I respect and admire Sarah Palin. This leads my Democratic friends to ask, “What can a guy like you possibly see in Sarah Palin?” I answer that America is a lot more Mark Twain than Earnest Hemingway, and Sarah Palin represents Mark Twain’s America. They ask me what I mean, and I explain:

For nearly a century, American literature was no more innately American than English translations of Chateaubriand’s Atala or René, until Mark Twain emerged in the 1860s as the first American literary voice.

Mark Twain’s America is the America of a fresh start — not only free from the baggage and inequities of previous ages, but scornful of them. In Innocents Abroad, Twain’s narrative expresses for the first time a view that embodied American superiority in a natural voice that is clever and humorous, but altogether free from shrillness, defensiveness, and nationalistic self-serving. Twain’s protagonists travel to Europe and find Europeans to be just as petty and crass and exploitative in commercializing their culture as Americans, and to be substantially more boorish about their history. Though Twain’s travelers in Innocents Abroad are frequently petty and silly, there’s something downright pristine about how they respond confidently with amusing pranks to European cynicism and assumed superiority.

Earnest Hemingway, on the other hand, wrote of an America that meaningful people found shallow and sinister — “broad lawns and narrow minds,” was the way that Hemingway characterized his own hometown. Hemingway’s protagonists preferred the authenticity of Western Europe, feeling a fundamental distrust and distaste for Americans who remained at home. Robert Jordan, the protagonist in For Whom the Bell Tolls, responds to the question of whether there are fascists in America:

There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.

Democrats frequently express this same sentiment. This worldview leads people like Michelle Obama to say things like, “And let me tell you something — for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” It leads people like Barack Obama to say things like, “[working class Americans who lose their jobs] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The cultural divide that distinguishes “red states” from “blue states” rests upon this tension between two visions of America: Twain vs. Hemingway.

Sarah Palin certainly appeals to the Joe Sixpacks of America, but most people who question Palin’s following won’t take “Joe Sixpack” for an answer. They don’t like Joe Sixpack, because they find him to be a meddlesome, ignorant, obstacle to their agenda. And besides, I’m not Joe Sixpack anyway. I’m a professional with intellectual pretensions who doesn’t watch sports. I fancy that I have educated and discerning opinions about current events, politics, and government policy.

So how does someone like me view Sarah Palin? She has a profoundly inspiring story, a story of American opportunity and equality and fresh starts. Sarah Palin was a working mother raising a family on a modest income who stepped up to the plate to change things she didn’t like in her community and (eventually) in her state. Sarah Palin developed a remarkable record of accomplishment, from the PTA to the city council to mayorship to governorship. Calling Sarah Palin ignorant or uninterested in the world around her is utterly preposterous. Sarah Palin is the type of person I want to succeed, and America is better for being a place where folks like her can succeed. When McCain chose Palin, I didn’t anguish over her qualifications. I smiled, and I thought, “More power to her.”

And the media’s slanderous onslaught against Palin has nothing to do with qualifications. The mainstream media holds Palin in contempt because she lacks Hemingway’s fundamental distrust of America and its values, because she doesn’t share that view of America’s problems, because, like Hemingway’s Robert Jordan, they believe that this makes her a fascist. Naomi Wolf rings the Hemingway bell, but with more panic and less panache than Hemingway:

Make no mistake: Sarah “Evita” Palin is Rove and Cheney’s cosmetic rebranding of their fascist push: she will help to establish a true and irreversible “fear society” in this once free once proud nation.

Those who long for the United States to become Earnest Hemingway’s America positively hate Sarah Palin’s embodiment of Mark Twain’s America. Not me. Not most of us. Dogonnit, we are Mark Twain’s children.