As Mike Huckabee continues to gain on Mitt Romney in Iowa, he seems to be steadily moving from a second to first-tier (or at least 1 and a half tier) candidate. Whether this is a function of his performance in the debates or his Chuck Norris endorsement remains to be seen.

Over the last couple of days I’ve read a couple of at least partly admiring profiles of Huckabee by liberal writers in Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. These writers inevitably express shock that Huckabee doesn’t seem to be a monster despite being a crazy right-wing evangelical who doesn’t believe in evolution. But beyond his personal affability, these writers pick up on the fact that Huckabee has made some enemies on the fiscal right who’ve tagged him (rather implausibly) as a big-spending liberal.

Personally I’m not too partial to Huckabee. He hasn’t done anything to distinguish himself from the Bush-GOP line on war, torture, and the national security state. Nor am I particularly a fan of his cultural politics.

But what does make him interesting is that he seems to be groping toward a different economics than most of his competitors. His instincts seem to be for the working class and he’s raised issues of inequality and economic security that would otherwise not even register on the GOP’s radar. Now, this doesn’t seem to translate into a particularly coherent policy stance: for instance, he’s on record as supporting a national consumption tax in place of the income tax, which is a pretty regressive proposal. But his popularity still suggests that his rhetoric is resonating with voters.

Michael Lind, a sharp left-of-center political analyst, argued recently that the economic “center” in American politics is shifting to the left. With the end of the Cold War, libertarianism and neoliberalism appeared to define the endpoints of the respectable spectrum on economic issues, but recent years, he says, have seen a resurgence of economic populism as a force to be reckoned with:

Libertarians succeeded in promoting deregulation and the liberalisation of trade and finance. But, partly as a result of their success, the popular anxiety caused by globalisation doomed far more radical libertarian reforms.

Even as libertarianism was losing its political lustre, economic populism came to life in US politics for the first time since the 1930s. Unlike the reactionary populism of Patrick Buchanan in the 1980s and 1990s, the middle-class populism represented by CNN’s Lou Dobbs cannot be dismissed as marginal. The decline of libertarianism and the revival of populism are already reshaping politics in the US and similar societies.

What formerly was the left – welfare-state liberalism – is once again the ­centre. To its left (in economic, not social, terms) is protectionist ­populism; to its right, neoliberalism.

If this is right, Huckabee may represent the future of the GOP as it scrambles to catch up with these new realities. Most of the other candidates are peddling the same old low-tax, anti-regulatory gospel, but if voters, even Republican ones, are increasingly feeling the pinch of economic anxiety, they may not be buying.

What was originally called the “New Right” – the blue-collar former Democrats who came into the Republican coalition in the 70s and 80s was never really distinguished by its fealty to laissez-faire. It was motivated more by cultural politics, crime, welfare, and other concerns associated with the middle and working classes. These concerns were able to fit under the philosophical tent of antistatism because it was thought that government bureaucrats were the primary villains responsible for undermining sound virtues by meddling in communities.

Previous to this the intellectual Right was elitist, Anglophilic and often characterized by a high-church religiosity. By contrast, the “New” Right was populist, blue-collar and less committed to the virtues of laissez-faire and individualism. Christopher Lasch brilliantly criticized the co-opting of populism by laissez-faire Republicans in his The True and Only Heaven. Lasch largely accepted the populist criticism of the Left and the welfare state, but he argued that capitalism and the state work in tandem to rob ordinary working people and their communities of their capacity for self-government and self-determination. Reaganomics was not, in his view, the true ally of populism, but the apogee of liberal individualism which corrodes communities in the name of “choice.”

If evangelical Protestants are the heirs of the old “New” Right, then the turn toward economic populism may make sense. The “economic royalists” of the GOP (as the New Yorker piece calls them) have enjoyed the support of evangelical voters without really giving them much in the way of actual power. But if these folks now constitute most of the base of the party, then the populist chickens may be coming home to roost. I don’t know if Huckabee is the right vehicle for a conservative neo-populism, but he’s at least providing an interesting challenge to the status quo.