In less than a week Barak Obama will be inaugurated as President and what has come of the time of reflection the new loyal opposition has supposedly gone through from the day he was elected until his moment next Tuesday?  Well, Fred Barnes is writing mash notes to outgoing President Bush II, the would-be chairmen of the Republican National Committee are competing to see how many times they can drop Ronald Reagan’s name and the neoconish Pajama’s Media is employing “Joe the Plumber” as their war correspondent in the Middle East who believes their shouldn’t be any war correspondents at all, lest they get in the way of the war.

In other words the social democrats who control the Right have learned nothing new about themselves so they revert to type, especially when it comes to “Populist Chic”, their supposed love affair with the middle and working classes which is why Mr. Wurzelbacher is covering Israel’s attacks on Gaza instead of snaking pipes. Oh well, I supposed its better than sending Richard Perle to Gaza to be their war correspondent or Douglas Feith. It’s just less believable.

Dan Larison has a nice column on Eunomia about how the Wurzelbacher dispatches won’t make anyone forget Edward R. Murrow from London. How long the social democrats wish to keep pretending that they’re just “keeping it real,” is up to them, for however long it’s politically expedient I suppose. Leonard Bernstein held just one fundraising soiree for the Black Panthers as far as I know, so maybe the Cosmos will come to their senses and realize they are who they are, and no amount of fantasizing that they’re all just God-fearing, pick-up driving coal miners in their glass tower, Beltway think tanks is going to change their status as Bobos. Say what you want about David Brooks but at least he’s honest about who he is.

It has distressed those provincials and paleos whose part of the country has been filled with populist movements of long ago from the Wisconsin Progressives to the Virginia Regulators, from Minnesota’s original F-Lers to the North Dakota NPLers, Nebraska’s Bryans and Louisiana’s Longs, from the Grange to the Greenback Party, to see populism reduced from a movement of substance to a cultural archetype as we saw so clearly in 2008.

But we should not despair because real populism may very well be making a comeback as Rod Dreher wrote in his Dallas Morning News column last Sunday. He gave the specific example of one Caleb Stegall, a Kansas lawyer who ran for Jefferson County DA and won. Stegall was also a  contributor to Takimag.

“Last year, Stegall, a conservative of strong agrarian sympathies, got so fed up with the Republican machine that he ran for Jefferson County district attorney. He won and will be sworn in tomorrow. Today, amid the wreck of conservatism nationally, he sees America as ripe for a populist revolt.

“There is a widespread angst that crosses all political lines that we are losing those things we have loved most, that we are powerless in the face of this loss, and that those with the power are far away and don’t care very much about what we are losing,” he tells me.

A time like this is also ripe for a populist demagogue, a fact of which Stegall is keenly aware. This is partly why he warns conservative populists not to make the same mistake that the Prairie Populists made in the 1890s and believe that ceding more power to the state is any solution.

“My message would be a simple one,” he says. “Stand up! Stand up on your own two feet. Stand on your own ground, with your own family and culture to love and care for. And if anyone comes to take that away, you give them hell!”

While Dreher is dismissive of Sarah Palin, I do believe the Alaska Governor can be rehabilitated from her social democratic addiction. First she needs to get rid any and all Beltway consultants around her and realize that Fox News is not her friend and that the Beltway conservatives who she thinks are her friends and supporters are only just using her because they don’t love her as a real person, they love what they think she represents for political reasons.  Then she needs to spend the next four years doing what Dreher recommends:

“Sarah Palin, who has many admirable qualities and a scintillating political talent, would be perfectly positioned to lead the next conservatism if she had “prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking.” But she has not. To say that a politician has to have either the common touch or be conversant with ideas and intellectual discourse is to accept a false choice. “

Hopefully she’ll get the help she needs and as always, we provos and paleos are ready to provide it.