Sarah Palin and the apocalypse, Part II

“There comes a moment, said Edward Edinger, New York’s pioneering
psychoanalyst, when something comes unfettered and free as if from
nowhere and brings an end to all the systems and their agents and arts
that we take for granted as part of who we are and what we always
expect to be. This, said Edinger, is the apocalypse and it could just
as easily be bloodless as not.” — from “Sarah and the Apocalypse,” pt. 1, The Hill 10/2/08 — day of the VP debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden.

Very few sensed a moment of pivotal change when Sarah Palin was announced as John McCain’s vice presidential candidate in late summer 2008. Most followed the assessment of The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker, who wrote in the National Review: “If Palin were a man we’d all be guffawing.” But the market crashed unexpectedly barely a month later. Some felt it was a sign from God as it fell 777 points on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. 777 is the holy number of God blogs in this vein say. And the bell broke on Wall Street when they tried to ring it in the morning. I felt it was a sign of Sarah Palin.

The arrival of Palin brought an archetypal shift exactly like the ones described in Edinger’s “Archetype and the Apocalypse”; a tectonic shift in politics and culture. I’d consider it the beginning of the “fourth turning” which generational historians William Strauss and Neil Howe had been prolifically writing about in the 1990s. It would be especially devastating to the national collective psyche as we had just triumphantly put all of our eggs in another basket just 12 hours before: Barack Obama’s. Not the best investment, perhaps. Democratic adviser Pat Caddell today says the elitist Obama admin has so alienated common folk that they have advanced a condition that is “pre-revolutionary.”

That the opinion makers at the NYTs today field op-ed writers to find “a Palin of our own” — The Washington Post last week also talked of the “new Sarah Palin” — is an indication that the hysteria which accompanied the archetypal transition — much like the hysteria from cultural conservatives which accompanied Elvis on the early Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan shows — is finally passing and the new cultural situation — Palin, Tea Party, Beck, Ron Paul and Judge Andrew Napolitano with his good-natured and cogent libertarian commentary of Fox Business — is being metabolized and accommodated.

But the change we face today is vast. The post-war American cycle was based on American conquest in World War II. America expanded externally then but will grow and change internally now. Outward post-war expansion has ended. It is virtually impossible for most economists today to understand that an economy can grow internally as all models in current use are expansionist. But we can, as Texas Gov. Rick Perry has said, compete internally among regions and it would make us a better place if we did.

The Empire State has a dilemma. The Hamiltonian “empire” instinct is waning and NY is without defenses. Historian Frank Owsley has written that our country has two directions; Hamilton and Jefferson. Jefferson awakens. Trying to find “our own Sarah Palin” could bring the New Yorkers problems. They tried to do that with the Beatles and came up with the Monkees.

Visit Mr. Quigley’s website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.