What Does it Mean to Take Sarah Palin and the Tea-Bagger Set "Seriously"?

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer with AlterNet.

Reviewing Sarah Palin's book on the front yesterday, Matt Taibbi joined a thousand voices warning progressives not to take her, or the fuzzily articulated but potent outrage of the tea-party set she's come to represent, lightly.

Obviously, being Taibbi, he rendered the caution better than most:

Sarah Palin is the Empress-Queen of the screaming-for-screaming’s sake generation. The people who dismiss her book Going Rogue as the petty, vindictive meanderings of a preening paranoiac with the IQ of a celery stalk completely miss the book’s significance, because in some ways it’s really a revolutionary and innovative piece of literature.

Palin -- and there’s just no way to deny this -- is a supremely gifted politician. She has staked out, as her own personal political turf, the entire landscape of incoherent white American resentment. In this area she leaves even Rush Limbaugh in the dust.

And we shouldn't underestimate her, because unlike Rush her blather is of a perfectly American sort that tickles the grievance bone of a declining middle class. It all fits nicely into a larger narrative, popular of late, warning liberals and progressives that they dismiss the tea-partiers rage at town-hall meetings with lawmakers at their own peril.

I think this confuses Palin and the tea-partiers themselves -- and the bizarre conspiracies that animate so much of their fury -- with the larger political dynamics they represent.

I won't claim to speak for "the left," but I know I take the anger unleashed at these tea parties very seriously. It's only turned violent at the margins so far, but I know a lot of people who are genuinely concerned about the potential for all this Civil War nonsense to escalate into something uglier. I also take the tea-partiers' ability to gum up the legislative works by derailing our political discourse and intimidating lawmakers seriously.

And here's a really key point: I take the dysfunctional political process that is the real cause of their ire -- or should be -- with its wretched but endemic low-level corruption, habitual partisan bickering and stunning inability to get anything done to address the nation's problems very seriously. And I don't know anyone anywhere to the left of center who doesn't think "The Great Risk Shift" that underlies all this rage is a very grave issue.

But because of their Fox News-quality incoherence about public policy, I don't really see how any sentient person can take the tea-partiers themselves very seriously. Yes, there's a popular notion that progressives don't do enough to reach out to working-class folks who don't share their worldview. It may be true, and I suppose it's smart to be sensitive about it, but I just can't see how a normal person can reach out to someone who thinks Obama is a covert Islamo-Maoist illegal alien, is incensed because he or she thinks his or her mother is going to end up in front of a death panel or believes the Democrats -- still basically indiscernible from the British Conservative Party on most issues -- are plotting a socialist take-over of the U.S. economy. How does that conversation work? Where does it even begin?

And so it is with Palin, chief promoter of the death panels, and now, after the whole thing in NY-23, a figurehead of the right-wing rebellion within the GOP. Of course we shouldn't take her influence lightly, or the cultural strains she represents. But at the same time what is there about Sarah Palin's politics to take seriously?

As Taibbi writes:

Sarah Palin’s battlefield... is whatever is happening five feet in front of her face. She is building a political career around the little interpersonal wars in the immediate airspace surrounding her sawdust-filled head. And in the process she connects with pissed-off, frightened, put-upon America on a plane that’s far more elemental than the mega-ditto schtick.

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