Peggy Noonan has written a rather vehement article in the Wall Street Journal, so that nobody will be unsure about where she stands concerning Sarah Palin. There’s something rather disturbing about this article. It implies that there is an intellectual elite who alone have what it takes to lead this country, among which elite Noonan, but not Palin, is supposed to be included. The question here isn’t about egalitarianism; it’s about whether the real varieties of endowment line up with Noonan’s vehement protestations.
Noonan may be smart, but some of her recent artices reveal some other characteristics as well, and three in particular. First, she tends to emote too much, where reasoning would be more appropriate; second, she is maybe just a tad full of herself; and third, she judges too much by surface rather than substance. One needs to notice that these are interrelated. In a column published just before the election, she wrote with a fair amount of passion that the country needed to unify behind whoever would be elected, that that was more important than anything else. If we are to look for evidence that Noonan has far superior political judgment to that of Palin, we didn’t find it there. What we found, instead, was the superficial, self-congratulating but slightly insecure emotion of the day, caught up in the suave but vacant elegance of Obama, and embarrassed at the relative stiffness of the chosen representative of Noonan’s own party — a stiffness which, for all its embarrassing qualities, might have hidden at least a little substance worthy of respect.
The problem of substance versus surface is admittedly much more complex than some make it out to be. I do not mean to say that surface doesn’t matter. It matters because national public office is a world stage. An ability to thoughtfully articulate important things is both a sign and a condition for actually being able to have important thoughts, and for then being able to impart them to others. George Bush was generally incapable of articulating his thoughts, even if he had some. What was often more troubling was the suspicion that he didn’t have many deep thoughts because he couldn’t articulate them.
That’s one source of complexity in the relation between substance and surface. There is another which might matter even more. There are those who would have us believe that government is an amoral exercise. That is pure nonsense. Government is the paramount moral exercise, the one where the moral character of individuals and the society is most revealed and most formed. It will therefore never be true — no matter how much one pretends — that excellence in a political leader has nothing to do with moral dispositions. Political excellence requires both. (There was a time when that was fairly obvious. One has only to think of Churchill for instance, or his adversaries. The fact that it is now frequently called into question is very significant.) So substance itself is a very complex thing, even before one considers how it appears in a public forum.
Liberals may despise Palin for her lack of rhetorical skills, but what they really despise her for is her soul, a soul which unhesitatingly confesses some very simple truths: that there are good and bad ways of being, that too much government is apt to destroy us, that we are a Christian nation, or that socialism is a threat. One doesn’t have to be a simpleton to confess such simple truths. It may be that, when all is said and done, the world of ethics and politics is incredibly complex. But it’s one thing to say that; it’s another to attach oneself to the view that nothing is simple. Liberals despise Palin for the same reason that they despised Reagan (at least at the beginning): namely for understanding and saying that some things are simple. Maybe, in different ways, Reagan and Palin have both understood something else as well: that greatness of soul is perfectly compatible with — no, rather, inseparable from — the acknowledgment of a few simple truths.
The likes of Charlie Gibson are never apt to say that they despise Palin for the reasons I have just given. They are more likely to say that they despise her for her lack of intellectual subtlety. We are deceived, though, if we don’t notice that those two accounts are related in the liberal mind, because in the liberal mind subtlety is the very essence not only of intellectual virtue, but of moral virture as well. And because no one likes to be thought unintelligent, this way of thinking tends to be contagious, especially among those who are a little too full of themselves — which Sarah Palin is not.
An unavoidable weakness of the American form of government (since every form has its weaknesses) is that it encourages a tendency in everyone to want to appear talented and impressive, precisely because our government allows the possibility of some degree of participation in public life to all — but a participation which depends on the approval of others. In that circumstance, the temptation to care about surface more than substance is even greater than it would otherwise be.
Some of what Noonan says may be true. But there are times when the best judgment is no judgment, but rather a willingness to sit tight and let reality as it unfolds be the measure, instead of one’s hubris. That’s especially true when one is talking about a person’s talents yet remaining to be fully revealed. Talents are gifts. Best not to despise gifts before one finds out what they are, so that one can be both humble and grateful towards one’s fellow human beings, for their generosity.
