Actually, I think the Huckster might be a closet atheist or at least agnostic. He frequently makes even rather good jokes about religion. He is a sort of Elmer Gantry or Marjoe Gortner and now he is pushing the extreme end to assure his base.

Such a conservatism didn’t exist when Disraeli invented it, and doesn’t exist now. There is no ‘populist’ version of a world where some few are born booted and spurred, and the many are born saddled, and ready to ride.

Huckabee doesn’t have to “court evangelicals” because evangelicals know that he’s already one of them. As for gay-bashing, he may not be making it a major part of this particular campaign, but he’s made no effort to backtrack on any of the very explicit and very strident gay-bashing he’s done in the past. The fact that he isn’t out there fulminating like Falwell at every opportunity may be enough to convince Brooks that he isn’t really “out there”—or, like I said, maybe Brooks’ column is a first salvo in the “He’s really not that scary” campaign.

Crystal is exactly correct—the proper “family values” populist vote right now should clearly be for Edwards. But you have to see where the Republican rank-and-file stands now to appreciate what Huckabee can possibly, just maybe, mean. Tomasky is probably correct that, for many reasons (most of which boil down to structural idiocies in our campaign finance laws and election practices), the counterveiling forces that could successfully open up the Republican party to a true rethinking simply aren’t there, or at least aren’t there yet. But nonetheless, lower-class and struggling middle-class social conservatives are out there, talking a populist language without anyone serious promising to do anything about it. (This is obvious; it’s pretty much all anyone has been arguing about ever since What’s the Matter With Kansas? came out.) Edwards could try to reach out to these folks, and probably would connect with at least a few of them given the chance, but the progressive cultural/social commitments of more powerful factions in the Democratic party make it unlikely that Edwards go very far in that direction. And yet, their populist longings, even if not articulated that way, remain. Suddenly, here’s Huckabee: folksy, anti-abortion, an up-from-his-bootstraps hick who is occasionally willing to bash Bush and Wall Street and ring the populist, let’s-help-out-the-poor-a-little drum. He sounds pretty good; certainly better than that dude from Massachusetts who talks like a robotic CEO from Jupiter. So they’ll vote for him. And maybe he’ll effect a little change—just here and there—in Republican political possibilities. I’m not a Huckabee supporter, but I am a fan—because so long as we’re stuck with this infuriating two-party corporate system, cracking up one lousy coalition (the walking-dead Reagan one) is, in the long-run, better than nothing.

Actually, I think Brooks means that Huck plays the bass, issued a pardon to Keith Richards, and likes appearing with Chuck Norris. Of course, evangelicals—with the notable exception of Jack Chick—have been embracing rock and youth culture (or at least ersatz rock and youth culture) for decades.

Like so much else that Brooks writes, this observation suggests a nearly complete lack of knowledge of life in the fly-over states with a tendency to focus on the shallowest details of any sociological phenomenon he thinks he sees.

Tomasky writes that the status quo will hold “…because there are no strong countervailing Republican forces to present an opposite view or argue a different set of policies and principles.” Not yet. The coalition he writes about has yet to be smashed, but that seems more likely than ever given the underlying reality of Iraq, Afghanistan, debt, impending stagflation, the normalization of homosexuality, and myriad other failures of the Bush team.

PS: Sneering liberals who haven’t read Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise really should; it pretty well explains why “Obama Republicans” is about to replace “Reagan Democrats” in the party coalition lingo. (Also useful: the analysis of anti-elitism in The Right Nation). Brooks is so obviously not a hard-right ideologue that calling him such says more about you than him.

It does start to look like, even outside of money, a pure class issue. It isn’t enough to keep redistributing wealth upwards (go FairTax!). You have to be From Good Stock as well.

Well, he could try to make block transfers to states dependent on their adoption of “covenant marriage” aka “till death do us part, double plus infinity, no takebacks.” That and pushing for a beefier version of the Federal Marriage Amendment to fend off the homos should do the trick.

That’s why I say a vote for Edwards is a vote for family values – Edwards has attempted to address the economic problems so many Americans face.

But he does seem to be pulling off the balancing act of tapping into the evangelicals effectively without driving everyone else away screaming.

Jury is still out on this, at the very least. According to the NYT href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/us/politics/04repubs.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/us/politics/04repubs.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin entrance polls suggest that more than 80% of Huckabee supporters were self-described evangelicals.

Given that, I think that Unlcle Kvetch had it right in #4:
“Snark aside, I think Brooks’ clumsy pop-sociology is most easily interpreted as the beginning of the Republican establishment coming to grips with Huckabee. “We just might get stuck with this guy—better learn how to live with it.” ”

If Huckabee is winning the GOP nomination, Brooks will spin that as Good for America. If Romney won it, Brooks would be writing ‘Mormon in America’. If Giuliani, ‘Amtrak will run on time’.