Compare and contrast.

One day before the election, Peter Beinart had a piece in The Washington Post explaining why Palin’s appeal had dropped.

He provides a mini-history of culture wars in America going back to the 1920s and finds a pattern. When economic troubles hit, culture matters fade. Voters don’t care so much about religious differences when unemployment, inflation, foreclosures, and bankruptcies spread. Palin’s populism, more based on cultural and geographic variables than on economic variables — she wasn’t a “labor candidate”—no longer played once the market tanked, Washington Mutual went under . . .

Beinart’s story has problems, though, the biggest one being his premise that Sarah Palin is, in fact, a culture warrior. Yes, Palin did have positions on religion, family, and other theaters of the culture wars over time, but that doesn’t make her a culture warrior. Culture warriors are people prepared, precisely, to engage in battle, to square off against the other side and attack, and they attack with the arms of ideology and philosophy, books and ideas. They have experience sitting across the table from people who disagree with them on fundamental principles and values, and they don’t just leave the room. They attack the other side’s premises and axioms, their beliefs about human nature, the Good, the meaning of the past . . .

This is precisely the kind of seasoning that Governor Palin lacked. The difference stood out to me back in September when I read this op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer, entitled “Palin, Reagan Share Much.” It found several similarities between the two, but missed this culture-wars experience gap entirely. Author Charles Dunn called them both “instinctive leaders,” that is, people who lead through on a deep sense of right and wrong, not clarifying where the “depth” of each came from. He said that Reagan entered the presidential debates with “a set of well-honed conservative principles,” and that Palin’s convention speech “suggest that she is cut out of the same cloth.”

Not by a long shot, for Palin’s ideological combat experience doesn’t come close to Reagan’s. Remember that Reagan stood at the center of two of the most important battle sites in 20th-century cultural history: communists/Fellow Travelers in Hollywood and the New Left/student radicals in Berkeley. Reagan engaged them both, with mixed results (winning politically and losing culturally). But the experience led him to examine the principles of both sides, to read Hayek and question his own liberalism.

If Palin does have a future as a culture warrior in the same mold, she has a lot of reading and debating to do.