An interesting post over at First Things from Jonathan V. Last, who discusses why the left not just opposes, but hates Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. He identifies four particular issues, all revolving around her family, that provoke the left. It’s difficult to pull a quote out of the post; it’s all very good. But here’s a small taste to get you interested:
…there is the left’s long-standing concern about overpopulation, which has become a staple of modern environmentalism, beginning with Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb. Ehrlich preached a Malthusian near-future in which hundreds of millions would perish by famine as the world’s unchecked population growth spiraled to infinity. As it happens, Ehrlich’s predictions were entirely incorrect: Not only has increased food production reduced famine to a weapon of political conflict, but the world’s population growth has slowed to a crawl. Fertility rates around the globe are falling and world population will peak around nine billion by 2050. From there, we will experience population contraction.
But Ehrlich’s prognostications never fell far out of favor, particularly with environmentalists who take it as an article of faith that the planet is already overcrowded. To them, the prodigious Palin family is surely seen as taking more than its fair share.
I’m curious to see what PowerBlog readers think of John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin, and to have your thoughts on the Presidential race in general. I can say with certainty that this is shaping up to be one of the most interesting elections of my lifetime; what say you?
More Cultural Differences: Via A Second Hand Conjecture, here’s an interesting bit from the Volokh Conspiracy on the “western vibe” of the GOP ticket:
What is the “western” vibe? This is purely subjective, but to me it is the feeling of no-nonsense, self-reliant, egalitarian, outsiderism, sort of Barry Goldwater-ish. Is it libertarian? Not exactly, but it does have that sort of feeling to it, to me at least. It feels like Goldwaterism. And I think this trickles through to the worldview of the candidates and then to policy. It seems pretty clear to me (especially after last night) that John McCain sees himself as Gary Cooper riding into to town to single-handedly clean-up corruption and gun down the rascals…
…The only caveat to this is that McCain’s westernism is tempered by his military background. And frankly, this is what concerns me most about him–his mind seems like a command-and-control, top-down worldview. To put the matter more elliptically to many but more accurately to my thinking, I think he simply does not understand or trust the idea of spontaneous order. In his worldview, things happen (good or bad) because somebody makes them happen. This is not a worldview that is conducive to understanding spontaneous order. That’s a statist streak in him that offsets some of his westernism.
More fodder for discussion. Carry on.
