image: NYMag.com
Very interesting article by Gabriel Sherman: “The Revolution Will Be Commercialized” on how Sarah Palin became a national industry and built her wealth, quickly, by seeing that there was money to be made … but serving out her term as Alaska’s governor wasn’t the way to get it.
Nowadays, for both poles of the political spectrum but especially for the right, politics is a business—the entertainment business. The freak show, as Mark Halperin termed it, has been turned into a fully merchandised product. It was Fox’s Roger Ailes who had the insight that the American right was an underserved market, one with a powerful kind of brand loyalty.
Fox News has turned a disaffected segment of the populace into a market, with the fervor and idiosyncratic truth standards of a cult. Wingnut-ism has been monetized, is one admittedly partisan way of looking at it. Palin stokes the disaffection of her constituents and then, with the help of Fox, offers to heal them, for a price. And—surprise—they’re more affluent than most Americans.
Read it at NY Mag.
