Huckabust
Posted on May 29th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Republicans need to be Republicans. The greatest threat to classic Republicanism is not liberalism; it’s this new brand of libertarianism, which is social liberalism and economic conservatism, but it’s a heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism because it says “look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government. If it means that elderly people don’t get their Medicare drugs, so be it. If it means little kids go without education and healthcare, so be it.” Well, that might be a quote pure economic conservative message, but it’s not an American message. It doesn’t fly. People aren’t going to buy that, because that’s not the way we are as a people. That’s not historic Republicanism. Historic Republicanism does not hate government; it’s just there to be as little of it as there can be. But they also recognize that government has to be paid for. ~Mike Huckabee
The sound you just heard was Mike Huckabee’s hypothetical 2012 campaign imploding. It was one thing to justify tax hikes to balance budgets or pay for necessary road maintenance, but to adopt the treacly, preachy Gerson-style whining about mean ol’ right-wingers who want everyone to suffer and die will guarantee that Huckabee’s future political endeavours will be as cash-strapped as they were this time and the resistance to any future candidacy will be doubly intense. Before this, economic conservatives merely hated him. Now they will become obsessed with thwarting him at every turn. Frankly, a lot of us who enjoyed the angst he was causing mainstream conservatives and were rooting for him secretly or openly against Romney will not be sorry to see him lose in the future. No one wants to be lectured to by someone spouting Gersonism, especially the particularly disingenuous kind that calls for “as little” government as there can be without ever being able to find a single thing that government does that it shouldn’t do.
There are obviously many, many problems with Huckabee’s assessment. First, it vastly overstates the power and influence of what he calls “social liberalism and economic conservatism” within the GOP. As his own candidacy demonstrated, social conservatism and something less than strict economic conservatism pack a lot more punch electorally, and meaningful Hayekian libertarianism in the GOP is generally so scarce and strongly opposed that Huckabee warning against it is a bit like warning about a Zoroastrian takeover of Iran. He is not alone in this, since some people at Cato have made a cottage industry out of inflating the political strength of libertarians by conflating libertarianism with “social liberalism and economic conservatism,” but this is wrong. If Huckabee thinks that this force represents the gravest threat to the GOP and “Republicanism” it suggests that Huckabee has not been fully conscious for the last eight years, since the chief things that brought the GOP into discredit have been 1) Iraq; 2) New entitlement spending; 3) The mishandling of Katrina; 4) Abuse and torture of detainees; 5) The administration’s effort to force-feed the country ”immigration reform” of a kind it didn’t want; 6) Corruption. These discredited the GOP with different constituencies, but all combined to create the generally miserable conditions for the party. Whether or not they were consistent with one kind of “historic Republicanism” or another, they were all serious errors that cast doubt on the capacity of anyone who embraces Republicanism to be a competent governor.
Here Huckabee seems to be making Medicare Part D some sort of litmus test for what it means to be a good Republican, when pushing this entitlement through Congress was one of the worst blunders of the current administration. He mistakenly imagines that the economic conservatives who waged a scorched earth campaign against him in the primaries are particularly influential or powerful, when they could not even derail his candidacy. Meanwhile, Huckabee has consistently shown himself to be on the side of the “compassionate” conservative boondoggles and errors of this decade, and here he has effectively aligned himself with the government-expanding forces within the GOP, which is to say that he has aligned himself with a lot of “historic Republicanism” of the Nixon variety and against a significant part of conservatism.
Filed under: libertarianism, politics
An evolution to a European-style “Christian Democratic Party” seems to be the future of the GOP. I can think of nothing worse for the long term fate of the GOP than for McCain to be the next POTUS.
I think the next two paragraphs indicate Huckabee isn’t speaking about “Gersonism”, although I would suspect he is heavily sympathetic to parts of it. Oddly enough his next couple paragraphs sum up your penultimate paragraph well: “they were all serious errors that cast doubt on the capacity of anyone who embraces Republicanism to be a competent governor.”
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“The sound you just heard was Mike Huckabee’s hypothetical 2012 campaign imploding.”
One can always hope, but I doubt it. Sadly, Huck is right about one thing: there’s virtually no constituency for small government anymore. Spend, spend, spend is the motto of both the Dems and GOP. The sound I hear is the continued GOP excommunication of Ron Paul and his supporters.
I’m with DaveA.
Larison read this and was all like Boo! Hiss! You just blew the whole thing, Huck!
I read it and was all like Wow! That cat’s gonna be tough to beat. Dumb he ain’t and he really has an ear for what the average American wants to hear.
But he has to get the nomination first, and to do that he has to be able to raise more than a couple million dollars. He came a long way on a shoestring, but not nearly far enough, and people who have money and are inclined to donate it to candidates hear this crap and close their wallets real fast. Also, we talk about Obama’s Appalachian/Scots-Irish problems, but Huckabee has a non-Appalachian, non-Scots-Irish problems in winning votes, and that makes for a pretty big set of electoral problems. Plus, Catholics don’t like him very much. Many months ago I used to think Huckabee was viable and competitive and would have been just what the GOP needed in the Midwest, but I don’t think that anymore. Maybe bleeding-heart “conservatism” can survive the debacle of the Bush years, but I don’t quite see how.
What Huckabee is saying is not so much that there isn’t a constituency for what he calls “libertarianism” as it is that he’s saying that it’s un-American and a threat to the GOP. He implies that there isn’t a constituency for it, but if there were absolutely no consituency for it it would hardly be in the position he says it is in. Indeed, I agree that the constituency for small government conservatism is small and not very influential, which is why Huckabee’s analysis is quite wrong, at least so far as the “threat” goes.
Oh yes, the points you made here were excellent:
As his own candidacy demonstrated, social conservatism and something less than strict economic conservatism pack a lot more punch electorally, and meaningful Hayekian libertarianism in the GOP is generally so scarce and strongly opposed that Huckabee warning against it is a bit like warning about a Zoroastrian takeover of Iran. He is not alone in this, since some people at Cato have made a cottage industry out of inflating the political strength of libertarians by conflating libertarianism with “social liberalism and economic conservatism,†but this is wrong.
You are argue that one of the “…chief things that brought the GOP into discredit [was] new entitlement spending.”
The question I would pose is: What electorally significant constituency opposed new entitlement spending and soured on the GOP as a result?
What’s your basis for arguing that the Bush Administration’s loss of electoral support arises in large part to its entitlement spending? Its my understanding that new entitlement spending is extremely popular among the electorate, Republican and Democrat alike. Rightly or wrongly, people like Social Security, they like Medicare and they do NOT like people threatening those programs. A fact that Newt Gingrich learned the hard way.
It’s certainly true that libertarians and small government conservatives were repelled by the Bush administration’s entitlement spending. However, that group of people has never struck me as electorally significant–probably because there are so few of them.
I’m an unabashed liberal, so this isn’t my fight, but it seems from a distance that there may not be any way to reconcile Huckabee’s compassionate “Republicanism” with the general conservative movement, much less with economic libertarianism. These are not only strange bedfellows, they wake up in the morning in horror at who they’ve been sleeping with. The prognosis seems to be either an increasing fragmentation of the right, or a realignment around just one of these groups. Huckabee may end up the winner of that realignment.I don’t see how economic libertarians, or even small government conservatives, can possibly win in any re-alignment, so either they simply capitulate or they separate. In either case, it sounds like good news for democrats, who don’t have this kind of ideological division.
“But he has to get the nomination first, and to do that he has to be able to raise more than a couple million dollars. ”
You mean like GOP nomineee John McCain, who was broke and declared dead last summer — versus, say, Ron Paul, who raised $35 million, or Mitt Romney and his bottomless bank account?
A year ago, I would have agreed, but if there’s one takeaway from this cycle, it’s that money ain’t everything.
Huckabee has been extremely outspoken lately, often to little effect, first with his terrible joke about assassinating Obama at the NRA convention, and now with this seemingly unmotivated attack on libertarians. What this says to me is that he wants to be noticed. Why? Has McCain ruled him out of the VP position? Or — ?
[...] And those of us who were never rooting for him are relieved by the Huckster’s falling out with Larison. [...]
“He came a long way on a shoestring, but not nearly far enough, and people who have money and are inclined to donate it to candidates hear this crap and close their wallets real fast.”
And yet you say libertarianism – or fiscal conservatism, or neoliberalism, or what have you – has little influence on American politics! Aren’t these people the very Rockefeller Republicans we see paleos complain about so often? Have we forgotten Russell Kirk’s warning against “chirping sectaries”?
Ask any self-described political “moderate” what their positions are on various issues, and invariably you will find that they reject socially conservative positions on abortion, gay rights, etc – yet they are vehemently opposed to government waste, higher taxes, etc. Keep in mind, these “independents” or “moderates” are supposedly the voters Republicans need to appeal to in order to win elections, although I think an actual assessment would find that appealing to blue collar Democrats – by running on a platform similar to Huckabees – is easier and will yield better results.
I honestly don’t see why anyone here is upset about this; it seems perfectly sensible. Has anyone who has run on a platform of lower taxes and smaller government kept their promises? Is it even possible to reduce the size of government in this day and age? Should reducing the size of government take precedence over social issues such as abortion and gay marriage (which was legalized in California very recently, as you are well aware)?
Libertarians and economic conservatives (not the same thing, mind you) have an outsized influence inside the GOP nominating process because they are overrepresented among activists, primary voters and donors, and economic conservatives more so than libertarians. Even so, all of them together couldn’t kill Huckabee’s candidacy and saw their golden boy Romney go down in flames despite spending tens of millions of dollars. I never said that the things Huckabee was criticising had “no influence on American politics,” but that his remarks vastly overstate that influence.
Rockefeller Republicans have nothing to do with any of this, and we don’t complain about such people because, on the whole, they don’t exist. I have sometimes used the label to abuse some of the big-government conservatives, but it isn’t really the right label for them. If there are people anything like the Rockefeller Republicans today, they are closer to Huckabee in their views about expanding the welfare state. But the confusion Huckabee’s terminology creates is part of the problem–anything that can confuse moderate Republicans with libertarians is obviously deeply flawed as analysis. Rockefeller Republicans were not necessarily fiscally conservative at all. Today’s Republican moderates are well to the “right” of Rockefeller et al. on taxes and spending.
This constant dividing conseratives into “economic”, neocon, “moderate”, etc. just doesn’t sway me. I’m an Indy con–an Independent conservative–so what the GOP does or doesn’t do isn’t of concern to me at The White House level. What the House does is what really matters, and as it’s in Pelosi/s hands for likely another 2.5 years, I believe the country is screwed…no matter WHO is elected POTUS. To me, there are ONLY “true conservatives” and PHONY ones–the RINOs, neocons, economic ones and even some of the social cons, because many of them are voting for the pro-war Democrat, McCain. That’s what we have left running for POTUS, you realize–three Demoncrats.
Back to “true vs phony conservatives”. The WSJ boys are NOT conservatives! The Minutemen and other anti-Invasion activists who are trying to keep our country from further invasion ARE conservatives! The Bill Kristols and Mike Huckabees are not. There ARE no conservatives in the Bush Inner Circle, or even in his Outer Circle!
Larison IS right about one thing, however. Mike Huckabee is finished in national politics. Conservatives like me who backed Thompson and Romney will remember how Huckabee teamed up with McCain in FL and S.C. which cost Romney the nomination. When anti-conservatives Ed Rollins (who was part of the Perot org and other losing candidates) and Chuck Norris joined Huckabee, I knew the guy was a two-bit phony. He belongs on the pulpit down in Arkansas, not in The White House.
There is a strong and growing movement to conservative third parties this year, particularly to The CP and Rev. Chuck Baldwin. Huckabee and every other GOP candidate is “passe” to me. He’s a favorite of the MNM because he’s NOT a conservative. The only real conservative in this race is Chuck Baldwin.