Sarah Palin and the F-word.

• Position: Political Eye - Essay

Sarah Palin is a feminist. Ted Olson is a champion of gay rights. Yet we keep hearing about the demise of progressivism and the American Left.

Maybe the real problem is that the Right is co-opting progressivism for its own ends.

If God, Guns, and Gays were the Republicans' rallying cries in the Culture War decades, this year the new, tea-party-inflected Rs feature gun toting feminists and gay-marriage-loving libertarians.

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Whether or not the Democrats take a drubbing at the polls in November, you can't really argue that the country is beating a straight path to the right.

Pundits David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and Matt Bai, to name a few, say the Democrats are going down because Americans are a lot more conservative than liberals realized. Old-fashioned ideas about the necessity of a social safety net and the need to regulate oil companies are out.

But it is not that simple. American politics are a tangle of contradictory impulses, some progressive, some regressive. Just go to a tea party rally and try to sort it all out.

Case in point: A recent speech in which Palin repeatedly used the F-word lit up the blogosphere, and made the cover of Newsweek .

Is Sarah Palin's feminism real? Her supporters seem to think so.

Feminist writer Jessica Valenti, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, says no. It's not enough to come out for women's suffrage 100 years after the fact. The Susan B. Anthony feminists, as Palin and her anti-abortion allies call themselves, are opportunists in Valenti's view, taking a ride on the legal and cultural transformations wrought by the women's movement of the last few decades, while opposing every advance for women since the advent of the bicycle and the demise of the hoop skirt.

Like Phyllis Schlafly before her, Palin promotes a vision of true womanhood that works for her but is not exactly transferable to her less fortunate sisters. She had her fifth child, a baby with Down syndrome, and then hit the campaign trail full time, relying on the State of Alaska and the Republican National Committee to underwrite the expense of hauling her children around on airplanes, all the while opposing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Still, Palin's "feminism" is not meaningless because it clearly means a lot to her...