This NY Times story is very telling about just how tied to Big Money the Republican Party Establishment really is - and how worried that Establishment is about its old tricks being exposed for the fraud they really are:Here's the problem the Big Money Republican establishment is facing. As I blogged earlier, America is in a period of global economic decline. One very significant characteristic of world powers as they go into such economic decline is that their economy becomes "financialized." That means that rent-seeking becomes the predominant method of making money, and actual production of goods is ignored. That is true in America and has been for decades."Mr. Huckabee has struck a distinctly populist chord when it comes to economics. He has criticized executive pay, sympathized with labor unions, denounced 'plutocracy,' and mocked the antitax group the Club for Growth as 'the Club for Greed'...So basically, Republican Party leaders are acknowledging that they have been relying on tricking working class voters into not voting on economic issues. These leaders are chafing under the realization that Huckabee is implicitly undermining their old tricks in that he is gaining ground by applying his religious/altruistic rhetoric not just to social issues, but to economic issues as well.
'I see Huckabee as more of a Prairie populist than what I would consider a traditional conservative,' said former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania...He acknowledged that in some ways Mr. Huckabee’s combination of social conservatism and sympathy for the working class also touched a fault line that ran further through the Republican Party, including in his home state of Pennsylvania. 'He would do very, very well in southwestern Pennsylvania, Reagan Democrat country,' where many socially conservative working-class voters 'have a heart for the poor and, unfortunately, think of government as the answer,' Mr. Santorum said.
When the American economy produced goods, the Big Money Republican Party establishment required a healthy middle class to buy it's products. That was the meaning of the story that Henry Ford was paying his workers a very high wage,$5 a day, so that they could buy his products. Ford was sharing his profits so that his workers could buy his automobiles.
When the economy becomes primarily one of rent-seeking, that need for the middle class disappears. Bankers don't need to produce goods. They send their money anywhere in the world that offers the highest percentage return on investment. They can shaft the middle class out of any share of the profits they make and not be hurt at all.
The Big Money Republican Party establishment has been using hot-button emotional and moral arguments to tap into the anger felt by the middle class as their income no longer has been growing while costs go up. The leaders of the Religious right have been happy to play along and operate as the Republican ward heelers who controlled the political organizations that operate through their churches, because this is a real position of power for the religious leaders. Their followers tend to look for authoritarian leaders who tell them why their lives are getting more difficult, a job the political preachers are glad to fill. The preachers say the problems are all based on "immorality" as they define it, and then deliver their followers' votes to the Republican Party.
This is a scam. The economic problems are based in power and economics, not morality or lack of religiosity.
Huckabee has blown the lid on the Republican scam that induced the "Reagan Democrats" middle class to vote against their own economic interest for ephemeral and ineffective moral and religious reasons while the CEO's destroy unions and take home unrealistically high pay checks. In the meantime middle class Americans are being laid off, being evicted from their homes, are sending their sons and daughters to Iraq for a useless war, and die for lack of health insurance (often because the insurance companies cancel the policy rather than pay claims. Hey, how else can they afford to pay their CEO's?)
That's why the Big Money Republican Party establishment has been lambasting Huckabee so much recently. Huckabee is threatening to hit them both in the pocket book and politically. Will the Reagan Democrats vote for Huckabee this time, against the Big Money Republican Party establishment candidates, and then meekly come back to some Big Money candidate who talks down to them in 2012?
Huckabee has really threatened the fault line down the middle of the Republican Party.
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But will the threat last? There is a good chance it will last through the general election in November. But after that? Remember that the Reagan Democrats are the old Southern Democrats who moved to the Republican party because the Democratic Party they had grown up with had abandoned its deal with the racists Southern Democrats. The Reagan Democrats wanted a Party that could accept their Chauvinism and Racism, and the Republican Party was more than ready to accommodate them.
But that was 1972, 1976, and through the Reagan years. Those old Reagan Democrats are now in their 50's and older, and their children are voting. The newer generation no longer suffers in such large numbers from the attitudes of chauvinism and racism. In the South those children have been voting the way the political preachers told them to, but will they buy the Republican scam to vote for moral reasons when they are losing their jobs and being evicted from their homes? The sharp tilt of the young voters age 18 to 30 towards the Democrats nationally suggest that they won't. Racism and religion may no longer trump economic motives and drive voters to vote Republican.
Huckabee may be a harbinger of this movement of voters. We won't have any reliable indicators of how long the voters will move away from the Big Money Republican establishment until about 2010.
I don't blame the Big Money Republican Party establishment for being upset with Huckabee's populism. They have a right to run scared. And I'll enjoy watching them as they run.
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