I don’t have anything interesting to say about Mitt Romney’s religion speech, but, as it happens, yesterday I was hanging out with an out-of-town Mormon friend. I asked him what he thought of Romney’s speech. He didn’t like it because he doesn’t think Mormonism should strive to be mainstream. He said he has never thought of himself as a Christian and doesn’t like the idea of Mormonism being subsumed under a generic quasi-evangelical Christianity. He prefers, he said, that Mormonism remain on the margins. Also, he’s a liberal Democrat who is torn between supporting Clinton and Obama and complained that Romney is betraying Mormon values with his support of “enhanced interrogation,” Gitmo, etc. Though he readily concedes that his aren’t typical views among his co-religionists.
Category: Conservatism
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Huckabee vs. torture
It’s a depressing sign of the times when you feel like you should praise a politician who wants to hold America to a higher standard than, say, the Inquisition or the Khmer Rouge. Still, it’s good to see Mike Huckabee joining John McCain (and Ron Paul) as a Republican against torture:
After the Iowa poll showed that Republican voters like him but found him much less “presidential” and “electable” than Romney, Huckabee sought to build his foreign policy credentials, meeting with a group of retired generals who are in Des Moines to urge the 2008 candidates to commit to opposing torture. After the meeting, Huckabee joined Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in declaring his opposition to the interrogation procedure known as “waterboarding,” and said he would support closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a contrast with the other leading Republicans.
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The case for McCain
CPA makes it. I’ve come around, somewhat to my own surprise, to the view that, of all the likely GOP nominees, McCain is the best option. Initially I thought Romney might be the least damaging of the crop since I reasoned that he would govern as a northeastern Rockefeller Republican (far from my favorite ideological grouping, but preferable to some of the alternatives). Instead he’s decided to pander to the Jack Bauer wing of the party.
McCain has the soundest views on torture, has a realistic view of the threat of climate change, and is actually something of a principled fiscal conservative. The problem, of course, is that his views on foreign policy are roughly 180 degrees away from mine. He doesn’t seem to have ever seen a foreign conflict he didn’t think the U.S. should be involved in. But, as I mentioned in a comment to CPA’s post, he would be the best, I think, on jus in bello issues if not jus ad bellum. That’s no small thing.
Which is not to say that I’d actually vote for him. I think the GOP needs to lose in 2008. I’m not crazy about any of the Dems, but eight years of Republican leadership hasn’t been good for us. The GOP needs a time out to think about what they’ve done. But it’s better for all of us if both parties put forward relatively decent candidates.
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Huck on the environment
Better than most of the other Republicans (except possibly McCain). Still, I think this is an argument that might appeal to conservative Christians otherwise inclined toward skepticism about climate change:
Do you believe that human beings are the primary drivers of climate change?
The honest answer is I don’t know. And for me, that’s not the issue. Instead of being wrapped into this political discussion of, “Is there global warming, and who caused it?,” what we need to be saying is, “Look, let’s agree that we all have responsibility to present a better planet to the next generation.” Whether or not you want to believe that it’s caused by driving to work, let’s agree that we need to take better care of the planet. Being a conservationist is the proper way to live, whether there is human-based global warming or not.
This still doesn’t go far enough, in my view, because what policies you support will be a function of what you think the facts are. Huckabee’s reluctance to talk about the necessity of government regulation is one outcome of this agnosticism. But I also like this:
This world doesn’t belong to me. I’m a guest here. I don’t have a right to abuse it, any more than I have a right to abuse someone else’s property if they were to let me stay in their apartment for a weekend. It’s a sin against future generations for me to act as if there are no future generations that should enjoy the world as I do.
I love the outdoors. We have a beautiful, magnificent world: rivers and streams and mountains. I find myself overwhelmed when I look at it. I want my great-great-great-grandchildren to one day go out and smell the same fresh air, fish in wonderful streams, and be able to see the same mountains I see. I sure don’t want them to have it in worse shape and wonder why I didn’t do a better job of handing it down to them.
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The Huckster and neo-populism
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.
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Kucinich/Paul in ’08!
In the – ahem – unlikely event that he secures his party’s nomination, Dennis Kucinich has suggested that – wait for it – Ron Paul might make a good running mate.
“I’m thinking about Ron Paul” as a running mate, Kucinich told a crowd of about 70 supporters at a house party here, one of numerous stops throughout New Hampshire over the Thanksgiving weekend. A Kucinich-Paul administration could bring people together “to balance the energies in this country,” Kucinich said.
The Paul campaign has demurred, however.
Unlikely as it sounds, I’ve long thought that a left-right fusion movement based around opposition to global interventionism, a defense of civil liberties, and a genuine populist critique of government and corporate elites could provide a healthy counterpoint to our current bipartisan consensus. And who better to lead it than these two gadflies?
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As we go marching or It’s the war, stupid!
Ross Douthat offers the logical response to this Jonah Goldberg column wondering why mainstream Republicans and conservatives are down on Ron Paul (who, after all, believes most of the things conservatives are supposed to stand for) and not Mike Huckabee, who exhibits many more deviations from conservative ideology:
[T]he reason Paul has been treated differently than Huckabee by the right-wing media is very, very simple, and it has nothing to do with size-of-government issues: Paul opposes the Iraq War (and war with Iran, waterboarding, and all the rest of what’s increasingly defined as the right-wing foreign policy package) and Huckabee doesn’t. Full stop, end of story.
I think he’s right and it shows to what extent the war (and attendant issues) have crowded out traditional conservative concerns. The popularity of Rudy Giuliani is another example of this phenomenon at work.
It’s illuminating to recall that during World War II there were people with impeccable progressive credentials who opposed the entry into the war and were castigated by FDR and his supporters as reactionaries. Two notable men of letters, Oswald Garrison Villard and John T. Flynn, were liberals who ended up on the wrong side of FDR and became victims of a seismic political realignment..
Villard wrote for the Nation, was a founder of the anti-imperialist league, and advocate of civil rights. Flynn was a left-wing populist who wrote for The New Republic. Both men opposed U.S. entry into World War II and were associated with the America First committe. And both ended up breaking with their erstwhile allies who supported the war (Villard stopped writing for the Nation and Flynn was fired from his regular spot at the New Republic). They found themselves with new allies on the Right who opposed foreign intervention and both became harsh critics of FDR and his policies.
What’s interesting is that both Villard and Flynn apparently underwent an ideological evoultion, becoming more right-wing in domestic as well as foreign policy (at least as right-wing was understood at the time). Both became sharply critical of the New Deal, calling it a precursor to an American form of fascism.
This suggests that war has a way of bringing about political realignments. If “the Right” continues to be defined by a preference for preemptive war, the unitary executive, and “harsh interrogation techniques,” critics of these policies will find themselves to be on the Left de facto if not de jure. But it also raises the intriguing possibility of an ideological metamorphosis on domestic questions too, a la Villard and Flynn. Ron Paul, for instance, while clearly having libertarian leanings, couches a lot of his arguments in rhetoric drawn from the populist tradition. You see this when he talks about returning to the Constitution, about U.S. sovereignty, in his criticisms of NAFTA and the WTO, and so on. And this kind of rhetoric has a lot in common with Left-wing populism.
This doesn’t mean that I agree with conservative critics of Ron Paul that he’s a “leftist,” but once one raises the kinds of questions someone like Paul raises not just about the Iraq war, but the very premises of “conservative” foreign policy, it opens the door to further questions about the foundations of American capitalism as it’s currently practiced, about police powers, about the military-industrial complex and other traditionally “left-wing” issues.
Personally speaking, I considered myself a fairly conventional conservative in 2000 and voted (reluctantly) for Bush, but became increasingly appalled at the conduct of the administration and the support it received from organized conservatism beginning around the time of the run-up to the Iraq war. But this eventually led me to re-think the entire panoply of conservative positions and abandon many of them. If conservatives could virtually en masse be so disastrously wrong, I thought, about foreign policy and issues like torture and executive power, what else were they wrong about? Since then I’ve departed from conservative orthodoxy on enough points that I would be hard-pressed to self-idenify that way anymore (politically I’m registered as an independent). But it was the increasing self-definition of conservatism in terms of the positions connected to the war that initially pushed me into the other camp.
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Rev. Paul
Turns out Ron Paul’s older brother David is an ELCA pastor in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And the Paul family originally hails from Pittsburgh. Who knew?
David Paul is proud of Ron Paul, but he is enough of a realist to understand that his brother’s candidacy is a long shot. Some of his stands—for example, he favors repeal of most federal drug laws—put him on the political fringe. He barely registers in national polls.
But on the whole, David Paul thinks his brother is on the right side where it counts. “On Iraq, I am in total agreement with him. We shouldn’t have been there. We should get out of there.”
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Who owns Goldwater?
With all the buzz about the conservative movement being on the verge of breaking apart, it’s interesting to contrast the present with the career of Barry Goldwater, who managed to unite libertarians, traditionalists, and foreign policy hawks. Recently even liberals have been looking back fondly (if with rose-colored glasses) on the tolerant libertarain Goldwater who didn’t think much of Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right.
In the latest American Conservative Daniel McCarthy considers the latest wave of Goldwater revisionism and tries to uncover the essence of Goldwaterism.
A Thinking Reed 