Monthly Archives: December 2007

the Huckabee phenomenon

Disclaimer: I doubt very much that anything in this post is original. This is popular territory, and I haven’t looked for other blog posts that make the same points better:

If Mike Huckabee plays a major role in the Republican nomination race, the impact will be quite profound. The conservative coalition, as many have observed, consists of Christian values-voters, pro-corporate tax-cutters, and professional politicos whose fates are tied to the Republican Party. (By the way, there are also people and groups whose narrow economic interests and career trajectories tie them to the Democrats.) The three components of the conservative coalition sit uneasily together. In particular, social conservatives like Rich Cizik and Randy Brinson do not view the Republican Party as an end in itself (or as a meal ticket). They do not like putting political expediency above principle; and they are not mainly interested in cutting taxes. In fact, their substantive goals can be advanced either by cutting bureaucracies or by expanding government programs, depending on the context. I strongly suspect that Cizik and Brinson have bigger grassroots followings than the Republican Party loyalists, because that’s the nature of all political movements. Grassroots activists don’t have narrow self-interests, so they care about principles. Meanwhile, professional party leaders are easily corrupted by strategic considerations because they are the ones who can get jobs, contracts, fame, and contacts if their party wins.

The traditional conservative coalition has been held together by anti-communism (and now Islamaphobia), by a sense that government bureaucracies are godless, and by fear of losing to liberals. Social conservatives get one obvious thing from their partnership with corporate types: cash for Republican campaigns, which helps them to win. But they want results in terms of policy, and they want to believe that principles are driving their movement, not expediency. They have very good reason to doubt that they’ve gotten a decent deal lately.

What’s fascinating about Huckabee is that he’s going straight to the conservative grassroots and saying that he won’t do anything to get corporate money or GOP endorsements. He is declaring independence–much like a Democrat who refuses to court labor. If Huckabee wins, the conservative coalition blows up, although conceivably a pure social conservative movement might prevail under his leadership. Even if someone like Romney or Giuliani ultimately defeats Huckabee, his strength in the primaries could be an effective warning shot.

German memories

Last winter, we took a quick family vacation to a small town in Bavaria. This was my first serious stay in Germany, although I’d been to Austria before. Specifically, we chose to visit a town in Franconia, a province famous for walled cities, vineyards on rolling hills, carved altarpieces by Tilman Riemenschneider, and the Nazi Gauleiter Julius Streicher.

Our hotel was built into the medieval walls. Its cultural atmosphere was, I suppose, a mix of the pre-modern and the contemporary. The food, the appliances, and the free computer terminals were all up-to-date, but the structure belonged to the old free Imperial city of traders and guilds. That city, incidentally, incorporated a large Jewish community with a famous scholarly tradition, until the Jews were expelled in 1520.

The family that owned the hotel could not possibly have been friendlier, warmer, or kinder to us. Near the end of our stay, we had to move–as previously arranged–to a suite in their private house. This turned out to be a spacious and comfortable home with all the modern conveniences, reminiscent (to me) of suburban houses in Surrey. It was, in fact, a newer building than any in which I have lived in the United States. A stone plaque over the main door identified the date of construction. I believe it said “1937.”

I do not pretend to know the details of life in a small Franconian town in 1937, but I suspect that no one built handsome houses right outside the city walls without being friendly to the totalitarian Nazi regime, which was deeply rooted in the region. Our host had grown up in the house and seemed old enough to remember its construction. You flipped on a light switch and thought to yourself that that very same switch had still been new on Kristallnacht in 1938. Evil felt close and recent.

And yet, the family’s private library included serious, scholarly books on the holocaust, anti-Nazi classics by Mann and Grass, and pacifist volumes by the likes of Tolstoy. How do I know that there was a medieval Jewish community in town? Because of the fine and prominent municipal monument to the expelled, which is inscribed with Hebrew poetry translated into German. I know from an equally excellent Holocaust memorial that the 17 Jews who resided in town in 1938 were driven away and lost to history.

It wasn’t our host’s fault that he was born in Franconia around 1930. Nor do I deserve one ounce of moral credit for having been born of Jewish heritage in America decades later. I don’t see what anyone in his position could do, beyond reading the books that he owns and contributing to the decent contemporary state that is the Federal Republic of Germany. There are countless citizens of guilty countries who have never stopped to think about such matters.

Our host’s wife was in the hospital. On the day we had to leave, he insisted on driving his little car all the way to the Autobahn so that we could follow him and get safely on our way to Frankfurt. I picture him waving goodbye to us and then driving back to his 1937 house to wait for news from the hospital. I only hope that the news was good.