Posted on 05/27/2015 1:14:47 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Mike Huckabee doesn’t have a lot of prominent defenders, and I am not volunteering for the job. Huckabee has always struck me as a right-wing populist-progressive. A deeply religious — and by all accounts decent — man, Huckabee nonetheless has a view of the state that would have jibed almost perfectly with such forgotten titans of the Progressive Era as Richard Ely, Josephus Daniels, and even William Jennings Bryan.
Ely, a mentor to Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt and the founder of the “Wisconsin school” of progressivism, believed that “God works through the state in carrying out His purposes more universally than through any other institution.” It “is religious in its essence,” and “a mighty force in furthering God’s kingdom and establishing righteous relations.”
Daniels, Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of the Navy, was a devout Evangelical who banned alcohol (and condoms) from the service. At Daniels’ insistence, officers were forced to replace wine with coffee in the officers’ mess. They took to calling their replacement beverage “a cup of Josephus,” which was quickly shortened and immortalized to “a cup of Joe.” Daniels ordered that prostitutes be kept five miles from every port, and with the aid of a young assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, oversaw a heavy-handed crackdown on homosexuality at the Naval Training Station in Newport, Rhode Island. Their tactics were so unseemly, Congress rebuked them both in 1919. Bryan, the dashboard saint of populists for the last century, largely for his assaults on monied elites and his opposition to World War I, had no problem imposing his values on others — at home and abroad. After Prohibition was passed, he proclaimed, “Our nation will be saloonless for evermore and will lead the world in the great crusade which will drive intoxicating liquor from the globe.”
Huckabee isn’t as severe as the progressives of yore, but the same impulses are there. When he was governor of Arkansas — and on a weight-loss kick — he wanted Arkansas schools to track the body-mass index of students. In 2007, he favored a national ban on smoking and argued that we have a Biblical duty to fight global warming. In 1992, he told the Associated Press, “I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public-health risk.”
It’s worth noting that the progressives of yesteryear Huckabee resembles were not “right-wing” back then. The original progressives, so beloved by contemporary liberals unburdened with historical knowledge of their forebears, were overwhelmingly religious (and quite often very, very racist). The main reason Huckabee is placed on the right side of the political spectrum today is that liberals have largely jettisoned the Christian rationalizations for government activism. But their pious faith in government activism itself remains intact. For liberals today, it is right and good to use the state to impose your values on others, but don’t you dare suggest that Jesus told you to ban smoking or cut down on sugary soft drinks. The new preachers in the pulpit are public-health activists and social-justice warriors imbued with religious fervor sans religion.
In the 1990s, Hillary Clinton famously pushed for a “politics of meaning” that she hoped would “remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century, moving into a new millennium.” Barack Obama has defined sin as “being out of alignment with my values.”
Against this backdrop, Huckabee is an anachronism — again, not for his statist meliorism, but for his openly religious motivations. And while I have as little use for a nanny state anointed by Jesus as I do for a nanny state anointed by bureaucrats, Huckabee has more of my sympathy. He can at least point to something outside and better than himself — i.e., God — as his lodestar. He can also invoke traditions grounded in how people want to live. The meddling busybodies of the left only have their own innate sense of superiority to guide them. Huckabee recently earned a lot of criticism for denouncing the “false god of judicial supremacy” in the context of the Supreme Court’s ever-growing role as the all-wise shepherd of our society. His grasp of the legal niceties no doubt leaves something to be desired. But he has a point. I certainly don’t want robed priests dictating how America should define life, death, and everything in between (including marriage), but I’m at a loss as to why having robed lawyers (i.e., judges) make such decisions is such an obvious improvement.
How about the National Gay Review’s brand of progressivism?
If so, it's part of the facts of life. Burkean conservatives are pretty rare in America, and free market purists are nowhere near a majority. If you want to get anything done in politics you have to work with people who don't agree with you about everything. Once in a while, they may actually be right about something, maybe even more right than oneself.
But Huck is too much yesterday's guy. He won't have much of a following among people who actually follow politics. A lot of people don't follow politics though.
But, nothing will remove the need for God in our culture and if the GOP-E continues on joining with the Democrats to try to ditch God, they will collapse the country.
A Huckabee presidency would back off that day of collapse.
I see you have not read many, if any, books about US history in your time. What Jonah Goldberg is writing about is basic Turn of the 19th/20th Century American history. If you bothered to ever read any books on the subject, you would know that evangelicals, for the most part, leaned to the Left right up to the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, who they voted for. The issues that concern them today were pretty much the consensus on all sides of the aisle until the 60’s, thus they voted for more activist government in the economic sphere (where the two parties differed). Small government conservatism was not all that popular in the South and other rural areas. Believe it or not, the stereotypical Small Government Conservative was to be found in states like Vermont and Massachusetts back in those days.
Huckabee isn't God.
I think your reading has lead you to misunderstand why Christians vote for a man.
They were told Nixon was a criminal and Carter was a good Baptist.
They’ve just been trying to vote for a good Christian man all along.
If the GOP-E didn’t have contempt for God, they would provide a candidate close to a good Christian each time and they would win each time.
True enough, but what would Republicans or conservatives be without the Evangelicals? Either they’d be a much smaller party or they’d have to find votes in groups that are even less conservative than Evangelicals. If you define the conservative base as limited government free marketeers or as Burkean traditionalists, you don’t have a very big base.
So Huckster represents God? Perhaps a socialist God requiring the gubmint assistance in carrying out those Godly duties like pardoning rapists and murderers and making excuses for pedophiles and enablers.
To be a progressive he would have to have an ideology.
Huck sterling is an opportunist. He sells his snake oil wherever he can turn an profit. He cloaks self serving mercenary endorsements of any product, candidate or position in biblical language. And he doesn’t even bother to see if those candidates or products are antithetical to anything or anyone else that he has been hawking.
The man appears to be an insincere con man cut in the classic fraudulent evangelist mold.
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