The Thin Line Between Charm and Smarm

David Seaton points out that people like me (rational, debonair, immoderately well-informed, and utterly cosmopolitan when it comes to cheese selection) are irrelevant when it comes to the voodoo spell Sarah Palin exerts on her undead believers.

Many commentators, while admitting that Sarah Palin is attractive and charismatic, quickly discount her because little that she says will stand up to even the most cursory examination of its sense or nonsense. They fail to realize that this mixture of charisma and incoherence is precisely her most powerful political tool.

They fail to realize that mindless energy combined with charisma, the "just do it", is exactly what distinguishes and empowers "fascism", a word which most Americans throw around with enormous imprecision until it has become virtually meaningless.


Thoughtful progressives have trouble understanding that it is precisely this mindlessness vitalist energy, which Sarah Palin incarnates, that the ultra-right celebrates, and if you try to pin them down to rationality, they can suddenly stop being charming and turn very ugly, very fast.

David Seaton lives in Spain, where presumably a greater premium is put on charm, since here in the states those of the ultra-right persuasion tend to bypass charm and go straight for the Popeye mug. Why just today I read a Palin idolator, after designating Democrats the party of fisting and rimming, uncork yet another wishful prophecy of civil war that would pit Christian gun-toters against heathen Project Runway fans in a blood-cleansing that would restore America to its rightful place in the 19th century. How they long for this clarifying reckoning while clinging to their Barbie doll of redemption, Sister Sarah. Seaton:

The people who follow demagogues aren't interested in thinking, they are interested in feeling: demagoguery is a form of political pornography: up and on, who cares about the "plot"?

This would explain why the pro-Palin bloggers tend to be the most insistent on asserting their masculinity and rhetorically beating their hotdogs against the steering wheel, while waiting for the light to change.