Huckabee’s Anachronistic Brand of Progressivism

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.

What America needs now is a visionary Constitutional statesman as leader. One is not likely to come from the so-called "progressives" of the Left, nor from those currently labeled as "conservatives," who see no problem with using the coercive powers of government to legalize "taking" the hard-earned wages of the citizens' labor from some in order to fulfill their own version of "doing good."

Such a Constitutional leader would vow to hold fast to the principles of liberty stated so eloquently by the Author of our Declaration of Independence and President of the U. S., Thomas Jefferson, in his 1801 Inaugural Address--wherein Jefferson laid out what might be considered to be "qualifications" for the American presidency:

(Excerpt, "Our Ageless Constitution," p. xiv, reformatted)
"Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation;
- entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them;
= enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man;
- acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter
—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people?
- Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
- This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
"About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you,
- it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations.
- Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political;
- peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none;
- the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies;
- the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad;
- a jealous care of the right of election by the people—a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided;
- absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism;
- a well disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve them;
- the supremacy of the civil over the military authority;
- economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened;
- the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith;
- encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid;
- the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason;
- freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected.
These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety."

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