It was a slow newsday, Friday before a holiday, so why shouldn't Sarah Palin suck up all the oxygen in five continents? If only that stupid Michael Jackson fellah hadn't died the week before, she could have totally pulled it off. As it was, she did pretty damn well for a couple of hours there. Her big secret? Same as it ever was: she lied. Seven ways from Sunday. She lied about being cleared in all the Alaska investigations; she lied about their cost; she lied about wanting to serve the people of Alaska; she lied about fulfilling her goals; she lied about people attacking her son Trig; she lied about being like a point guard; she lied when she said "and" and "the". She spoke, therefore she lied.
Why does Sarah Palin lie? She lies to get out of trouble; she lies to shift blame; she lies to get even; she lies to get ahead; she lies to hurt her enemies; she lies to amuse her friends; she lies to relieve boredom; she lies to have some fun; she lies because truth is bother; she lies as a key to strategy; she lies because she has no plan; she lies to confuse anyone trying to keep track; she lies to make sense to those not keeping track; she lies for power; she lies because lying works for her; she lies just for the hell of it; she lies because she can; she lies because that's how she expresses her freedom--a very libertarian idea of freedom, I might well add.
Liberals and libertarians are both about freedom, but their concepts of freedom are radically different, and Sarah Palin's compulsive, multipurpose lying is as a good a way as any to approach understanding the differences between them.
In sharp contrast, liberals characteristically express their freedom by telling the truth, inconvenient truths, as Al Gore put it. Truths about racism and war, such as Martin Luther King told, when speaking truth to power. Truths about the social order and tradition that are not supposed to be said.
One way to clarify this difference is my old favorite, Robert Kegan's levels of cognitive development. Liberalism has a natural affinity for level four, characterized by autonomy/self-authorship, stepping outside the level-three socially-constructed self and the world it knows, and passing independent judgment.
Libertarian freedom rejects that world as well, but it does so from a point of view of not understanding, of arbitrary rejection. It does so from level two, the level at which one is one's point of view. "You're not the boss of me" is its snot-nosed twelve-year-old battle cry. Which is perfectly fine, for a twelve year old. Twelve-year-olds lie a lot. It works for them...or at least it seems to, for a while. But then they turn thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, they start growing up, or at least most of them do. Bit by bit they start learning to see the world from multiple points of view, until the day dawns when they no longer are their point of view any more. Instead, they have a point of view, and that means they can have a mature discussion with others, each with their own point of view.
This is what Sarah Palin can't do. This is why everything reduces to personality clashes with her. From the Vanity Fair article by Todd Purdum, here's a view from John Bitney, a friend of Palin's from high school and one of the key people who helped her become governor, who subsequently was fired for becoming romantically involved with (later married to) the estranged wife of another close Palin friend:
When I ask Bitney what he makes of the whole Palin phenomenon, he sighs. "What do I take away from this?" he asks. "Oh, I don't know. I don't know. It's just a lot of emotions and stuff. I find it's frustrating dealing with Sarah, because it seems we're always dealing with emotional crap and we never seem to be able to focus on the business at hand that needs to be done. I don't know whether to blame her or pity her for all this emotional upheaval that we're always going through with her. Now we all get to listen to Levi and Bristol. Check my feet for horseshoes if I have to sit there and listen to another talk show. I got involved in helping her become governor because we needed to change some policy directions. Teen abstinence is not why I waved signs for her."
Kegan's explanation of level two consciousness, as I draw on it above, seems to me to be far and away the most parsimonious way to explain the upheaval that Bitney talks about, and that in turn seems the most parsimonious way to explain Sarah Palin in toto. There's nothing wrong with level two consciousness per se. It's just a stage of development. Without it, one could advance to more sophisticated stages.
The problem comes in dealing with matters that are too complex for it, matters more complex than a twelve-year-old's world. Such as high school. Some folks do fine in high school despite being stuck in their twelve-year-old mindset. This goes especially for those at the top of their cliques. These kids don't have to learn their socialization lessons. They don't have to learn to respect, or even understand the existence of other people's points of view. It's up to others to understand them.
At one level, the character Cordelia Chase in Buffy, The Vampire Slayer is a perfect embodiment of this attitude, except for the fact that occasionally she lets slip that she's profoundly aware of her existential condition. ("What, I can't have layers?" she says, in a somewhat different context.) For Cordelia, other people exist only as objects. They have no interiority, no point of view that she can recognize apart from her own. If they agree with here, then they're cool, because they share her point of view. They validate her. Otherwise, she has no use for them. Sound familiar?
Significantly, what spurs Cordelia to begin evolving is her lust for Xander despite the fact she sees him as a social leper, while he sees her as totally vacuous. But that's a topic for another day. Suffice it to say, some form of Force Majeure is needed to break out of this state for those arrested in it.
But Palin is utterly immune to Force Majeure--which is why she is such a mega-hero to her worshipful supporters. Indeed, in her mind, she herself is Force Majeure. And the same is essentially true of all pure libertarians. Their simple grasp of essential truth makes them immune to everything else the world has to offer. "Essential truth" confirms them in the splendid isolation of their own unquestionable point of view.
Level four liberals also elevate their individual points of view above the dictates of social convention. But what differentiates them from level two libertarians is that they know what they are rejecting, and why. Which means they often reject only partially or not at all. One need not reject just because one can reject. They also respect that others may choose to reject or accept differently than they do. The interiority of others is not the total mystery it is to level two libertarians.
As we celebrate this day of freedom, we would do well to reflect on how different the meaning of freedom is between level four liberals and level two libertarians. They are not the only two positions in the world, to be sure. But they do constitute a sharp distinction, the contemplation of which can shed considerable light on both the profound truths and petty details of our shared political lives.
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