If you have not yet heard, the new standard bearer of the Republican Party met with a chilly reception recently in Erie, PA when she offered her congratulations to the Philadelphia Phillies for winning the World Series. What Ms. Palin evidently failed to understand is that Erie, some seven hours to the west of Philadelphia, has, like western PA more generally, no love for Philly or its damned institutions.
The reaction to this error was muted, limited largely to chuckles from the left, who are by now rather inured to Ms. Palin's misunderstandings. It was, to be sure, not the most important story of the day--there is an election looming and to focus on a seemingly innocent mistake would seem petty.
Yet I fear such an error is in fact a symptom of a far more dangerous disease.
Imagine for a moment that Ms. Palin or any other representative of the movement she represents were speaking not of sports teams in Pennsylvania but of religious factions in Iraq, or of warring ethnic clans in Afghanistan. It is, as we have learned through bitter experience, not acceptable to assume that different peoples under the same flag must share common views. Neither may we assume that those of the same race, gender, age, religion, or any other group are uniform in their beliefs.
Ms. Palin can be forgiven for not understanding every intricacy of American sports loyalties. But at the very least, we should expect someone in her campaign to be more aware and warn the candidate against jumping to conclusions. Yet such a haphazard assumption seems to be not only allowed in Ms. Palin's world, but in fact the foundation of her and Mr. McCain's electoral strategy. At every turn their campaign appeals to the most crude of distinctions--city folk maligned in hopes of pleasing rural voters, horrid references to the Holocaust designed to frighten Jews, thinly veiled racial attacks made with no concern that they might perhaps alienate even white voters. Is not Ms. Palin's own presence on the ticket evidence of a superficial compartmentalization of women into a single, monolithic bloc?
Such characterizations are offensive, yes, but they are also the crutches of the intellectually slothful, as Christopher Hitchens has so aptly described Ms. Palin and her comrades. It is not my concern that these tactics are reprehensible; I understand the ferocity with which political wars are often fought. Rather, I believe that they are dangerously misguided. While each effort to pigeonhole voters and sell them on a platform of a single plank has failed, and we can hope to see a final repudiation come Tuesday, the battle is not yet won. The simpletons who fear a world more finely nuanced than the paint-by-number template they have conjured will not go quietly. It is our task, our duty, to carry on the struggle for the triumph of reason, else our children inherit the world's complexities without the complexity of thought to tame them. To allow such an outcome is to accede to barbarism.