Mama Grizzly vs. The Establishment.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: 'America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag' & 'Going Rogue: An American Life' - Book review

Sarah Palin, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag (New York: Harper, 2010), 304 pp., $25.99.

Sarah Palin, Going Rogue: An American (New York: Harper, 2009), 432 pp., $28.99.

In his novel The American Senator, Anthony Trollope has Elias Gotobed visit England to study its institutions. Senator Gotobed, an apostle of the wisdom of the common man, soon expresses his consternation at the feudal power and prerogatives, the arrogance and presumption, of the nobility. He informs a British acquaintance that his country is stuck in the past:

The spirit of conservatism in this country is so strong that you cannot bear to part with a shred of the barbarism of the Middle Ages. And when a rag is sent to the winds you shriek with agony at the disruption, and think that the wound will be mortal. It's a sentiment that American conservatives have always grappled with uneasily. In the past century, the Right has wavered between Burkean conservatism on the one hand and fiery populism on the other. But whether one traces its origins back to Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, who loathed cities and venerated rural life, or argues that it is of a slightly more recent Jacksonian vintage, a militant populism--God-fearing folk carrying the mantle of American exceptionalism--has become a potent feature of America's political landscape.

Indeed, an insurrectionary trend--the attempt in fact to overthrow the regnant liberal ruling class--began to take hold in the early 1950s with the Joseph McCarthy-led revolt against intellectual elites and establishment Republicans. Too much too soon perhaps--too indebted, above all, to the bilious McCarthy--it never gained the necessary traction.

The liberal historian Louis Hartz suggested that the absence of a feudal aristocracy meant that a viable American conservative tradition could not exist. In 1955, William E Buckley Jr., who cowrote with L. Brent Bozell McCarthy & His Enemies, established the National Review and declared that its mission was to stand "athwart history, yelling Stop." Buckley was trying to create a right-wing movement by improbably grafting together Burkean traditionalism with populism. His personal lodestar might be Edmund Burke, but he also knew that for conservatism to flourish, it needed foot soldiers. Barry Goldwater and his libertarian challenge to the GOP'S complacent grandees supplied them. The Goldwater uprising set the stage for the Reagan revolution.

Ronald Reagan's presidency signaled the apparent demise of the Republican ancient regime. With Reagan's rise, a dynamic conservatism flourished. The stodgy Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover-style Republican era was pass& "I don't think we ought to focus on the past," Reagan said, "I want to focus on the future." As historian Garry Wills has noted, the Gipper espoused a most unconservative sentiment by frequently quoting the radical Tom Paine: "We have it in our power to start the world over." In his first inaugural address, Reagan declared that government was the problem, not the solution, all the while championing a crusading foreign policy (which rested on Washington's intervention abroad).

It has been a back-and-forth battle for the soul of the party ever since. For the war against the old-guard Republican establishment, the "wets" to use the British term, was never decisively won. Rather, during George H. W. Bush's presidency, conservatives of various stripes fell into a funk over his readiness to compromise on tax hikes and his alleged timorousness in global affairs-most notably when it came to Iraq and Bush the Elder's refusal to take us all the way to Baghdad.

As the New York Times's Sam Tanenhaus observes in the epilogue to his book The Death of Conservatism, by 1995 neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol was so exasperated that he called for the emergence of a new "popular movement," one that was ready to "walk away" from the GOP...