This initially surprised me. Sarah Palin has been criticized on many grounds. (I would try to list them, but their number, like the demons that afflicted the Gerasene demoniac in the Gospel of Mark, are legion). Being insufficiently conservative on social policy is not one of them. Alan Keyes, however, never ceases to amaze even the most jaded political observer. He has attacked Sarah Palin for not being a genuine pro-life candidate. He charges that she has expressed her opposition to abortion only in personal terms, but has given no principled, ideological reasons for limiting or banning abortion. In doing so, she leaves herself room to waffle later on. Here’s a summary of his view:

I review both her statements and her actions, and find them in contradiction with the necessary moral logic without which the pro-life position is simply a matter of emotional feeling. Based on this review I conclude that she is not in fact espousing the pro-life public policy position….Sarah Palin’s statements and actions are rationally inconsistent with the moral logic of unalienable right which, if true, binds all levels of government and all US public officials to the goal of securing the unalienable rights with which God has endowed our humanity. If we accept her as a pro-life leader we abandon the rational moral basis for the pro-life position. I cannot do this without betraying the principles of liberty, and the will of the Creator God whose authority establishes them as the basis for human justice….Unless Sarah Palin fundamentally alters the views she has enunciated and acted on up to now, I predict that she will disappoint the hope so many sincerely pro-life people are mistakenly investing in her supposed pro-life stand. I am sure I will pay a price for saying now what others will only realize when it may be too late. I was excoriated starting in 2004 for calling Obama a hard line Marxist bent on destroying America….My view of Sarah Palin’s supposed pro-life stance, and the danger involved in following her leadership, is similarly based on facts and reasoning (sic).

On further reflection, this is less surprising. An essential part of Alan Keyes’ worldview now is apparently that the Republican Party is wholly worthless as a vehicle of real conservatism. So, attacking the Cult of Sarah which seems to have strong appeal for some religious and social conservatives seems to be natural.

There’s a grain of truth to Keyes’ position on the Republican Party– altough not in the way he sees it, since he filters everything his own extremist, quasi-paranoid vision. If by “conservatism” we mean the tradition of political thought initiated by Edmund Burke, developed by thinkers such as Joseph de Maistre and Alexis de Tocqueville, and carried on by Leo XIII, Disraeli, Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk, John Lukacs and other luminaries, there is no conservatism in the Republican Party. Certainly, it is a challenge to find any trace of genuine conservatism in the rantings of the Dick Tracy-like rogues’ gallery of blowhards and demagogues who stalk the studios of cable news shows. Calling them “conservatives” is like calling Donald Duck the heir of Admiral Nimitz.

Keyes himself is an example of the bizarre path so-called “conservatism” has taken, but in a different way than the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin or Anne Coulter. The latter are all opportunists. They are not interested in consistency of ideas. They are corrupt rhetoricians, and are successful because they know how to adjust their message to mass sentiment.

Alan Keyes, however, is more like Ayn Rand. He is not a corrupt rhetorician, but an ideologue.

He was one of the star students of Harry V. Jaffa, an influential political philosopher and historian of ideas. The problem with Keyes is not lack of principle. Rather, he illustrates G.K. Chesterton’s dictum, “The mad man has not lost his reason; he has lost everything but his reason.” In politics, this kind of person confuses rigidity of thought with logical consistency. This attitude ignores chief principle of classical political philosophy: the kind of reasoning called for in politics and other kinds of practical affairs is very different from the speculative reason used in mathematics or theoretical physics.

Trying to squeeze the richness of human experience into an ideological straitjacket is also conducive for paranoid condemnations of rivals and opponents. Thus, Rand not only attacked liberals and socialists, but also libertarians. Although they advocated almost all of her own policy views, she attacked them ferociously for not basing them on the right principles. The drive for ideological purity has also given rise to all sorts of divisions and splits in small parties of the Left (cf Monty Python’s Life of Brian). Likewise, Alan Keyes cannot tolerate someone who shows no concern for ideological structure– so of course, he would erupt over Sarah Palin.