The Harrison Bergeron Election

In his 1961 short story Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut wrote about a futuristic United States in which everyone is not only equal, but forcably equalized: 

In the story, societal equality has been achieved by handicapping the most intelligent, athletic or beautiful members of society down to the level of the lowest common endowment. This process is central to the society, designed so that no one will feel inferior to anyone else. This is overseen by the United States Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers.

Harrison Bergeron, the protagonist of the story, has exceptional intelligence, height, strength and beauty. As a result of this he has to bear enormous handicaps. These include headphones that play distracting noises, three hundred pounds of weight strapped to his body, eyeglasses designed to give him headaches, and a mask to hide his beauty. Despite these societal handicaps, he is able to invade a TV station and declare himself emperor. He strips himself of his handicaps, then dances with a ballerina whose handicaps he has also discarded. Both are shot dead by the brutal and relentless Handicapper General. The story is framed by an additional perspective from Bergeron’s parents, who are watching the incident on TV, but because of their handicaps cannot concentrate enough to remember it.

The story was later made into a movie.  Eugene Levy played the president, a Scranton steelworker. He’s utterly unqualified and ill-suited to the office, but he’s an everyday guy — kind of a male hockey mom:

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And this is where Palinism ends up — voters electing candidates because they’re most “like them” or they’re the kinds of people with whom they can identify.  They’re elected not because they’re exceptional, but for exactly the opposite reason — because they’re unremarkable in every way. 

The single attribute about Sarah Palin that commends her to her supporters is that she’s average.  I haven’t heard Republicans argue that she posses superior intelligence, creative ideas or a sophisticated understanding of policy.  They like her because she’s like everybody else:

I like that she’s a brand new mother, and that she has the courage to stand behind her pregnant daughter. She relates to working women. For all of us who have children at home but have to go to work every day – she has given us a sense that we can still do it and can be an excellent mum.

Here’s how this excellent mum feels about the unprecedented economic crisis facing the country:

One thing that Americans do at this time, also, though, is let’s commit ourselves just every day American people, Joe Six Pack, hockey moms across the nation, I think we need to band together and say never again.

On global warming, she said this (with Biden’s response for contrast):

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I’m not one to attribute every man – activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man’s activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet. But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don’t want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?

These aren’t quotes taken out of context.  This is how she talks and how she thinks.

This country faces incredibly difficult and complex problems which will affect all of us.  While we should all be grateful to hockey, soccer, and baseball moms, is being one a qualification to deal with these crises? Is that the kind of person we want dealing with the world’s most complex, challenging problems? Why would the most average among us be most appealing to deal with the kinds of sophisticated problems that confront us? Because they’ve taken their sons to hockey games?

UPDATE:

The New York Times notices the Harrison Bergeroning of politics:

One can argue (and her supporters will) that Ms. Palin is a newcomer and can’t be expected to know all of the wonkish details, that what matters is the image she projects. Except, anyone who is running for vice president in these very dangerous times needs to have detailed knowledge.

When it came to domestic issues, Ms. Palin mainly relied on enthusiasm and humor, talking about hockey moms, soccer moms and Joe Sixpack almost as often as she used the word “maverick” to describe Mr. McCain or herself.

But she offered virtually no detail – beyond the Republican mantra of tax cuts – for how she and Mr. McCain would address the financial crisis or help Americans avoid foreclosure or what programs they would cut because of the country’s disastrous fiscal problems.

AMERICAblog agrees (a bit more directly than I put it):

Obama has noted this before, as has Jon Stewart – the fact that Republican politicians admire stupidity and ignorance. They wear their lack of education, their incompetence, their failure as a badge of honor. And it’s certainly an American tradition, having disdain for intellectuals. But when push comes to shove, do you really want bubba, or bubba with lipstick, in charge of your 401k and your life savings? At some point America has got to get over its love affair with stupid. Or the mistakes of the last eight years, when we elected stupid to an art form, will continue to repeat themselves.