Sarah Palin Represents the Lost Wild West

The United States must begin looking more toward the East and begin learning from the old world. The old frontier society, the relentless drive to “Go West,” is no longer valid.

Whichever candidate the Republicans want to choose to challenge Obama, that candidate has to nail this thesis to the White House door: The United States is unique. It’s precisely this principle of “American Exceptionalism” that most conservatives feel has been rejected by world citizen Barack Obama.

Politicians like Palin and Gingrich want to cling to the American Way even now in the 21st century: America reins in the government by the God-given power of its citizens.

Individual power is protected and sanctified by the U.S. Constitution. Conservatives argue that one can’t simply push it aside as they do in Europe or China, for example, where the people have always been an easy target for governments.

But this American Exceptionalism has never been more abstract and theoretical than it is today. The concept of the frontier had always served as an explanation for America’s national uniqueness: America was different because it was boundless.

Undiscovered Western Territory

Uninhabited, inexpensive new territory was always available, and nature provided access to near-limitless resources — provided one had the courage, strength and willingness to take chances to conquer the unknown territories.

A hundred years ago, the Harvard historian Frederick Jackson Turner said that the real American republic was always born on the Western frontier: first the Allegheny Mountains, then the Mississippi and finally the Rocky Mountains.

The frontier — that border being pushed ever westward — was always the dividing line between life and death, fortune and misfortune. The spirit of inventiveness reigned there; it was expansive, restless and irreverent; original democracy that was violent as well as liberty-loving.

But if Turner’s theory was right, America now has a problem. The frontier society has become a myth, the territory long since divided and subdivided. There is no longer a Wild West where people can try anything and accomplish everything, where even the poorest can reap the rewards of nature.

More Government Wasn’t Necessary

But it was precisely that vast hinterland, that actual equality made possible by the widespread ownership of land, which spawned the desire for limited statutory regulation. Nothing more was possible, nor was it necessary.

That narrow, limited government still exists, but the reasons for its success have disappeared. The phantom pains that afflict modern America because of the loss of its Wild West explain what makes Sarah Palin so fascinating to people. She embodies the lost West in more than just the spoken or written word; she embodies it in flesh and blood.

She rules the Wild West like the overly made-up lady behind the bar of a frontier saloon, like a hunter with a rifle on her shoulder standing astride the grizzly bear she just killed, like the schoolmarm in a one-room frontier school house. Sarah Palin lives, but the Wild West is dead.

She grew up in Skagway, a small Alaskan town that has been known as the “Las Vegas of the North” ever since the Klondike Gold Rush. When the Palin family moved there, the legend of the frontier was still alive on Skagway’s Main Street.

Palin wrote in her autobiography that those who had struck it rich came to the town to celebrate, and those who had just gone broke came to drink their sorrows away. Piano music and the laughter of the saloon dancers spilled out over the raised wooden sidewalks.

As a young wife and mother, Palin experienced the oil boom on Alaska’s North Slope, as well as the oil catastrophe caused by the “Exxon Valdez” that spilled 53 million gallons of crude oil into the ocean. As governor of Alaska, Palin was known as a vigorous opponent of the energy lobby, but as a candidate for vice president, she coined the phrase, “Drill, baby, drill!”

Today, when a gallon of gasoline costs nearly $4 and the unemployment rate hovers around 9 percent, even President Obama wants to drill for domestic oil, despite the BP catastrophe. A mini-frontier. But no one believes that drilling for domestic oil or hoping for another gold rush can really solve America’s problems.

Palin’s words resound only with the uneducated and those really down on their luck. Her biggest fans are, above all, those who have nothing left but their unshakable faith in America.

The truly successful representatives of today’s old West, such as Harvard dropout Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg — who, as no others, represent the boundlessness, the informality and the democracy of that era — do not support Sarah Palin’s initiatives but rather the educational reforms proposed by Barack Obama.

They fear that without radical education reform, the United States cannot retain its position of technology leadership. But education reform hasn’t gone anywhere to date. Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch criticizes that, unlike healthcare reform, education reform can’t just be copied from European models.

Instead, teachers, parents and students are made uncertain by quickly implemented and often arbitrary new rules. The American elite obviously recognizes the nation’s problems but is apparently in the dark about how to solve them.

The Real West Has Disappeared

That’s the irony: America’s frontier now lies cheek-by-jowl with the old world that has become economically powerful because of contact with American individualism. Now it’s time for America to learn from the rest of the world, and that won’t be easy because every instinct and every social teaching advises us, “Go West, young man.” If there’s no longer a real West but only global competition in every direction one looks, that instinctive insistence on uniqueness unfortunately seems shockingly out of touch.