In this fascinating Michael Brendan Dougherty piece on Mike Huckabee in the American Conservative, Daugherty maintains that Huckabee could emerge as a new evangelical leader less beholden to that establishment than Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and the now-deceased Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy. They allowed themselves to be played by the establishment, whereas Huckabee, the piece suggests, is not afraid to stand up to it.Dougherty documents that, for example, conservatives sneer at Huckabee's populism, such as when Dick Armey said he was more John Edwards-esque than John Edwards. (Hardly, but anyway.) Take note here: when liberals do what Dougherty does, conservatives accuse them of engaging in "class warfare." (Horrors! How dare anyone suggest there's a gross inequality of wealth and privilege in America!) But, Dougherty maintains, there's a class war going on between the GOP establishment and working class evangelicals, and Huckabee has harnessed the working class evangelical resentment at those elites who have only played lip service to their concerns:Joe Carter, an activist at the Family Research Council, took a leave of absence to spend a month acting as Huckabee’s rapid-response man. He . . . highlights the barely disguised class conflict in the GOP: “The establishment Republicans don’t want some hillbilly preacher to be president.” To Carter and others, the conservative establishment’s contempt for Huckabee feels familiar. It mirrors the liberal establishment’s disdain for conservatives generally. And so just as Beltway conservatives have taught middle America to resent the liberal elites, so Huckabee and his supporters have leveraged evangelical discontent at those who tell them to “sit down and take what the party gives you.”It's hard to believe that a Huckabee supporter is acting like the liberals invented class warfare -- after all, isn't Huckabee saying that it's the Republican Party that's beholden to Wall Street? But in any case, can we finally, finally, say that it's the Republicans who are engaging in class warfare -- with their own?--Sarah Posner
