Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse!

I’ve also spent a lot of time studying Gorbachev and his reforms—as has the Chinese Communist Party. The way he implemented perestroika—which was, essentially, a renovation of a moribund Soviet economic system—and the fact that it led directly to the collapse of one of the world’s two superpowers, was not lost on Beijing. In the three decades that followed, Chinese leaders studied Gorbachev’s reforms in great and obsessive detail in order not to repeat his mistakes. It is why, for example, the CCP has pushed for economic reform but resisted any political change whatsoever: it is the opposite of what Gorbachev attempted to do, a simultaneous revamping of the economic and political systems. In Gorbachev’s case, the political reforms acquired a momentum of their own and got away from him, while political reform stalled and ran aground.

One last thing I’ll note. Or rather, I’ll point out what my friend, film director Michael Idov pointed out: after losing his wife Raisa to leukemia in 1999, Gorbachev remained a very public widower till the end of his days. He never remarried, he often got visibly emotional when speaking about her, his college sweetheart, in a way that no Russian politicians do when speaking about their wives. It was something uniquely human and touching about him, his devotion to his wife in death, just as he had been in life, when she was one of his main speechwriters and his closest advisor.

Tina shows how Palin, who belongs to our generation, looks to the next generation of lib-owning, Democrat-tear-drinking, online-living MAGA warriors who fueled Donald Trump’s candidacy as well as his cultural staying power on the right. “It’s sort of like driving the previous model, but it still drives fine. Just doesn’t have car play and mobile wifi,” one young MAGA warrior told Tina—and reader, I giggled.

It’ll be interesting to see how Palin fares, not just in the Trump-MAGA world after a 10-year hiatus from politics, but in Alaska’s ranked-choice system, which is designed to favor candidates from the center rather than the fringes. And if Palin does win, what will she do in a Congress that’s now filled with Palin 2.0s—the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and the Lauren Boeberts who can out-crazy her in their sleep?

Julia

Now, a decade later—post-Todd, post-reality TV, post-Anchorage, post-Trump—Palin occupies an odd lane. Sure, she might be the O.G. populist, the ancestral progenitor of today’s MAGA movement. But one of the questions setting Official Washington off is what she might be like if she were to come to Congress. At the moment, she is Trump’s endorsed candidate for the newly-vacant Congressional seat of the late Don Young, running in two races: a special election which will determine whether she or Democrat Mary Peltola will serve the remainder of Young’s two-year term, going to Congress for roughly five months; and then a general election in November, which will determine the future of the seat. Should Palin win, after a decade-plus spent cashing in on her evanescent fame out of the political spotlight, she would be joining a Congress that contains Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz. We’re not in Wasilla anymore.

Whether she gets the seat is still being decided, a quirk of Alaska’s newly-instated ranked choice system (and thousands of overseas ballots that will continue to be counted through Wednesday) that would hypothetically reward centrism rather than political extremes. But the question that interested me most of all was what sort of representative Palin would be if she were, hypothetically, to come to Congress. After all, in the ancient times of 2008, Palin’s reputation was set in stone by a horde of angry John McCain advisors calling her a “diva”, preemptively blaming her for his loss. Endless reports focused on her $150,000 shopping sprees and contracts fished out of dumpsters that revealed her preferred type of private jets (“a Lear 60 or larger”). Rivers of digital ink were spilled on her divorce, and, well, she had two TV shows. And considering the types of Republicans making up the core of the G.O.P. House—moderates being primaried out, tweet-generating populists coming in—the competition for air time is going to become intense. “I think the whole caucus, especially if they’re in control of the House, every day is going to be a competition to get the most play over who can say the craziest shit,” Joe Walsh, a former Tea Party congressman turned Never Trump radio host, told me.

Palin’s team didn’t respond to an interview request, but tellingly, her reputation inside MAGA circles diverges wildly from the McCainite’s grievance-filled narrative—largely because, for once, the populists are in charge of the G.O.P. and the establishmentarian haters have been exiled. One MAGA consultant called her “super chill,” predicting that while she might not be the sort of social media superstar that Greene or Gaetz have become, Palin would be a strong ally for the Trumpian agenda inside Congress.

Palin, according to some of the people I spoke to in the MAGA super-nucleus of the Republican party, is the political version of an entertainer—say, Betty White or Dolly Parton—whose early works are being embraced by a younger generation. “I think she knows now who she is, what she likes, what she’s not going to put up with,” a second MAGA-oriented operative who knows her predicted. “That might be diva to some, but to me it was just not bothering with the things she knows she doesn’t need to mess with this time around.”

Or, to put it another way, Palin is more of an old-school, Tea Party, Freedom Caucus type of Republican, rather than full-throttle, extremely-online MAGA warrior. “It’s sort of like driving the previous model, but it still drives fine. Just doesn’t have car play and mobile wifi,” the G.O.P. operative continued. “It’s still American made. We’d take that over a Kia, to draw the analogy out to a painful degree.”

Internet fluency, for sure, has played a massive part in this generational change. Trump’s entire political candidacy was turbocharged on Twitter; digital grassroots activism spawned movements like QAnon and built influencers like Greene. So has a sense of anti-liberal grievance that expands well beyond the confines of politics and into the realm of culture. In Palin’s hayday, for instance, the dog-whistle objections to Barack Obama’s presidency manifested as libertarian objections to the size of the government. Today, the far right couldn’t care less about government spending—they’re too busy owning the libs online, protesting drag queens, picking fights with The Walt Disney Company, and shopping anti-woke razors.

Palin does have one recent culture war credential under her belt, a long-running defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, which she recently lost. But her successor populists in the Republican Party possess a burn-it-all-down mentality that Palin, so far, seems loath to embrace. In a recent article, Alaska Public Radio noted that despite her general vilification of Democrats, Palin seemed to refrain from attacking her former Juneau colleague Mary Peltola, whom she called a “sweetheart.” Marjorie Taylor Greene would sooner drop dead than praise a Democrat.

Could Palin pivot from the analog politics of the Tea Party to the multi-channel, loyalty-demanding, institution-breaking instincts of the MAGA movement? Would she even want to? Or would she confirm the stereotypes that the McCain campaign lobbed against her: that she is, at heart, a fame-seeking political dilettante with no interest in policy and every interest in maximizing profit. It’s not yet clear what her political focus would be if she ended up in Congress—drill baby drill?—and considering Peltola’s current performance, the question might be moot, anyway. But should Palin be sworn in, the second operative predicted that, true to form, the one time Alaska governor would be a maverick, just like she’d been in 2008. “She’s a bit of a strange fit no matter where you put her,” this person said. “She’s her own thing. But she’ll do just fine, I think.”