As the Sarah Palin saga unfolds, it occurred to me that one angle on the Republican ticket is as a last gasp of the right wing vision of the west, that weird frontier of mythic individualism propped up by a concealed federal socialism.
McCain represents the sprawling, sunbelt, water-thieving wing of the party. His (well, his wife’s) 7000 sf Phoenix condo and his recent faux pas on the need to reconsider western water compacts reflect the illusion that infinite cities can be constructed in the American desert. The McCain’s numerous residences and Cindy’s priviligese on how a "small private plane" is the only way to get around Arizona show how money and air conditioning can still shield the wealthy from the energy and climate consequences of their lifestyles.
Palin even more directly has built her political career on the exurban strand of politics - government subsidies for private gain - flavored with an Alaskan/republican obsession with dragging money out of the natural landscape. Whether in her stint as mayor of a town whose main industry is gravel mining, the bounties she offered for killing wolves (often from the air, in a sort of twisted extreme sport), her efforts to fight the listing of polar bears as endangered, denial of human causation of global warming, or requests for prayers for a new oil pipeline, she’s invariably on the destructive side of environmental debates.
Both images of the west draw upon American mythology, twisted by new right ideology, especially the anti-environmental, anti-federal regulatory spirit of the sage brush rebellion of the 70s and 80s. The irony is that both the megacities of the western sunbelt and the extractive industries of Alaska required massive government subsidies and interventions to engineer.
Fortunately, shifting demographics and sensibilities in the west have raised hope for a more sustainable and enlightened politics that sees freedom in a broader scope than the right to be gifted federal land to dig on.
McCain and Palin are voices from the past. The closer one looks at their ticket, the more it seems like an excavation, like archeology wedded to the remediation of a particularly filthy superfund site.