It has been more than thirty years since Margaret Thatcher altered the Western political landscape, helping to save the world from Soviet expansionism while coming as near as anyone could to saving England itself from the cultural and economic quagmire that, since her departure, has continued to deepen. Nevertheless, over the past few months the most serious female presidential candidate in U.S. history—and the one most similar in principles to the early Thatcher—has been treated as an also-ran by both the mainstream and Republican-leaning media, as well as subjected to unfounded accusations of incompetence or instability—from conservatives.
There was Tim Pawlenty’s suggestion that her susceptibility to headaches (an ailment she shares with Thomas Jefferson) renders her unfit to govern. Then there was George Will’s judgment, apparently pulled straight out of the ether, that she could not be trusted with her finger on the nuclear trigger. (They said the same of Reagan.) Perhaps the concern is that if she had a headache and went stumbling blindly in search of her painkillers, she might inadvertently hit The Big Red Button, thus starting World War III. Never having been in the White House, I had naively assumed there would be safeguards to prevent such a mishap, like secret codes and a military chain of command and stuff; but Will and Pawlenty, who have been in the White House, seem to think it’s a possibility, so who am I to object?
No, I do not believe that the Republican Establishment’s objection to Bachmann is that she’s a woman. The objection, rather, is that she is not a man—where by “man” I mean “an accredited member of the Washington Insider’s Club.” She doesn’t talk the way we expect modern politicians to talk. Her public persona, in debates and interviews, does not fall easily within the accepted norms of TV-age politicians. She tends to speak in bold colors. She talks about over-arching issues much more comfortably than about niggling details. She delineates issues with a view to their long-term ramifications, where long-term does not mean two years, but two decades, or two generations. Worst of all, she infuses all issues about which she speaks with a moral tinge—which is to say that she instinctively hones in on the moral implications of public policy, rather than merely on the pragmatic, outcome-oriented aspect of decision-making.
This last trait, the morality-colored glasses, is particularly troubling to today’s Establishment types, for whom politics is about winning, at least as much as it is about being right. Bachmann speaks to those who would lose the fight without losing their souls, rather than win a hollow victory. A Gingrich or Romney presidency would be hollow victory on a grand scale, sucking the wind out of America’s burgeoning constitutionalist revival while doing little—or, more likely, nothing—to change the fundamental premises of the Establishment’s workings. That is to say, the multi-generational project of rekindling the notion of a constitutional republic, not only in rhetoric but in practice, will require more than lip-service critiques of the current Establishment’s follies. It will require the slow, bottom-up creation of a new Establishment. Establishmentarianism, per se, is not the problem; George Washington was the Establishment in his time. The challenge is to transmogrify the Establishment into something noble, something with purposes and ideals higher than the next election cycle.
Joseph Conrad said that women hate irony. He meant it as a criticism; as they are more inclined towards naive belief in the good, the true and the beautiful, women are more likely to be angered than pleased at the cleverness that undercuts and casts doubt upon fundamental principles. Conrad, however, was writing in an age in which irony was an intellectual art, a means of broadening understanding by way of refusing to allow the mind to say “Stop here.” Today, we live in an age of universalized, and hence diminished, irony. Everyone is wised-up; everyone sees through everything; everyone thinks that matters of the most crushing importance are merely intellectual games, mass media games, power games. In such a morally decrepit climate, irony is not a means of enlightenment. It is just a fancy name for cynicism, which is the enemy of enlightenment.
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Read More at Canada Free Press By Daren Jonescu, Canada Free Press
