning going on out there” is not a headline they’d understand to be news.

So the media’s going to wait for the Christian right to rise up and condemn Mrs. Palin, and they’re not going to do it because it’s not their way, and in any case her problems are their problems. Christians lived through the second half of the 20th century, and the first years of the 21st. They weren’t immune from the culture, they just eventually broke from it, or came to hold themselves in some ways apart from it. I think the media will explain the lack of condemnation as “Republican loyalty” and “talking points.” But that’s not what it will be.

One of the key failures of the liberal New Class is that fact that it is not only secular, it is actively hostile to Christians.

(It’s not hostile to Muslims, but that’s because they don’t actively contest with the secular types for control of American culture, and the Muslims can be treated as a politically correct victim group.)

The Democratic party is pretty much controlled by people with a secular orientation, and occasional claims of religious faith (which may be sincere, but are certainly superficial) aren’t fooling anybody.

But happily, the Democrats ignorance of people of faith and frequent hostility toward people of faith harms them politically. They just don’t get it, and therefore make serious political miscalculations.