The Parallax Brief has a guilty secret: he is addicted to American politics. He finds its intoxicating mix of lofty ideals, snarling populism, Congressional dilatants, breakneck pacing, and great statesmen utterly irresistible.

In fact, he believes that a political wonk who tires of listening to great American rhetoric is a political wonk who has tired of politics.

One American politician who likely will not join Abe Lincoln, Jack Kennedy and Ron Reagan in the pantheon of great American speakers, however, is Sarah Palin. Yet she does encapsulate the return of slobbering, populist demagoguery to the American conservative mainstream.

The Palin phenomenon is something that we in Britain must guard against — and not just because it really wouldn’t do to have dim-witted, narcissistic, lying ignoramuses of quite Palin’s stature influencing British public policy from Westminster.

In his review for Newsweek of a Palin biography, Christopher Hitchens explains why.

The Palin problem, then, might be that she cynically incites a crowd that she has no real intention of pleasing. If she were ever to get herself to the nation’s capital, the teabaggers would be just as much on the outside as they are now, and would simply have been the instruments that helped get her elected. In my own not-all-that-humble opinion, duping the hicks is a degree or two worse than condescending to them. It’s also much more dangerous, because it meanwhile involves giving a sort of respectability to ideas that were discredited when William Jennings Bryan was last on the stump. The Weekly Standard (itself not exactly a prairie-based publication) might want to think twice before flirting with popular delusions and resentments that are as impossible to satisfy as the demand for a silver standard or a ban on the teaching of Darwin, and are for that very reason hard to tamp down. Many of Palin’s admirers seem to expect that, on receipt of the Republican Party nomination, she would immediately embark on a crusade against Wall Street and the banks. This notion is stupid to much the same degree that it is irresponsible.

[…]

Once again, one is compelled to ask which would be worse: a Sarah Palin who really meant what she merely seemed to say, or a Sarah Palin who would say anything at all for a cheap burst of applause. This is not a small matter for the Republican Party… The task and duty of a serious politician, as Edmund Burke emphasized so well, is to reason with such people and not to act as their megaphone or ventriloquist.

In pandering to the base, illogical intolerances and desires of relatively small groups of society, politicians and media groups give both credence to abhorrent resentments and build up hazardous popular expectation that these resentments will be satisfied should power be attained.

And, judging by recent American experience, where a whole political party and section of the media have decided to take this course, it has also muddied the waters of truth, triggered legislative constipation and debased politics and politicians.

Daily Mail be warned.