Daniel Larison has a good post up highlighting the clash between Hugh Hewitt and National Review’s Kevin Williamson, over the so-called conservatism of Wall Street. Williamson, a guest on Hewitt’s show, pointed out that the big-money folks on Wall Street don’t give a damn about the kinds of things most American conservatives care about. Most of them are actually social liberals who are only interested in making money. Larison writes:

It’s blindingly obvious that most people working in the financial sector have no strong attachment to social conservatism or small government political principles. For one thing, neither of them is particularly relevant to them or their interests, and they correctly see both of them as obstacles or distractions from what they believe government should be doing.

Mike Huckabee, in his 2008 incarnation, tried to point this out, to a certain extent, and was dumped on by Establishment conservatives for being a populist. Anyway, I’m glad to read this piece in NR by Williamson, in which he explores the cultural differences between Wall Street and Main Street. Williamson edges into things by listing all the top Obama administration people, and Democratic elites, who are mobbed up with Wall Street elites. The idea that the Democratic Party is on the side of the little guy against the cigar-puffing Monopoly tycoons of Wall Street is a cartoonish fantasy. Then this bit of elegant writing:

When President Obama opined during his 2011 State of the Union speech that a corporate tax-rate cut might be just the thing for America after a year of record corporate profits, his left-wing base was shocked and dismayed. Heck, some conservatives were caught off guard, too. Perhaps they hadn’t noticed who was running the Obama administration: In large part, the same guys who plan to be running the next Republican administration.

What Williamson is saying here, in a way delicate enough for NR readers to digest, is that Wall Street owns the leadership of both parties. More:

If Wall Street has done pretty well by investing in Washington, the more despair-inducingly germane fact is that Washington has done pretty well by investing in Wall Street. A catalogue of recent congressional insider-trading, self-dealing, IPO shenanigans, and inexplicably good investment luck would fill an entire volume, and in fact it has: The book has the Tea Party–bait title Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison, by Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution. That’s a lot of title for a fairly slim book (176 pages of reportage, plus end notes), but, despite its relatively slender dimensions, it cost me an entire night’s sleep: I spent half the night reading it in a single sitting and the other half having nightmares about it. It’s the most offensive and disturbing thing I’ve read since sampling the oeuvre of the Marquis de Sade as an undergraduate.

And, about the relationship between Wall Street, the broader economy, and the conservative movement:

[Wall Streeters are] hoping that conservatives can be buffaloed with a bit of cheap free-market rhetoric into not noticing that something is excruciatingly amiss here.

Read the whole thing here.  You go, Kevin Williamson! Keep hitting the Democrats hard, and don’t let up on the Republicans either. I’ve got to get my hands on Peter Schweizer’s book, too. This exchange from Williamson’s interview with Hewitt encapsulates the kind of argument that conservatives ought to be having among ourselves:

HH: Wait, but that’s a diversion. Isn’t your argument, didn’t I just distill it correctly? We should be suspicious of Romney because Wall Street supports him?

KW: I think we should ask ourselves what they’re hoping to get by supporting him, yes.

HH: And so, in doing that, you are telling Republicans, it’s sort of a Ron Paul critique, and I find it very anti-free market. And I’m actually kind of stunned that a conservative would find, would launch a polemic against finance. Finance is what makes the world…

KW: We’re not talking about free markets here. We’re talking about firms that have been bailed out by the government, that rely on political handouts, that rely on special favors from Washington, that helped Nancy Pelosi and her husband get their hands on all sorts of IPO’s that are normally closed to the general public.

HH: Oh, no, you’re mixing up many different things here. I’m talking about pure finance. Isn’t pure finance a good thing for the world? People who make money go round…

KW: Well, look, where are you going to find any pure finance on Wall Street? Show me a firm that wasn’t bailed out by the government that’s still out there. Show me one that’s not taking politics into consideration in every decision it makes.