The Republican outlier candidates (and some comments on the Maverick)

Still shaken from my intense exposure this past week to far more CNN TV than I usually absorb, I can't help but notice that most of the punditocracy is eager to write Brother Huck and Ron Paul out of the Republican Presidential contest.

It's easier to understand with Paul. I'm surprised he hasn't done better in the primaries. But then, I was expecting him to spend a lot of that impressive bundle he raised online to do ad buys in the media markets where primaries are being held. But, as the ever-diligent Dave Neiwert tells us in Ron Paul and that money Orcinus blog 01/30/08, he hasn't been doing that. Dave speculates that Paul is saving the money for a third-party run. But who knows? Maybe he plans to use it to do image-boosting advertising for Stormfront, the White Citizens Council and the John Birch Society.

Christian populism a century ago: William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner

Clearly, Brother Huck has little chance to win the nomination. But he could come on strong in some of the Southern primaries and remain a player in the nomination process. And his campaign has provided us an important glimpse at the state of Republican Party Christianism.

Michael Kazin looks at the difference between Brother Huck's brand of so-called populism and the original version in What Evangelical Populism Lost: Why Huckabee Is Not Another William Jennings Bryan Washington Independent 01/28/08:

However, the differences between the two men are significant—and reveal how radically the fault-lines of religion and politics changed over the last century. In Bryan’s heyday, most Americans were evangelical Protestants, and split their votes about evenly between the two major parties. But now they are about a quarter of the population, and have been the GOP’s most reliable constituency since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Huckabee, whatever his rhetoric of the moment, is a loyal member of that right-wing flock.

The former Baptist preacher, like Reagan, does have a knack for coining one-liners that Bryan, the most popular orator of his time, would have admired. "In many ways,” Huckabee mused recently, “I’m like a lot of people in the United States: I’m a guy over 50 looking for a job." But the policies he advocates have almost nothing in common with those of the Great Commoner.

Bryan helped initiate the progressive income tax; Huckabee wants to abolish it in favor of a national sales tax that would fall most heavily on the working and middle class. Bryan tried to expand federal power to aid working people; Huckabee opposes universal health care “mandated by federal edict.” Bryan was the first major-party nominee to receive the official backing of organized labor; most unions shun Huckabee, who governed a right-to-work state where Wal-Mart has its headquarters. Bryan hated war and resigned as secretary of state in 1915, when he thought President Woodrow Wilson was leading the U.S. into the hell of World War I; Huckabee strenuously supports the war in Iraq.

Christianist "populism", 2008: Brother Huck

Nicholas Kristof in his Sunday column defends the Huck by using a favorite Christian Right verbal trick (Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love New York Times 02/03/08):

At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith.

Liberals believe deeply in tolerance and over the last century have led the battles against prejudices of all kinds, but we have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals. They constitute one of the few minorities that, on the American coasts or university campuses, it remains fashionable to mock.

Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade. Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

Good grief! Can New York Times columnists be this dumb? Well, I've followed David Brooks for years, so I know the answer to that question.

I wonder if Kristof even realizes that in Fundispeak, "New York liberals", as well as "Hollywood", are understood to mean "Jews". Especially in the context he uses the concepts (okay, he uses "Los Angeles" instead of "Hollywood"), which is of people "deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith". Since Brother Huck's religious faith is Christianity, presumably other Christians wouldn't want to make fun of his faith.

What Kristof repeats here is the whine of which Protestant fundamentalist white folks are so fond, of casting themselves as a persecuted minority. But when Kristof writes that "we [liberals] have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals", it makes me recall the old Lone Ranger/Tonto joke where the punch line is Tonto saying, "What do you mean 'we', Kemosabe?"

Look, the groups we know as the Christian Right have worked actively since 1979 to become a force in American politics. They've suceeded. But there's reason to be careful what you pray for. Because now it's become impossible to understand a great many Republican Party policies, not least our current Middle East policies, without understanding the Christian fundamentalist religious viewpoint from which they stem. As much as it might be convenient, the Christianists can't form a religious-based political bloc and still hope to discourage any criticism of their political positions by declaring that the criticism is offensive to their religious.

Kristof also uses a columnists' trick, which to me is getting very old, of basing his column on unnamed and unidentified parties, e.g., "liberals" at cocktail parties in New York and Los Angeles. He also blurs the distinction between "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" in making his comment about the unidentified groups who "do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur". In the American context, evangelicals are conservative, Protestant Christians who generally espouse a "born-again" theology. Fundamentalists are a subset of evangelicals. It's a distinction that fundamentalists and non-fundamentalist evangelicals have made going back at least to the 1950s.

Outside of the strange and mysterious cocktail parties Kristof frequents, it's a huge leap of faith - or a huge conceptual disconnect, take your pick - between evangelicals of the Jimmy Carter or Jim Wallis type who may do "do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking," etc., and a theocrat like Mike Huckabee. Is Kristof really under the impression that Brother Huck and the Christian Right groups with which he has worked hard to align himself are interested in, to take one example, ending their advocacy of "abstinence-only" sex education programs which often leave their participants uninformed about basic safe sex considerations? Those programs are the very opposite of "superb work" in fighting AIDS. Did Brother Huck talk to the White Citizens Council about the need to end "prison abuses"?

Kristof's column gives a very misleading impression that the newly-prominent moderate/liberal evangelicals are somehow the same people that ten years ago were hardcore Christianist conservatives. I'm sure that's true in some individual cases. But his column fails to make the long-standing distinction between fundamentalists and non-fundamentalist "evangelicals". Maybe Kristof only recently discovered the latter. Or maybe he's just clueless about the distinction.

Among the "inlier" Republican candidates, there's little doubt about which one our "press corps" loves the most. Joe Conason discusses their love affair with the bold Maverick in Will the press get over its love for McCain? Salon 02/01/08. Patrick Ottenhoff at the Political Insider blog also looks at the adoring posture of the press generally toward that bold Maverick in McCain's Standing with His Base is as Strong as Ever 01/28/08.

Jim Lobe at his LobeLog blog reports that McCain is Now the Neo-Con Candidate 02/02/08:

With the elimination of both Rudy Giuliani last week and Fred Thompson the week before, neo-conservatives who were not already in his camp will be rushing to support Sen. John McCain. Of course, McCain was the early favorite of Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard back in 2000, and the latter’s most recent coverage, particularly by Dick Cheney favorite Stephen Hayes (he of the famous “Case Closed” leak that purported to prove beyond any doubt that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were long-standing friends and collaborators) has made clear that they are solidly in McCain’s camp.

Tags: christianism, christian fundamentalism, mccain, mike huckabee, ron paul, william jennings bryan