Palin's Personal Holocaust

Ranting in front of a crowd of cheering admirers Sarah Palin blamed Obama for “single-handedly” “ruining” her “plans and dreams” as to, you know, “regarding me becoming Vice President”

“I can’t help thinking that, if I had been elected Vice-President, Bristol and Willow wouldn’t have gotten into that drunken brawl and Track wouldn’t have threatened his girlfriend and whatnot,” she said. “Thanks, Obama.”

The question is not why is she mad, but why does anyone — anyone at all — listen to her?

Palin’s rant bespeaks the culture of victimization that has seized the United States.  Not only does everyone look for ways to self-describe him or herself as a victim, but one can even attain victimhood by being at risk of being victimized. 

Victimization is, of course, egotism in negative form — a self-asserting masochism.  Nietzsche called it the spirit of resentment. 

More than that, this outward-blaming, inward turning emigration constitutes a rejection of political life and the social values such life presupposes.  

What we see in Palin’s personal holocaust, is the culmination of individualism and fulfillment Democracy in America.  It was Alexis de Tocqueville who coined the word “individualism.”  Ever since, Amurkans have taken it as a badge of honor.  But it was not so intended by de Tocqueville.

I HAVE shown how it is that in ages of equality every man seeks for his opinions within himself; I am now to show how it is that in the same ages all his feelings are turned towards himself alone. Individualism is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth.  ..

Selfishness blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness.   ...

not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

Amurkans listen to her because seeing themselves reflected in her self-absorption is the full extent of their capacity for social feeling.  In the end, all individualism devours itself.

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