"Empty vessels for others' hopes"

I'm glad the Paleocon Dark Lord Larison got off his road trip and home in time to start blogging before New Hampshire. Because he has this habit of asking questions that need asking and pressing points that need pressing. Like, for example, turning his skeptical eye toward the sense that people want "change," and that Obama, and even Huckabee, are the avatars of transformation. Says Larison:

It was a media-driven myth that McCain was a great anti-establishment figure in 1999-2000, and I am beginning to think that the same is true of Huckabee. He may have different priorities, as McCain does, but he does not represent the break with the current establishment that some Republicans fear and some conservatives hope to find. On the contrary, he represents continuity with the present administration in many respects. All of us who have problems with Mr. Bush and what he has done, to put it mildly, would like to see the current GOP leadership and the conservative elites who have supported them get their comeuppance. To the extent that Huckabee throws a wrench in their plans and generally aggravates them, we are very pleased, but this is not because he actually represents anything different from the very administration we oppose. For others, such as Brooks, I think Huckabee’s candidacy serves as a cipher for frustrations with the current direction of the GOP, just as Obama’s has served as an outlet for progressive frustrations with the Democratic Party. The candidates have been almost secondary for supporters and opponents alike–they see the candidates representing what supporters and opponents want the candidates to represent, and it doesn’t matter whether the descriptions they give are complete caricatures. They are serving as empty vessels for others’ hopes, so it is appropriate that they are framing their campaigns around empty promises of hope.

Larison raises a key point that's squirm-inducing for we who like seeing both Obama and Huckabee succeed: the possibility that we're so fed up with the status quo that we cast these two very gifted but philosophically conventional politicians as somewhat revolutionary figures, when in fact they're not all that. Of course Larison's far from the only, or the first, writer to make that point, but I don't think it can be made enough. If one is going to ballyhoo either or both of these men, one should at least try to be as undeceived as possible about one's motives, and what's possible.

I think Larison's point applies more to Obama than to Huckabee. I can't see a single point on which Obama is an unorthodox liberal Democrat. In fact, if he's a "change agent" it's likely to be that his charisma makes it more possible for him to sell liberal Democratic policies to the American people. But that's not nothing -- if you'd like to see the country move in a more strongly liberal direction.

Moreover, I think that Obama's real potential for rewriting the rules of American politics is on the question of race. This, I believe, accounts for the otherwise inexplicable enthusiasm many of us conservatives have for his candidacy. If Obama is elected president, I will rejoice because it likely spells the beginning of the end of the Jesse Jacksonization of black politics. It is possible that Obama, in this respect, is an empty vessel for my hopes, but I keep going back to the contrast, at the 2004 Democratic convention, between Obama's speech and Al Sharpton's. Sharpton's was, unsurprisingly, typical black-pol "Forever Selma" boilerplate, because Sharpton (like Jackson) knows his own power depends wholly on the perception that Nothing Ever Gets Better for Black Folks in America, and its corollary, that White People Can't Change. Obama was different. He didn't deny the country's past, but he pitched a positive vision of solidarity and progress, emphasizing what all Americans had in common, and de-emphasizing what divides us. It's not just a rhetorical strategy: it is a sign of, yes, hope -- hope that Obama represents a way beyond the poisonous racial politics of victimization and grievance, one that doesn't deny our differences, and the fact that some have to struggle more than others to achieve the American dream, but one that also offers a path toward real overcoming, together. Only a black political figure embraced by most Americans could pull this off. Obama is that man, I believe.

Or, he could end up being a standard affirmative-action liberal. But I don't think he would be. So: Even though he's a conventional left-liberal Democrat, if I were a Democratic voter I'd have a lot more faith in Obama as a candidate of change because his charisma makes it more likely that the Democratic agenda would pass. That's not romantic -- that's prose, not poetry -- but it's real. As a conservative, I have faith that Obama would dramatically change the national conversation on race, which would be a great achievement.

Now, on Huckabee, Larison is absolutely right to point out that he differs from other Republicans (minus Giuliani) on social issues not one meaningful bit. I have been arguing that the only reason the GOP establishment hates Huck is because he threatens their economic interests. But Larison takes on Huck's economic populism today, and declares it a shibboleth :

Having been an early adopter of this economic policy explanation for the anti-Huckabee campaign, I now think this emphasis on Huckabee’s economics is to exaggerate the differences between Candidate Bush and Huckabee considerably. President Bush has indeed been tied closely to corporate Republicans and has been one all along, but if we can think back to the original Bush campaign in 2000 we will remember a candidate who stressed many of the same themes and tried to identify Republicans with a ”reform” agenda in policy areas not traditionally assoociated with the GOP. If Bush launched his campaign with an attack on the Congressional GOP for “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor” (even then, Gerson’s rhetoric was annoying), Huckabee has engaged in much the same “I feel your pain” hand-waving that Bush did. If Huckabee is not so daft as to say things like, “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande,” he has plenty of statements on the record that make him sound every bit as sentimental and sappy on immigration, while also having said plenty of things that insult conservative restrictionists in the worst ways. The charge that Huckabee is “borrowing liberal economic attack lines” is mostly baseless, unless it is a “liberal economic attack line” to acknowledge that there is economic anxiety and uncertainty abroad in the land, which the new jobless numbers and purchasing reports are beginning to drive home. If he is borrowing them, perhaps it is because they have been succeeding electorally. In any case, we don’t know whether a “compassionate conservative” would have sounded more like a populist in 2000, because economic conditions were relatively better and there was much less anxiety. Huckabee is showing us what “compassionate conservatism” looks like in an election year where economic conditions are relatively worse.

Aside from the Fair Tax, which is bizarre (and not in the interests of the people this populist is supposed to represent), it's hard to see where Huck differs substantially from his rivals, except, as Larison notes, in what he chooses to emphasize. I hear in Huckabee a kind of soft Buchananism with regard to economic nationalism. I don't know what kind of follow-through a President Huckabee would have on these matters, which is to say I don't know to what extent it's just sentimental rhetoric. But I don't think it's meaningless that a Republican candidate is willing to make his case in these terms. I would expect a President Huckabee to be far more of a conventional Republican than a change agent, but then again, as Russell Arben Fox alludes, having Huck in the White House would, I think, force a more slow-moving and organic change on the conservative movement by making it possible to consider ideas and policies that have been more or less outside the GOP mainstream for a very long time. For all his conventionality, Huck (as both Dr. Fox and David Brooks see) appears to intuit the connection between social and personal morality, and the economy. Brooks wrote the other day:

Third, Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person’s lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has.

In that sense, Huckabee’s victory is not a step into the past. It opens up the way for a new coalition.

A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

If we accept (as we must) that we will never live to see Wendell Berry or anyone faithful to his teaching elected president, then why is it so wrong to be enthusiastic about a candidate who understands one of Berry's basic themes? (In fact, if I were a Huckabee adviser, I'd get into the candidates hands a copy of the Berry essay collection, "Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community." I think it would light a fire in his mind.)

For me, the Huck-as-change-agent theme comes down to this: an America led by a President Huckabee, and a conservative movement whose leader he is, might be an America and a conservatism where more people will read Wendell Berry -- and for that matter, Catholic social thought. Who knows where that might lead? I'll tell you this: some place better than is offered by Huckabee's Republican opponents. A Huck presidency would be transformational in a similar sense as an Obama presidency would: by changing the national conversation.

OK, that sounds like thin gruel, I know. But listen. In "The Seven Storey Mountain," Thomas Merton wrote that as he was deepening his conversion to Catholicism, he thought he was Catholic enough, because he could argue doctrine all night long. What he didn't understand at the time, he confessed, was that it's far more important that the will be converted than the mind, and for this reason: because while the will can't convince the mind that something that's true is false, it works more subtly than that, directing the conscious mind to ideas and possibilities that wouldn't have occurred to it otherwise. In politics, what this means is that when you elect a president, you are electing not only a set of policy preferences, but a worldview, and that worldview will inevitably open up some doors and close others. And this matters.

In this sense, I don't think either party has seen a presidential contender this potentially transformational in a long, long time. The question both men will confront, if elected: will he be a Ronald Reagan, who was both an eloquent rhetorician of change, and effective in transforming the political and policy agenda? Or will he be John F. Kennedy, a master style politician, but only that?