If you don’t know Spengler, this is a good day to fix that deficiency.
Spengler’s writings on economics, politics, and culture somehow makes sense of the competing viewpoints of Europeans, Asians, and Americans.
Today he takes up the question of how a country bumpkin like Sarah Palin can be taken seriously by American voters and explains that she is the reason that Asians continue to pour money into American capital markets.
What does America have that Asia doesn’t have? The answer is, Sarah Palin – not Sarah Palin the vice presidential candidate, but Sarah Palin the “hockey mom” turned small-town mayor and reforming Alaska governor. All the PhDs and MBAs in the world can’t make a capital market work, but ordinary people like Sarah Palin can. Laws depend on the will of the people to enforce them. It is the initiative of ordinary people that makes America’s political system the world’s most reliable.
And the Palin archetype – the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – is precisely what the Europeans and Asians lack. They have no context for Sarah Palin, no positive examples of ordinary people seizing the reins of government. But Spengler says, “Palin is qualified for high office by temperament if not by education, and is preferable to candidates whose education has made no improvement on their characters.”
“Hockey Moms,” to be sure, may not be the optimal promoters of America’s future. One for one, the “Piano Moms” of China are cleverer people and produce smarter offspring. China’s 30 million students of classical piano are one of the two great popular movements in the world today: the other is the House Church movement in Chinese Christianity. Children who play hockey will grow up to get coffee for children who study piano. As a pool of talent, nothing compares with the educated segment of the East Asian population that has embraced and mastered Western culture. Nonetheless, Asia still can’t invest its own money at home, and seems farther than ever from that objective.
The popularity of Western classical music, the idea of 30 million piano students, and the spread of Christianity make me think Western Civilization will be saved, if at all, in the Orient. If we somehow manage to save it over here, that accomplishment will owe little or nothing to the PhDs and MBAs who sneer at Sarah Palin.
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I would also point out that no country but the US could possibly produce a Palin, for the simple reason that women do not have the freedom to do things like learn to shoot rifles, pistols, and shotguns, and learn to hunt anywhere else. In fact, most men worldwide do not have those options available to them because their governments deny them their God given rights.
Most of the Palin hatred exhibited outside of the US is simple envy. Inside the US, it is also envy, but of a different sort. Outside of the US Palin haters know they don’t have the freedom to become a Palin even if they wanted to, while inside the US Palin haters know they don’t have the guts.
I disagree about the Chinese Piano Mom phenomenon, however. No country produces as many outside-the-box thinkers as the US either. So, the children of Chinese piano moms will end up playing the music the children of US hockey moms write.
The spread of Christianity in China is amazing, and I’m not alone in thinking it will eventually swallow up communism there. The Chinese have thousands of years of entrepreneurship under their belts. There couldn’t possibly be a more inappropriate form of government for them than communism.
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