Palin, the Base, and the Northeast Corridor Conservatives

Thouhgts on Northeast corrider conservatives from J.R. Dunn at the American Thinker.

And so isolated had the Northeast Corridor conservatives become, so deeply embedded in their Jamesian parallel universe (which can best be pictured as kind of a conservative version of the old Steinberg New Yorker cover, with E.35th St. and Allen Jay Lerner’s townhouse looming as the center of the earth while, off on the horizon, we see a dot labeled, “Nascar races”), that they couldn’t recognize her clear conservative stance, couldn’t recognize her personal courage, couldn’t, in the end, be bothered to stand with her when she and her family were victimized by the most repellent political attack of our epoch.


If they won’t recognize that, they won’t recognize anything. Living in a Northeast that is steadily combining aspects of a Third-World state and a suburban mall, they have lost sight of what America actually is. Huge gaps exist in their knowledge of the country. In the same way that liberals view the U.S. a racist, militarist monolith, the Northeast Corridor coterie view it as a cultural wasteland populated by backwoodsmen, halfwits who need to be guided by an enlightened but aloof elite.


That’s what they saw when Sarah Palin stepped before the public. Not a superb example of the 21st-century American woman, knowledgeable, capable, and admirable, but a hick with a roughneck husband and a load of kids. Quite the opposite of what the rest of the country saw, and accepted, and will likely send to Washington this November.


It’s not going to get better for them. The last three waves of American conservatism came out of the West -- Barry Goldwater from Arizona, Ronald Reagan from California, and today Sarah Palin from Alaska. That’s not going to stop. Conservatism as it exists today is a heartland phenomenon, with all the virtues and strengths -- and yes, weaknesses and errors -- of the American heartland. Today it’s the Northeast Corridor conservatives who are the outliers.