Delusions of the way we were: How the presidential election is turning into a referendum on the myth of America

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Wait, am I about to praise Joe Klein yet again? Yes. (Just as I did here.)

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It's called "Sarah Palin's Myth of America," and it's Klein's latest piece at Time. It gets to the heart of Palin's appeal... and of the manufactured mythology, both about Palin herself and about America more broadly, that makes that appeal so vacuous, and so much of a lie.

I wrote about this myself a week ago: "Sarah Palin's Utopia of Wasilla." What's Palin's appeal? She genuine, authentic, a small-town gal with small-town values, your average American, your all-American.

But it's a lie.

Wasilla isn't the utopia Palin makes it out to be -- if anything, it's a utopia only in the literal sense, a place that is nowhere, that doesn't exist except in the imagination. Palin's Wasilla of the mind, a Wasilla of her own fictitious storytelling. She wants to be seen as an ordinary hockey mom from a town with "real" people and "real" values. Lacking experience and expertise, and even basic knowledge, her average-ness is her credential. Along with an extremist right-wing ideology -- or, rather, collection of opinions, for it is not nearly as unified as an ideology -- that is what, both to her and her supporters, qualifies her to be vice president.

But it is all romanticization and mythologization. It isn't real. Here's how Klein puts it:

We haven't been a nation of small towns for nearly a century. It is the suburbanites and city dwellers who do the fighting and hourly-wage work now, and the corporations who grow our food. But Palin's embrace of small-town values is where her hold on the national imagination begins. She embodies the most basic American myth — Jefferson's yeoman farmer, the fantasia of rural righteousness — updated in a crucial way: now Mom works too. Palin's story stands with one foot squarely in the nostalgia for small-town America and the other in the new middle-class reality. She brings home the bacon, raises the kids — with a significant assist from Mr. Mom — hunts moose and looks great in the process. I can't imagine a more powerful, or current, American Dream.

Yes, I get her appeal. But, putting aside her extremist opinions, none of this qualifies her to be vice president.

And yet her popularity has very much to do with the fact that Americans want desperately to believe in some idyllic Jeffersonian past, a time when everything was good and just. This is historical revisionism, but it is also national self-forgetting to a disturbing degree, the disease of national self-delusion.

The explains not just Palin but also Reagan, and hence modern American conservatism generally. For Reagan, Klein writes, it was all about "the power of nostalgia for Main Street... at least a Main Street that existed before America began losing wars, became ostentatiously sexy and casually interracial." It was "Morning in America," but Reagan's "vision of the future was the past." It was going forwards by going backwards. Progress, such as there was any, was regress. "The blinding whiteness and fervent religiosity of the party he created are an enduring testament to the power of the myth of an America that existed before we had all these problems. The power of Sarah Palin is that she is the latest, freshest iteration of that myth."

With Palin's pick as McCain's nominee, the election is turning into a referendum not on the Bush presidency, or on the GOP, or even on Obama's inspiration and leadership, but on the myth of America, on the Reagan-Palin myth. And with the Republican brand weak, with Bush deeply unpopular, and with most Americans fully behind Obama on the issues, this is precisely what McCain wants. Indeed, it is McCain's only hope. For while Palin's popularity could not have been foreseen, or at least not its astounding magnitude, and while her pick was both a convenient and cynical one, it is by tapping into that myth, inadvertantly or not, that McCain has surged out of the Republican convention and drawn even with, and even passed, Obama in the polls.

An election that is a referendum on the myth of America pits mythology against reality, lies against truth, delusion against honesty, regress against progress. But it is an election that McCain can win:

The Republican Party's subliminal message seems stronger than ever this year because of the nature of the Democratic nominee for President. Barack Obama could not exist in the small-town America that Reagan fantasized. He's the product of what used to be called miscegenation, a scenario that may still be more terrifying than a teen daughter's pregnancy in many American households. Furthermore, he has thrived in the culture and economy that displaced Main Street America — an economy where people no longer work in factories or make things with their hands, but where lawyers and traders prosper unduly. (Of course, this is the economy the Republican Party has promoted — but facts are powerless in the face of a potent mythology.) Obama is the precise opposite of Mountain Man Todd Palin: an entirely urban creature. He lives within the hilarious conundrum of being both too "cosmopolitan" and intellectual for Republican tastes — at least as Rudy Giuliani described it — while also being the sort of fellow suspected of getting ahead by affirmative action.

And, alas: "The Democrats have no myth to counter this powerful Republican fantasy."

"Americans like stories more than issues," after all.

And the myth more than reality.

For with reality not looking so good -- with an economy struggling, with wars ongoing, with gas prices rising, with the globe warming, with terrorists plotting, with jobs evaporating, with an empire declining, with hopelessness and restlessness growing -- Americans would rather long to be back in a place that never was, with values that never were, than face up to the challenges now and ahead.

The myth of Sarah Palin is their own myth, the myth of eternal small-town values, the myth that Republicans have traditionally exploited to win elections. And, to Americans, or at least to many of them, Palin is, quite simply, one of them, the lowest common denominator turned success story, the American Idol of politics.

She may be a self- and party-manufactured opportunist, an extremist and a liar, but the myth, the fantasy, may yet win out in November.