Have I forgotten to mention that I have an article on the crazed primary schedule in this month’s Chronicles?  If I have, I apologise.  The current issue has some excellent contributions.  I particularly recommend Dr. Fleming’s article on a politics driven by interests.

Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, Tom Coburn is one the mostardent opponents of Kyoto and any federal legislation relating to global warming.  So, naturally, given the insane nature of the GOP race, he has endorsed John McCain, one of the leading Republican proponents of cap-and-trade and raising the alarm about global warming.  Apparently it is McCain’s promised pork-busting that has won his support.

This is rather amusing.  Apparently I have become worthy of being denounced by Jamie Kirchick at Commentary for my sympathy for the Confederacy.  Kirchick’s “discovery” that I have belonged to the League of the South for many years will come, I expect, as no surprise to anyone who has been reading this blog for very long.  On my sidebar are links to the League of the South’s webpage and its blog, I have written several times for Chronicles, which also links to the League’s site, and I have repeatedly defended the principles of secession, decentralism and constitutionalism that I regard as being an inseparable part of the political tradition of the Antifederalists, Jeffersonians and the Confederacy.  I still belong to the League, but I am not active in the group.  My statements about Lincoln over the years should have left no one in any confusion about my views of the War or its negative effects on the Republic.  In essence, Kirchick believes that it is somehow disqualifying or unacceptable to reject the acts and legacy of an executive usurper and that it is wrong to sympathise with the people who fought for their constitutional rights against this usurper. 

I don’t consider my membership or my views on the War to be shameful or requiring any apology.  I don’t defend the legacy of the man who ushered in a destructive, illegal war that killed hundreds of thousands.  It does take a certain fanatical mindset to see mass destruction and violence as the correct solutions to morally repugnant institutions, and let me be clear that I believe slavery was such a morally repugnant institution.  I reject the mentality that says that the ends justify the means, and that the slaughter of other people is acceptable for the sake of ideology and centralising power.  I will gladly compare my views on this with anyone who defends illegal and aggressive wars and the intrusive reach of the central state. 

I should say that some of the things I said in the post to which Kirchick refers were intemperate and at least one was wrong.  The shot at Boot was excessive, and I shouldn’t have said that.  In that I was being hot-tempered and wrong.  However, the rest of my views are so “repellent and noxious” that they are shared by such conventional pundits as Walter Williams and even to some degree by no less than Democratic Sen. Jim Webb, who once said about the cause for which two of his ancestors fought:

I am not here to apologize for why they fought, although modern historians might contemplate that there truly were different perceptions in the North and South about those reasons, and that most Southern soldiers viewed the driving issue to be sovereignty rather than slavery. In 1860 fewer than five percent of the people in the South owned slaves, and fewer than twenty percent were involved with slavery in any capacity. Love of the Union was palpably stronger in the South than in the North before the war — just as overt patriotism is today — but it was tempered by a strong belief that state sovereignty existed prior to the Constitution, and that it had never been surrendered. Nor had Abraham Lincoln ended slavery in Kentucky and Missouri when those border states did not secede. Perhaps all of us might reread the writings of Alexander Stephens, a brilliant attorney who opposed secession but then became Vice President of the Confederacy, making a convincing legal argument that the constitutional compact was terminable. And who wryly commented at the outset of the war that “the North today presents the spectacle of a free people having gone to war to make freemen of slaves, while all they have as yet attained is to make slaves of themselves.”

All of that states the matter very well.  I remain convinced that the vast majority of Confederate soldiers were fighting for constitutional liberty, including one of my own ancestors, and I think that was, is, something worth defending.  If that repels the Jamie Kirchicks of the world, I have to conclude that I am on the right track.

I’m a little late to this, but I wanted to add a few remarks to what Rod said about Huckabee’s allegedly horrifying remarks about God and the Constitution.  But first, Lisa “Go Pack To Dogpatch” Schiffren:

What do you think God’s standard is on anchor babies and birthright citizenship? (Manger!) Does Huckabee’s God believe in borders? What is God’s monetary policy? Is Jesus a capitalist? How much economic disparity will he tolerate? Wouldn’t God want us all to have health care? Nice shoes?

What about rendering unto Ceaser that which is Ceaser’s [sic], and unto God that which is God’s? Mike Huckabee is going to force those of us who have wanted more religion in the town square to reexamine the merits of strict separation of church and state. He is the best advertisement ever for the ACLU. Even if you share his ultimate views on the definition of marriage, or the desirability of abortion on demand.

Is this “Ceaser” the one who ceases and desists from something?  Tell us more about “Ceaser,” please. 

These comments, and others like them in recent days, are revealing about what some movement conservatives really think about religion in the public square, “values,” and eternal verities.  Religion in the public square is all very nice so long as we’re talking about nothing more than prayers at high school football games and maybe a creche here and there, but just watch these people who allegedly “have wanted more religion in the town square” run screaming the moment a religious conservative proposes to do something and to do it for religious reasons.  Suddenly the great friends of religiosity cannot get away fast enough, which suggests that their earlier interest in more religion was very weak or it was simply a pose for the benefit of their audience. 

What is most remarkable about all of this is that these reactions are coming from people who mostly support the exact same constitutional amendments on marriage and life that Huckabee does.  Most of them, I assume, have supported the life amendment plank in the GOP platform, and I assume virtually all of them have voted for candidates running on that platform in the past.  If they don’t agree with these amendments, it is also probably not because they think that these amendments represent some horrible intrusion of religion into the public square, but because they think they are politically misguided.  There is a good federalist, decentralist argument against both of these amendments, and that is the real issue with what Huckabee is proposing.  He is trying to set up candidates who still have some nominal respect for federalism as relativists, as he has done before.  The reaction against what Huckabee said seems to be driven entirely by the way that he said it and the fact that he dared to suggest that the laws of men should be in line with the law of God.  In this, he is making a standard Christian conservative argument.  By their reaction, they have shown how much contempt they have for that kind of argument and the people who make it.  That isn’t news to some of us, but it is a little surprising that they would express it with so much vehemence.

Why Michigan’s evangelicals abandoned Huck is the inetersting question.  The most likely explanation is that the reality of Huck’s policies caught up with his funny, winsome style. ~Hugh Hewitt

Here Hewitt is repeating the sort of line we frequently hear about Huckabee, whether it is coming from a friendly or hostile source.  Going into the primary yesterday, quite a few observers assumed that Huckabee’s “populism” would help him, and it is this same “populism” that makes Huckabee persona non grata to the institutional movement types, and there are these references to Huckabee’s “policies” that I have never been able to understand.  Aside from the FairTax and his cut-and-paste immigration plan, Huckabee doesn’t have any domestic policies.  That is a legitimate reason to question his preparedness and oppose his candidacy, but it does not explain how his “policies” could have caught up to him in Michigan.  Here’s the thing: Huckabee is a “compassionate conservative,” which by my lights means that he’s pretty far to the left of me such that I have no problem regarding him as someone as liberal as Bush, but based on his current campaign and even based on his record in Arkansas he’s still not quite a “pro-life Democrat.”  More to the point, if Huckabee is a “pro-life Democrat,” Romney would have to be declared a Democrat as well based on his recent display in Michigan.     

Voters did not suddenly discover Huckabee’s great scheme to nationalise health care (or whatever it is that people think Huckabee stands for) and turn away from him.  Huckabee’s great health care insight is that we should eat smaller portions of healthier food, and maybe stop smoking.  Not necessarily bad ideas, but they are not policy proposals.  Outside of a narrow range of supporters tied into the church and homeschooling networks, plus a few others, Huckabee got little support because he had little money with which to advertise and spent little time advertising there.  He went on the air in Michigan less than a week before the vote, so he mainly retained those voters who had heard about him through other means.  What his Michigan ads said was: “I’m a tax-cutter, and I remind you of a working man and not a CEO.”  What Huckabee was offering was a symbolic repudiation of corporate managers and…tax cuts.  Romney promised a huge infusion of government spending.  The two who actually proposed interventionist policies of various kinds (whether they included deregulation or more regulation) won the race and finished second, while the one running as the relatively more laissez-faire candidate came in third.  So, in a sense, Huckabee’s limited number of policies may have caught up with him, but that would imply that Michigan voters rewarded the two most statist candidates in the race and punished the more simple anti-tax candidate.  Of course Hewitt will keep perpetuating the myth of Huckabee the “pro-life Democrat” because he is a Romney shill, but what is remarkable is how much currency this notion has gained in just a couple months.

Ponnuru chastisesRoss and says:

Many of Romney’s policy specifics involved removing Washington-imposed burdens on the industry, such as the prospect of new regulations. You can think he exaggerated their impact—I do—but that’s not left-wing. Convening industry reps and government officials to gab about the industry’s problems doesn’t strike me as all that alarming, either: It’s what comes out of the meeting that matters, and Romney didn’t commit to anything statist. Romney’s plan to quintuple research spending was pretty bad, in my view—but plenty of free-market folks are okay with such subsidies. The reason Romney got a “slap on the wrist” is that it’s all he deserved.

Plenty of free-market folks may be okay with such subsidies, but then that makes the definition of “free-market folks” rather flexible.  If you look at what Romney said, he made the subsidies an essential part of his proposal:

But taking off all these burdens is only half the solution [bold mine-DL].  If we are going to be the world’s greatest economic power, we must invest in our future. It’s time to be bold.  First, I will make a five-fold increase – from $4 billion dollars to $20 billion dollars – in our national investment in energy research, fuel technology, materials science, and automotive technology. Research spins out new ideas for new products for both small and large businesses.  That is exactly what has happened in health care, in defense, and in space.  Look how industries in other states have thrived from the spin out of technologies from our investment in these areas.  So if we can invest in health care, in defense, and in space, why not also invest in energy and fuel technology here in Michigan?

In other words, state capitalism is already the way we do things in other sectors, so why not link yet another industry to massive government spending in unhealthy and distorting ways?

Noting a double standard in the treatment of Romney on the one hand and Huckabee and McCain on the other on fiscal and economic policy, Ross says:

It’s “sustained and detailed,” all right, just as Frum says – a sustained and detailed infringement on free-market principle, and one that appeals to voters in places like Michigan precisely because it goes much further to the left than Mike Huckabee’s substance-free talk about how the current period of economic growth isn’t doing all that well by the working class, or John McCain’s straight talk about how Michiganders can’t expect the federal government to bring back the glory days of Chrysler and GM. But because conservatives spend way, way more time worrying about the spectre of “class warfare” than they do about than the nexus between big business and the Republican Party, Romney gets off with a mild slap on the wrist, while McCain and Huckabee get tarred as liberals.

This is what I was talking about when I said:

My larger point was that Huckabee actually presents much less of a threat to economic conservatives than they suppose.  It seems to me that, in their indignation that one of the non-anointed candidates has started succeeding where the chosen ones have failed, establishment Republicans have started applying a kind of rigour to litmus tests on fiscal records that they would not apply in other cases.  If Huckabee’s Cato grade was a D, Romney’s was a C, yet we are gamely told by those who endorse Romney that he is much better as an economic conservative than Huckabee, when the truth is that, by the high standards of Cato and CfG, both are woefully lacking.  The difference is that Romney is a corporate Republican and will be quite glad to work in the interests of corporations, while Huckabee manifestly is not.  That makes Romney more reliable [bold mine-DL], even if it does not make him any more conservative on economics and fiscal policy…

This point would also apply to McCain.  Beyond the substantive differences (i.e., Romney seems to be calling for massive state intervention to revive the auto industry and gets little criticism, while the same magazine that endorsed Romney would shriek about creeping socialism if Huckabee mocks candidates who went to boarding school), there is also a difference in the style of how Romney delivers his pandering nonsense: he is “optimistic” while the others are “pessimistic.”  If you dress up even worse policies in optimistic language, optimists will view whatever you say more favourably than if you cast it in “pessimistic” (i.e., realistic) terms. 

Those who don’t support Romney havecertainlynoticed the glaring problems with what Romney said.  Doesn’t it seem odd that the “full-spectrum conservative” is the first candidate to elicit multiple comparisons between his plans and Soviet economic policy?  Of course, you can’t believe a word he says, so there’s probably no danger that his actual policies would be quite so interventionist, and he is a team player, while McCain and Huckabee are idiosyncratic, temperamental politicians who enjoy bucking the establishment, if only a little.  In an odd way, Romney’s complete lack of credibility means that any promises he has made to Michigan are almost certainly empty and therefore non-threatening, while Huckabee’s mildest gestures in the direction of the middle class are proof of his unacceptable “populism.”  What also seems to worry people about McCain and Huckabee is that they have convictions and might act on them in a consistent manner.  Romney gives them nothing to fear on that count.

Update: Or, as David Brooks says:

His campaign was a reminder of how far corporate Republicans are from free market Republicans.

Of course, it helps to be reminded of this, since many free market conservatives often take criticisms of corporations as criticisms of the free market and some of them seem to conflate the two.

Instead, what we are seeing is yet more evidence that the Republican Party is not in the grip of the Religious Right. That has been a myth organized political evangelicals have been eager to promote and Democratic and Republican elites have, in gullibility, accepted. ~Daniel Casse

True enough, the GOP is not in the grip of the Religious Right, but the rest of this has things entirely backwards.  Yes, certain evangelical leaders have wanted to boast of their great influence (overcompensating for their lack of actual power) and some have enjoyed holding court and having presidential candidates seek their blessing, and some social conservatives took satisfaction in the apparently significant role of the famous “values voters” in swinging the election to Bush in 2004, but by and large the myth of the Religious Right’s stranglehold on the GOP has been promoted most of all by two groups of people in recent years: hysterical secularists on the left who would probably see “floating crosses” in every Republican political advertisement and…secular conservatives on the right looking for scapegoats for the GOP’s recent electoral woes.  It couldn’t be Iraq, dithering on immigration for six years or massive incompetence in government that has hurt Republicans–no, it must have been that Terri Schiavo business!  Or so say the Ryan Sagers of the world.

Liberals have mistaken the importance of “values voters” to the GOP coalition for evidence of religious conservative clout in policymaking; some secular conservatives disturbed by the politics of the “values voters” and the GOP’s exploitation of wedge issues for GOTV efforts have developed elaborate theories about the religious radicalisation of the GOP, mistaking the deep cynicism of the GOP establishment for zealotry.  The one group that hasn’t been pushing the narrative of a Religious Right-dominated GOP in recent years has been…religious conservatives, who know full well that they don’t really dominate much of anything in the party.  Support for Huckabee’s candidacy is partly an outburst of frustration and dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, and he has lately started making that sense of frustration an explicit part of his campaign.  However, while a major part of the voting coalition, evangelicals specifically and religious conservatives generally wield much less clout at elite movement and party levels than you would expect given the outsized electoral importance of their issues to the coalition.  The current election has highlighted the lack of unity and organisation of religious conservatives.  It was significant that Giuliani’s campaign weakened on its own–it was not stopped by religious conservative leaders, some of whom even entertained or made accommodations with the mayor.  It was also significant that religious conservative leaders adopted an “every man for himself” approach to candidate endorsements, rather than uniting around any one consensus figure, and still more significant that many, though by no means all, evangelical and social conservative voters rushed to rally around the candidate many of the leaders distrusted or opposed outright.

Did you notice Romney’s lame rip-off of Clinton’s “comeback for America” New Hampshire victory speech?  Bruce Reed did and noticed a few other things as well:

Romney didn’t stop there. He focused like a laser beam on the economy. He welled up on the trail. He set out to beat McCain among women. In his victory speech, he claimed his comeback was part of a comeback for America. Don’t look now, Republicans, but after Romney spent all that time searching and searching, in Michigan the New Mitt tried to transform himself into Hillary Clinton. At this rate, he might even endorse his own Massachusetts health care plan.

Sullivan drew the same parallel:

Of course, it’s just the latest poll-tested cynical ploy. But it’s working for Clinton! And she and Romney have one thing in common: two focus-grouped cynical dynastic holograms.

This sums up well much of the reason why I am so powerfully opposed to Romney.  Think of how much many progressives distrust and dislike Hillary Clinton, and then apply the same view to the Republican side.

Reed’s phrase “Transformer Romney” also reminded me of an old favourite post of mine.

I would like to be able to say that Romney’s victory was something other than impressive, but he has simply cleaned up in virtually every demographic.  He won among Republicans by double digits, reinforcing the old conventional wisdom that McCain is simply not very popular with most Republicans, but he also did reasonably well with independents.  Whether you divide the electorate by region, religion, age, education, Romney wins (except apparently among less observant Catholics).  According to exit polls, he even defeated Huckabee among evangelicals.  That’s a significant part of his success, since evangelicals made up about 40% of the electorate.  But this isn’t just Romney making inroads with evangelicals–he expanded beyond his natural constituencies of the well-educated, upper-income and more secular-minded voters. 

Once again, as in New Hampshire, a plurality of antiwar voters has opted for McCain.  Basically, the angrier you are at Bush and the more disapproving you are of the war, the more likely you were to cast a vote for McCain.  On the superficial level of “McCain was Bush’s rival eight years ago,” I suppose I understand why this is happening, but I can’t say that I really comprehend the thought process that leads to the decision to vote for the man.  At least Giuliani suffered an embarrassing showing of about 3%, staying just ahead of Uncommitted. 

Huckabee did all right with his core voters, and won among the quarter of the electorate that places great importance on religious beliefs (naturally), but for all the talk of his alleged populism his message didn’t register particularly well with those who see the national economy as either “not good” or “poor.”  Curiously, Paul overperforms among those who view the economy as “poor.”  All that talk about the inflation tax must be interesting to someone.

Update: Looking at the results county by county, Ron Paul has a very large level of support in Hillsdale County (17%)–Ron Paul must be a big hit with Hillsdale College students.