What's Huckabee to him or he to Huckabee?
The slow wearing out of Mike Huckabee's welcome among self-described moderates and progressives has left behind a pretty interesting question: How did the stars-and-bars-salutin', Satan's-brother-worshippin', animal-sex-speculatin' former preacher manage, however briefly, to win the hearts of liberals? What drove progressive pundits to gas about his daring stances, teachers and machinists unions to endorse him and editorial boards to praise his "stout heart for working families and the poor"?
It could be his personality; I can attest that Huckabee is every inch the affable, intelligent, engaging fellow he's made out to be. It could be the cockeyed hipsterism of this unlikely guitar hero. But what really turned the heads of the bien-pensant was the low-BMI razorback's staunch anti-capitalism. And nobody's brief encounter was as moving as that of Hendrik Hertzberg, the New Yorker's distressingly productive "Talk of the Town" thinker.
The flirtation had a definite shape and intrigue: an early, in-spite-of-himself recognition that, Hey, you can see why the groupies are all over this guy; a growing passion disguised by only the flimsiest of to-be-sures (which could be stated most succinctly as: "To be sure, the sun will supernova before The New Yorker ever supports a Republican"); and at last disillusionment marked by a funny, catty kiss-off. But while the fling was on, Hertzberg found points of commonality in Huckabee's refusal to issue the "usual denunciations of socialized medicine," his departure from the "economic-royalist wing of the G.O.P." and his apostasy from "the secular church of supply-side fundamentalism."
I love that last bit, as I love all attempts to imply that belief in a free market is some kind of revealed religion, unmoored from any ocular proof. Sure, a member of the irrational capitalist religion might say there's actual evidence for the effectiveness of economics. Maybe by noting that, in the period after lending at interest and common-stock corporations came into regular use, human beings went from not wiping their backsides to landing people on the moon, expanded their population by orders of magnitude, abandoned slavery and serfdom, etc., all in about a third of the time it took the tale of Huckabee's savior to travel the token distance from Jerusalem to Oslo. But hey, that's just theology.
I digress. The bittersweet news is that the left has abandoned Huckabee, and while it's sad to see a romance end, it's probably for the best. Presidents don't make a lot of difference on gay rights or the Confederate flag, but they do have the power to wreck economies. Thankfully, Huckabee's enlightened fans never figured that out.
Quite apart from the admirable, clear-headed content of the post itself, I am compelled to say that Mr. Zell owes to Mr. Cavanaugh a Substantial Increase in Compensation for the pure and shining brilliance of this post's title. Bless you, sir, bless you, particularly if you were the first to think of it.
Posted by: George M. Wallace | January 24, 2008 at 08:11 PM
Surely your rant about the beauty of modern capitalism proves the New Yorker's point -- some people really are very emotionally attached to their economic ideologies. But let me refer you, sir, to Dan Usher's Political Economy page 5. There you will find the life expectancy figures for males in England and Wales from the high middle ages onward. You'll notice that life expectancy decreased from 38.1 years in 1601 to 37.1 in 1701 to 35.9 years in 1801. That is, the first two centuries of modern capitalism and the industrial revolution where extremely unhealthy for ordinary folk. Marx was pretty much right about the symptoms of unbridled capitalism, if wrong on the cure.
It is true that from 1801 to 1841 life expectancy increased to 40.3 years, but of course this era saw some limited state intervention to curb capitalism's more nasty effects. Really big gains didn't occur until public health programs were instituted (as any epidemiologist will tell you, medical advances don't make up one tenth of improve health of the population, clean water and adequate sewage systems are the key). None of this is to say that modern capitalism didn't eventually produce benefits, only that those benefits really were felt by most people only when government was able to channel some of the productivity to the public good.
Oh, and as you will know, both the Man on the Moon and the Internet were brought to you by the Guvment.
Posted by: Mitchell Young | January 25, 2008 at 12:36 PM