Huckabee Could be Force in Party's Future

Mike Huckabee is convinced he can still win. He won’t. Mathematics preclude a Huckabee miracle. But his candidacy and its success could very well be a forecast of things to come. I can certainly see the future Republican party looking a lot more Huckabee and a lot less Romney.

Romney represents nothing more than a sack into which the party has thrown all the disparate parts of a moribund ideology. Huckabee, on the other hand, is a much more cohesive beast. He represents the hopes (and fears) of the lower middleclass, rural and working class voters upon which the Republicans have built much of their recent electoral success. These are people who voted Democratic for decades before that party became exceedingly secular, increasingly dovish and overly committed to identity politics. Republicans offered a better option, but not the perfect one.

Huckabee is more perfect. He’s a conservative populist, a man whose religion is as much tied to lifting people up as it is to opposing social change. He may welcome the endorsements of James Dobson and other conservative sycophants, but Huckabee is not like other Republican Christians, willing to sell his religion to the big business wing of the party. He speaks out against corporate greed in a way that rouses his supporters even as it risks offending party elders.

From his audacious tax plan to his immigration stance to his foreign policy (what little there is), his ideology is centered on giving the average family a better shot at succeeding. He sounds like a Democrat, except instead of promising more government programs he’s promising that government programs will stop getting in their way. It’s a revised Reaganism with a twang and a “Praise the Lord!”

Huckabee connects with people’s exasperation at being screwed over by big powers, be they governmental or corporate. He appeals to those who see their way of life (their religious values, their jobs, their apple pie Americanism) being submerged by larger forces they themselves are powerless to stop. Huckabee promises to be the levy against those forces. Where Barack Obama is offering a change-forward message, Huckabee has a change-back message. Change back to simpler times when jobs were secure, Mexicans were in Mexico, terrorists weren’t a threat and Christianity was the accepted moral guide for the nation.

We would be foolish to discount the allure of Huckabee’s message. Much of what he believes is already well-woven into the fabric of the Republican party. But instead of just offering a grab-bag of positions, Huckabee has a hard populist core around which other ideas naturally cling. Those that don’t stick, like overly favoring big business, are not forced into belonging. They are jettisoned, leaving a more pure ideology. It’s one that could provide the energy for a reconstitution of the Republican party.

A lot of us could never sign on to such a protectionist ideology. But many others eagerly would and that’s why, even though he’ll fail to get the nomination this year, Mike Huckabee could be a real force in the party’s future.