Ideologically speaking, this is one of the most interesting Republican presidential primary races in quite some time. Over at Alien & Sedition I’ve posited that, as the old post-Goldwater conservative movement lurches into obsolescence, two broad alternatives are emerging as potential ideological models for the right’s next coalition (keep in mind that these are ideal types framed from a conservative perspective — not necessarily reflecting the sordid reality of the right’s day-to-day policies and tactics):

One is something like “moralistic domestic reformism,” which would meld a slightly softened form of social conservatism to a right-wing version of economic populism. The other is a kind of libertarian pro-war nationalism with an added focus on procedural reform issues. We’ve seen how critics of each approach might characterize them. It’s probably safe to say that inasmuch as there is a presidental candidate to represent each tendency, it’s Huckabee for the former and Giuliani for the latter.

I should clarify: “libertarian” in a Giuliani-ist context is a euphemism for devotion to anti-government fiscal conservative orthodoxy, which may go along with a relative disinterest in abortion as an issue either way. In no sense is Giuliani a “libertarian” when it comes to civil liberties, and any Republican who believes otherwise is deluding himself.

At any rate, a Huckabee-Giuliani contest would be an interesting referendum on the GOP base’s opinions about the future of conservatism. But we seem unlikely to get such an even matchup between the two. Ross Douthat explains some of the reasons — for one thing, Fred Thompson is about to suck a lot of the air out of Huckabee’s media bubble. But also, as a model of a new social conservatism, Huckabee leaves something to be desired: as Douthat points out, his actual policy ideas “tend toward the semi-baked.” Still, he seems to be the only candidate representing an important alternative path for the GOP’s future, and Douthat wants him to hang in there:

The most important thing, to my mind, is that a Huckabee-Giuliani-Romney race would be a lot healthier for the GOP than a Thompson-Giuliani-Romney race, which is reason enough to wish the Huckster well.

Soren Dayton understands this dynamic. Dayton has argued that Rudy Giuliani could have a “transformative effect” on the GOP in the way that he would put national security issues at the center of the conservative ideological structure. Personally, I’m skeptical that this is “transformative” — it seems to me that Giuliani just offers Bush Plus on foreign policy, but drops Bush’s notional commitment to majoritarian “compassionate” domestic policies, falling back onto a much less-popular sort of AEI economic dogma. But there’s no doubt he does represent a fairly clearly defined option for the Republican party’s future. And again, there’s a very instructive contrast with Huckabee:

Mike Huckabee is certainly the most articulate and credible social conservative in the first or second tier. He is also the least conservative candidate on economic issues, as typically understood. Huckabee is the candidate who will make the most explicit attempt to maintain the party’s margins in the working class. The question is whether he will be able to get them to vote in a primary for him. Perhaps, more controversially, he is the candidate of a broader Christian agenda, including worrying about poverty, education, global warming, etc. Moderate and liberal evangelicals and Catholics have been swing votes in the recent national elections, and you can see him making a strong play for those.

Dayton casts Fred Thompson, meanwhile, as the status quo candidate, and Mitt Romney as the standard corporatist — both accurate judgments, in my opinion, and both reasons why they fall slightly outside the most vital current in contemporary conservative ideological debate.

So is Mike Huckabee, despite his many charms, too limited and too quirky a candidate to give full weight to the neo-socio-con option in this cycle of intra-GOP ideological struggle? It may be too early to answer that question. But if Huckabee loses out to candidates with more money and more star power, don’t imagine that that means his brand of conservatism is going away — even if the GOP’s fiscal elites would prefer that it does.

Posted by Paul Curtis
Sunday, September 2, 2007 at 12:53 pm

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