Sauce. Goose. Gander.

I've thought for a while that the R realignment would consist of social conservatives getting booted from the party, which would then consist of business interests and neocons.

It now occurs to me that in fact the social conservatives might boot the other factions. If Huck keeps winning, this is the likeliest scenario. Of course, a primarily social conservative party will never win a national election, but that their problem.

How would such realignment really serve traditional conservatism? I would hope that, unlike the NRO crowd, traditionalists, being virtuous, would be humble in victory (if this were really victory, but since Huckabee isn't a traditionalist and his victory is more a boon to the Manchurian Candidate than traditional values, any "victory" is symbolic more than anything). This would show a welcome contrast between traditional conservatism and what has been touted as "conservative" by establishment mouthpieces who attempted to write "unpatriotic" conservatives out of the coalition when they thought the moment was right.

Although anti-communism clearly helped to hold the Reagan coalition together, it wasn't the only glue. As one of Rod's commenters recently noted, viewing the Reagan coalition as social conservatives, economic conservatives, and national security hawks, misstates the categories and makes that coalition look more like three separate camps than it actually likely is. It may be more accurate to view the Reagan coalition as a single group with shared values with particular emphases regarding national interest, traditional morality, and limited government with a variety of different ideas about how each of those can be achieved. The Iraq War created a confusing fissure and highlighted that there is a strange group of hangers on who actually don't appear to be concerned about any of those issues, but saw the nativist predilection of the GOP as a convenient vehicle for a bizarre foreign policy that I don't fully comprehend.

A large portion of the Reagan coalition was (and maybe still is) willing to follow these internationalists and revolutionaries, who really have no place in the Reagan coalition, into their imprudent foreign entanglements, rather than find themselves occupying the same space as hippies and peace-niks. This is rational, because those people smell so you don't want to occupy their space. What will hopefully occur, over time, is that hippies will embrace personal hygiene and will become too old to engage in deviant sex acts, and the Reagan coalition will recognize the internationalist invaders as faux conservatives.

But I don't think that means a conservative crack-up. I don't think the unmasking of a handful of revolutionary Jacobins (notwithstanding how entrenched they may be in the establishment) alienates a large segment of voters who only followed them because they were talking the talk.

This whole post seems to have been crafted with nobody other than Jonah Goldberg in mind.

Deneen: It's clear that [Jonah] Goldberg and the mainstream of the Republican party were content all along to encourage the support of social conservatives so long as their votes, and not their views, were all that mattered.

This is such a hackneyed, tired meme. Disappointing that someone as astute as Prof. Deneen is stooping to regurgitate it. Huckabee has been ferociously attacked by, among others, Kathryn Lopez, Peggy Noonan and Bob Novak. Whatever one may think of such people, it's nonsensical to the point of incoherence to suggest that they just want to "use" social conservatives for their votes while not allowing them real leadership in the party.

That's because the core beliefs of the RP are eternal--they are based on morality, which in turn is based on the Natural Law which isn't going away.
Sounds good on paper, and I'm sure it's true of many individual Republicans; frankly, though, I don't think it's true of the Party any longer, not at the national level. The RP *as an entity* believes in the same thing the DP *as an entity* believes in - getting and staying elected.

I agree, by the way, that the GOP has to get beyond looking for Reagan Redux. But that's not because circumstances have changed, not because Reaganite principles need to be discarded.

We no longer face the overriding threat of an expansionist, nuclear-armed Soviet Union which identified us as "The Main Enemy." Thus, we do not need the same kind of defense and foreign policy posture we had in the 1980s. Frankly, I don't think we even need Nato, and we certainly don't need to maintain expensive, permanent military bases on the middle of Europe.

Broadcasting our global support for "freedom" made a lot of sense in the 1980s when everyone in the world understood exactly what that meant: Non-Communism. But using that rhetoric to support, e.g., abolition of burkas in traditional Muslim societies falls flat and therefore harms our national interests.

We also do not have marginal income tax rates at levels that actively discourage investment, as we did before Reagan took office. That's why the robotic singing about tax cuts by Republican candidates sounds so off key.

Deneen: It's clear that [Jonah] Goldberg and the mainstream of the Republican party were content all along to encourage the support of social conservatives so long as their votes, and not their views, were all that mattered.

Who is the bigger dope in this situation: The ones who used religious conservatives, or the religious conservatives who allowed themselves to be used?

I think its fair that many religious conservatives seem upset that they should just line up and vote, rather than pick the candidate who most closely shares their ideas. However, it doesn't take away from the fact that it's taken them 30 YEARS for them to actually have this Huckamoment. Man, when it comes to fund-raising and political organizating, religious conservatives are pretty impressive. When it comes to actually executing their agenda, they truly are the gang that couldn't shoot straight.

If Hucakbee shows anything at this stage in the game, it may prove that religious conservatives might actually stop buying iceboxes in the Arctic.

Simon,

I think anti-Huckabee sentiment can be rooted in the concern that he's not a conservative (rather than simply a disdain for social conservatives). But that doesn't mean social conservatives are not used by the GOP, whether or not Kathryn Jean Lopez and Peggy Noonan recognize or tacitly endorse such use. I would think it's expected given the nature of coalitions and have seen first hand at state and local GOP conventions the "use" of religious conservatives by establishment types to achieve their political ends without any meaningful payback.

Also, although two potentially anti-Roe Supreme Court Justices is pretty good payback, retaking the Supreme Court with an authentically pro-life majority is probably a sucker's bet. But it keeps the heat off of GOP politicians in the interim (and "interim" appears to be about 30 years and counting). Religious conservatives may indeed be suckers. Possibly we're just hopeful. Or maybe we're hopeful suckers. I'm just saying, it's all well and good to be critical of a witch hunt, but that doesn't mean there aren't witches.

At least Deneen knows Huck better than he knows (George) Bailey ...

Loudon, under the heading of "being used", the abilities of witches has been vastly overestimated, much more so than the "control" Simon cites as being theoretical at best. If you mean to use the metaphor as a reference to the advantage of having a handy scapegoat to use, I'm with you. The problem with a witch hunt is not that there are witches to be found, but that they could possibly care about or have even the slightest connection to whatever the hunters think they've done. The sole purpose of a scapegoat (or a witch) is to deflect everyones attention away from the person(s) calling for the hunt being responsible for most (if not all) of what is ailing the hunters.

In the present scenario, don't you think Huck qualifies as a witch? :-)

Simon
Assuming this thesis were true, could not the exact same thing be said about African Americans and the Democratic Party?

Except African-Americans actually get what they want from the party, or at least did, 30 years ago. And they aren't organized enough to do anything now, although it would be nice to see them stand up and actually demand the Democrats do something about what I think is probably the biggest issue for black Americans: The way the drug war is tearing their families and communities apart. (I am not black, though and have no idea if that is actually the biggest issue or not, I'm just guessing.)

African-Americans are, indeed, mostly overlooked, but overlooked and 'dismissed as crazy lunatics you can get to vote for you by saying the right words' is not the same thing. They get elected to office all the time.

Anyway, the religious right gets nothing from the Republicans, which is something I'm been talking about the entire time I was here, suggesting they suck it up and head over to the Democratic side. The Repubs give them a lot of anti-gay and anti-abortion talk, but the anti-gay talk is a losing battle and the anti-abortion talk is a losing battle that's not even being fought. The GOP thinks they're idiots.

Meanwhile, by supporting the Repubs, they're continuing to harm all sorts of middle and lower class families. They'll never make the GOP actually do what they said, and they'd never wrestle control away from the party enough to actually do anything, they should move to the Democratic side and try to affect social change over there.

...or, at least, that was what I was saying until Huckabee got all that support. So I freely admit I was wrong about their inability to redirect the party. But I was right about the need to essentially hijack the party, and I think the establishment's reaction to that hijacking actually sorta proves my point in that the party was, in fact, using them with no intention of ever actually doing anything they wanted.

Probably because they realize what I've been saying, the American people don't want those policies, and the Republican party actually attempting to actually do them, instead of just yammering about doing them, would seriously harm it.

I guess this was sorta foreshadowed by the local government takeovers of the religious right in places like Kansas and whatnot. Which somewhat proves my point about Americans hating those policies, as such takeovers usually resulted in the near immediately defeat of those people.

DavidTC, Abortion and Gay marriage are corrupt insititutions and behaviors that spread other corruption. Mike Huckabee has the right stand on moral soundness. The Godless socialism that Democrats worship is a fact that Christians do not want to support. Those misguided and deluded Christians that vote for Democrats will see the folly of their ignorance come to fruition in the near future when marriage is altered for reprobate behavior. It is bad enough what has happened to "the family" by Progressive and Liberal politics. The Black community is violence laden because the family is shattered. Re-defining marriage will only perpetuate further evil. It is why the GOP gets so many Christians to vote for their candidates. And, the socialism inherent in all things Democrat strike the Godless Government control chord in every Christian that listens to "The Left." Democrats have openly supported and encouraged social horrors and lascivious licentiousness as a civl rights issue. Whatever gains are made "politically" for Democrats in the next few years, will not come with the support and encouragement of Christians that value the testimony of Christ Jesus and the Apostles. Jesus taught that children were extremely valuabloe and that marriage is exclusively a man and a woman. Marriage IS the family foundation. That is to say, the war on Christians being waged by the Secularists and Humanists (anti-Christians one and all) that dominate the Democrat party, will succeed only in destroying America. That will hurt their social dependence programs and all of the inner-city dwellers that depend on their pitiless taxation (of decent families) programs to further enslave the poor in social programs. Christians will rise like they did from the Revolution that created a country worth living in and rebuild this continent into a place worth living. America is only an experiment on the stage of history. Decent people will always rise to overcome people like Progressives and Liberals that literally are the Democrats now.