From a reader:
Dear Mr Goldberg, Thank you for reading my email. Whether or not Huckabee wins the nomination, the Republican Party – particularly on “fiscal as moral” issues – must change. The Reagan “mantle” – God bless it when he was here – is the past. As David Brooks says about Huckabee in his NYTimes column tomorrow: “Most importantly, he (Huckabee) sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed.
“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.
“So the race will move on to New Hampshire. Mitt Romney is now grievously wounded. Romney represents what’s left of Republicanism 1.0. Huckabee and McCain represent half-formed iterations of Republicanism 2.0. My guess is Republicans will now swing behind McCain in order to stop Mike.
“Huckabee probably won’t be the nominee, but starting last night in Iowa, an evangelical began the Republican Reformation.”
Peggy Noonan is also beginning to realize that conservatives must change. She writes of Huckabee’s supporters in her Column in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal:
”. . . the thing really pushing his supporters, is that they believe that what ails America and threatens its continued existence is not economic collapse or jihad, it is our culture.
“They have been bruised and offended by the rigid, almost militant secularism and multiculturalism of the public schools; they reject those schools’ squalor, in all senses of the word. They believe in God and family and America. They are populist: They don’t admire billionaire CEOs, they admire husbands with two jobs who hold the family together for the sake of the kids; they don’t need to see the triumph of supply-side thinking, they want to see that suffering woman down the street get the help she needs.
Republicans must wake up, or say hello to bad Supreme Court appointments and Democrat taxes for years to come.
Your move.
Me: I get a lot of this sort of thing lately and one can only predict more is on the way given the Huckster’s victory last night. This is one of these moments — when all of the energy is either for rapid change or for the appearance of rapid change, when everyone either is a reformer or wishes to seem like he is — that real, small-c, temperamental conservatism is both most valuable and least in supply. There may well be a huge outbreak of me-tooism out there in the political system. Plenty of important “new ideas” will be thrown around and, perhaps, even some new ideas that don’t need quotation marks around them. Old hacks, stalwarts and stand-patters may suddenly get the message and pull some shiny new reformer’s work clothes over their fat cat bellies. In this environment the very best thinkers in the party and movement will be asked for their advice and it will be thrown on the same pile with the wares from the worst charlatans, spinners and frauds around. The problem is that the pols won’t be able to tell the difference and, worse, the oily pitchmen’s ideas will be crafted to be appealing and easy, while the substance will seem hard and too longterm.
And, my basic position will be: Don’t just do something, stand there. Better to do nothing and be mostly right, than do everything and be almost entirely wrong. To be sure, reforms are needed. New ideas are on our wish list. But, it is not a moment of “change or die.” Change or die is a radical position. It emphasizes change, while paying no heed to direction. It values the pile of broken dishes from a rapidly pulled tablecloth over a time consuming, but well-planned, new arrangement. It is at precisely the moment when everyone is saying “change or die” that the Burkean conservative Brooks so often touts says, “change only what is necessary and nothing else.” I say it would be better to reject 1 brilliant idea if it means not letting 10 idiotic ones go free upon the land.
Relax.