Years ago, William Kristol, the then-Weekly Standard editor—and Steve Bannon, a future president’s chief strategist—were on the same side. 

They saw what their party’s trifling establishment refused to: the future. In 2008, while getting murdered in the polls, though Republicans were incumbent in the White House and had nominated their putatively most moderate candidate, John McCain, the GOP threw a hail-mary. 

Bannon’s day in the sun would come, but it’s worth noting he once largely shared the instincts of the conservative establishment’s most avant-garde, if devastating, force: Mr. Kristol. Kristol insists today he too believed the party’s orthodoxy had gotten stale before the 45th president. The party had lost its way, not radicalized as the book reviews of the coastal cities might claim, but rather reduced: a pallid country club with its doors shut to those who actually kept the lights on. 

The future was female. The path forward was in the heartland. It was for hockey moms, suburban housewives, and in their own, if more tradition-oriented way, it was the domain of the career woman who showed they could quietly have it all. It was for those who could take on established interests. It was for a conservatism unafraid to bash a little business. It was for Sarah Palin, the young governor of Alaska. 

Now, after she was immortalized on Saturday Night Live, made viral for apparently knowing nothing of her country’s affairs of state, after her family was bear-baited for basically standard, American dysfunction, after her aesthetics became the crass-surreal punch line of pornography, it is hard to remember that Palin was ever taken seriously, or how long she hung around politically. Not only did she lead her McCain-Palin ticket to a brief advantage over Barack Obama (one, I might point out, the Republican ticket last year got nowhere close to ever enjoying), but even after the powers that be were content to abandon Palin to the loony bin, she for years hung on as her party’s heir apparent, a leading presidential candidate.  

Kristol, after McCain was vanquished, kept his distance from his latest protege, but Bannon stepped in. With his Hollywood pedigree, he in 2011 produced The Undefeated, a glowing documentary. Hinting at future bombast, Politico dubbed Bannon’s work “straight hagiography, without nuance or ambiguity, or the admission of opposing viewpoints.” A decade before pandemic politics, none of this stopped Palin from drawing a crowd, or Bannon from a big future of his own. 

The legacy of Palinism is clear. Most would say a politician who struggled to name a single periodical she perused shouldn’t have become president, and she didn’t. But blasé dismissals of her relevance, even dominance, in American political life risk memory-holing relevant lessons from that period just as we are poised to repeat history: a new Democratic president and a Republican Party riven by identity crisis competing over a country down on its luck from sudden crisis. 

Enter Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Forty-six, attractive, and apparently cuckoo-bananas, for reasons complex, she might just be the next big thing. On Thursday, she was stripped of her committee assignments in Congress. Institutionalists might argue that the maneuver is curtains for her relevance, a judicious and reasoned stopgap on the reach of a political figure who has backed the plainly crazed Q-Anonymous conspiracy theory, and theories about September 11, 2001 that conservatives a half-generation ago might say were the realms of the far left.

Let’s take a flier and say: she does not go away. If so, there are several implications.

First, Democrats and associated allies in the press, and in culture, plainly have grown infatuated of what legendary Stanford professor Rene Girard called the scapegoat mechanism. The University of Tennessee at Martin summarizes his concept thusly: “When violence is at the point of threatening the existence of the community, very frequently a bizarre psychosocial mechanism arises: communal violence is all of the sudden projected upon a single individual. … Former enemies now become friends, as they communally participate.” 

The word “violence” here is doing work, in a modern context. Or maybe not, as only a month ago extremists violently rampaged the Capitol, providing President Joe Biden’s government pretext for a potentially elaborate crackdown. We shall see. Regardless, former President Donald Trump’s deplatforming, particularly from Twitter, has plainly been a double-edged sword for his old rivals. Before Trump, the Republican establishment and Democrats could join in camaraderie at gawking at the Palin horror show. With Greene, a person few in America had heard of at New Year’s, as a new foil, many liberals and leftists may be cutting down on the booze, the old reliable bottle of @realDonaldTrump, with the political equivalent of bath salts. 

As in the 1993 film Searching for Bobby Fischer, the political world now searches for its next troubled genius of a sort. 

Conservatives, including populists, argue this can be a grim reality, and unfair treatment as they stake out post-Trump terrain. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida was in Wyoming last week to lead his crusade against Rep. Liz Cheney. The major press portray his efforts as purely vendetta for her recent impeachment vote, Gaetz said, while the substance of his critique is overlooked. “I gave a speech that 60% anti war, 30% anti-PAC money [and] 10% impeachment,” Gaetz texted me. “And the [mainstream media] reports that I give an impeachment speech.”

Second, the budding Greene movement exposes and reminds how much Trumpism probably emanated from Palinism. Trump was a more iconic and ideological figure—altering Republican orthodoxies on all manner of issues, in a way that Palin showed no interest in. In retrospect, the dark stuff was all pretty much there. It’s black comedy now, but Trump once insisted the election was stolen from Mitt Romney. “We can’t let this happen,” Trump tweeted on election night 2012. “We should march on Washington and stop this travesty.” But if Palin was a pure culture warrior, and Trump a more ideological successor, who went the distance with his Buchananism, his Perotism, you can’t say Congresswoman Greene doesn’t believe in anything. 

Third, Congress’ maneuver against Greene may yet show the pitfalls of escalation. Greene was never eyeing the Speaker’s gavel. Shorn of legislative responsibilities, she can take to the air, to press her case. Palin never served out her term as governor of Alaska, resigning suddenly in 2010, but not yet consigning her presidential, or at least, Fox News ambitions. For Greene, every morning absent from the Committee on Education and Labor, is another morning in the greenroom of the One America News Network or Newsmax, if they’ll have her. I suspect they will.

What is clear: it would be a mistake to now ignore her. Too many people are rooting for her.