My Faithful Sin-Eater

by Molly Ivors

David "BoBo" Brooks is anxious to assure us about Iowa: not Obama, so much, who has generated more platitudes about race and generation than I ever would have thought possible, but about Mike Huckabee, who, Bobo insists, is not really batshit insane.

Good luck with that.

I'm not going to talk about the Frankenstein monster wing of the Republican party: others will do that better than I. But Brooks's column smacks of the things a Sensible Conservative had to tell himself last night before the Ambien kicked in (including his hopeful assertion that Iowa marked the end of John Edwards).

Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans have been slow to recognize. First, evangelicals have changed. Huckabee is the first ironic evangelical on the national stage. He’s funny, campy (see his Chuck Norris fixation) and he’s not at war with modern culture.

Second, Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a crisis of authority in this country. People have lost faith in their leaders’ ability to respond to problems. While Romney embodies the leadership class, Huckabee went after it. He criticized Wall Street and K Street. Most importantly, he sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed.

Third, Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person’s lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has.

In that sense, Huckabee’s victory is not a step into the past. It opens up the way for a new coalition.

Let's take these in order, shall we? Brooks has apparently not seen Jesus Camp, because if he had, he would have known that funny, campy, and ironic is a staple evangelical pose. (Last time I checked, "campy" was an implicitly gay adjective: is there something Bobo's trying to tell us about Huckabee?) Ted Haggard, for example, was all about the wacky humor in Jesus Camp: the irony came later, when it turned out it wasn't all that funny.

In terms of being at war with modern culture, well, I don't see it. They've selectively sorted out past culture to eliminate sex and retain violence, and they've created a metric assload of cultural artifacts just for themselves (such as VeggieTales). Norris is perfect: his films were never really about sex, but always violence, and he, a white man, always won. Plus, he still has a mullet, as Thers notes below, just like a good 40% of Huckabee voters.

In terms of Bobo' second assertion, that Huckabee represents a new kind of authority free from K Street and big money and President Bush.... well, we'll just reserve judgment on that one, shall we? Huckabee's Arkansas days are rife with selling himself out for cheap crap: if K Street hasn't bought him yet, it's only because they have yet to make an offer. Watch Limbaugh and Norquist and Bush lick his heels now that it looks like he might be the only thing keeping them on the gravy train.

But it's the third assertion that really, really sticks in my craw. Conservatives have been trying for many years to make lifestyles rather than economics the basis for human suffering, and this paragraph, more than anything I've read, encapsulates that perspective. Back when we called this "blaming the victim," we rightly identified that it was bullshit, but here's Bobo, trotting it out in a new frock and pretending it's not a skanky old whore with many years of service to his ideology. 

Divorce does more damage than outsourcing? Fuck. You. Let me cordially invite you upstate to the Country Pines Tavern to make that assertion: you'll get the shit kicked out of you by guys who, yeah, may be divorced, but whose divorces can often be laid at the feet of a desperate financial situation. You spend fifteen or twenty years working on circuit boards or heavy machinery or metal refinishing to watch your job go to a Malaysian teenager, and see how hard it is to live with you, Bobo, you insufferable prick. Depression, substance abuse, and a loss of identity are not "lifestyle issues": they're the reasonable and comprehensible response to an analysis of one's situation.

As is evangelism, which brings me back around, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, to Huckabee.

Religion, specifically the evangelical religion which replaces all sorts of community and cultural structures, has a pretty clear appeal for a lot of people who see in it an answer. Our own brilliant chicago dyke, who posts at corrente, once explained how this works:

I once read a really, really depressing book called The Dead Will Arise. It's the story of native Africans facing the ever-encroaching forces of colonialism in Xhosa lands in southern Africa. Basically, the short version of the book goes like this: the Europeans are taking more and more land and resources from the native peoples, and the Xhosa are among the last nations to retain a degree of political autonomy. All their traditions and beliefs are increasingly challenged by European technology and military supremacy; it's clear that it's only a matter of time before white colonialists will do to the Xhosa what they have done to every other previously independent African peoples.

In the face of this, a young girl reports to her village's elders that she's had a dream, a sacred vision. In it, the Ancestors of Xhosa tradition have come to her and bid her to reveal this prophecy: if the Xhosa kill off all their cattle, their only remaining real wealth, then all the Xhosa dead will arise, and drive off the Europeans from Africa and Xhosa lands once and for all. She convinces her village elders and eventually most of the Xhosa nation of the truth of her vision. They proceed to kill off almost all their cattle, and subsequently starve, and completely falter as an independent nation. A few years later, the Europeans forcibly resettle what is left of the Xhosa people and take over the last of their independent lands, completing the conquest of southern Africa.

When Halfdan says "pretty much all they have left," I want you to think of the Xhosa. Republicans have spent the last 25 years doing away with all the things that once made America a great place for the working class: decent public education, secure manufacturing and farm jobs, responsible government that meets the basic needs of the people, a critical media that calls out politicians who don't, and balanced public political and social discourse that addresses the concerns of the little guy. These things are effectively dead in rural America today, and if you're in Kansas or upstate Wisconsin or delta Mississippi, times are tough, and have been for a long time. I grew up in the country, and I cringe every time I go back, to see just how poorly a lot of folks are doing these days. The problem is that for many, they don't even really know that once, life in rural working class America was much, much better.

The evangelical movement, in providing an identity and community for the hard-pressed, has essentially replaced American civic life for a lot of people. And Huckabee is the result.

Comments

[madamab]

Huckabee combines fake populism with true evangelical fervor. Plus, he comes across well on the TeeVee. He's the winner of the Republic nomination in a landslide.

Good news for Democrats.

[Virginia]

Awesome; simply wonderful. Extra bonus points for the outstanding ChiDyke clip.

And MoDo has the NYT gig . . . go fucking figure.

[SteveB]

So David Brooks is concerned about our rising divorce rate? Good, maybe he should think about this:

Iraq, in one way or another, is a driving force behind many officers' decision to leave. For some, there's a nagging bitterness that the war's burden is falling overwhelmingly on men and women in uniform while the rest of the country largely ignores it. While many officers don't oppose the war itself, returning repeatedly to serve in Iraq is a grueling way to live. One of the many reasons for this is that it corrodes their families; the divorce rate among Army officers has tripled since 2003. Internal surveys show that the percentage of officers who cite "amount of time separated from family" as a primary factor for leaving the Army has at least doubled since 2002, to more than 30 percent.

[Molly Ivors]

Don't worry, SteveB, under President Huckabee, all those abused and abandoned wives and children will come crawling back. It's the way god wants it.

[Ruth]

Glad you picked up on Bobo's latest treachery, Molly, it's another pundit out to excuse exchanging pretense of rational thought for pretense of family values. Can't wait for him to write The Book telling how all that made America great - and wealthy - was quaint and had to be replaced with sacred globalization so the masters wouldn't be hampered by laws.

Excellent. You should rewrite (because they don't like 'Fuck") this graph into a LTE and send to NYT.

Divorce does more damage than outsourcing? Fuck. You. Let me cordially invite you upstate to the Country Pines Tavern to make that assertion: you'll get the shit kicked out of you by guys who, yeah, may be divorced, but whose divorces can often be laid at the feet of a desperate financial situation. You spend fifteen or twenty years working on circuit boards or heavy machinery or metal refinishing to watch your job go to a Malaysian teenager, and see how hard it is to live with you, Bobo, you insufferable prick. Depression, substance abuse, and a loss of identity are not "lifestyle issues": they're the reasonable and comprehensible response to an analysis of one's situation.

[ecoast]

That was me.
ecoast

[American Citizen]

I never understand how a politician is going to 'bring back values' and 'reduce the divorce rate'. Maybe I'm too logical, but it's hard to see the path from the policies they're pushing to those endpoints.

[Leah]

Killer post, Molly.

I rolled out of bed only to find Brooks at the top of Memeorandum, so I went to look at the exact shape of his nonsense this morning; what a terrible way to start the day, though my own fault for not knowing better.

Bless you; I've found the will to live again.

And yes, that third point, the debilitating impact of divorce, as if it was a single personal moral choice made essentially in a social vacuum, is the one that gives the lie to all the rest.

All Brooks is ever doing is applying a propagandist's perspective and ethic to the problem that so-called "conservatism," and its vehicle, the current Republican party, are losing arguments and elections because their extremist rightwing positions don't represent a majority of Americans. This column says, basically, that Huckabee has come up with a newer, better cover story, that, literally, "yes, he talks the talk, but don't worry, he won't walk the talk.

And thanks for remembering that haunting, entirely apropos CD (chidyke) story.

[tim quick]

I always knew, of course, that "values" issues and the "cultural wars" were just a distraction - people like Rove and Tucker Carlson openly mock the evangelical wing of the party. And I always knew that rightists everywhere succeed by aligning corporate interests with fringe traditionalist reactionaries of one sort or another. However, it never struck me before - or as clearly - how the process is self-perpetuating: the more you undermine people's way of fulfilling their basic material and social needs, the more they will be attracted to these fringe reactionary traditionalists.

Thanks, Molly.

What I am not so sure about, and, yes, I mean I'm not sure of about it and not that I think the opposite, is that (as madamab says) this is, "Good news for Democrats." Sure it might spell a bigger loss for the Repu(gants) in the next election, hell, maybe in the next few elections. But doesn't it help mainstream these awful views? Doesn't it help them build their coalition over time? I mean with the way BushCo has politized every branch of government might we not just sit here and watch the corporatist agenda roll forward while the reactionary base expands. Who's gonna stop it? Clinton? Obama? I don't think so. Reagan's election required only marginal support and perfunctory gestures to these people. By the time we get to Bush, he is one of these people and his gestures are a lot less perfunctory. I'm afraid it's all too conceivable that in the not too distant future we'll elect the real thing.

P.S. How do you spell check when you're posting comments?

[aschupanitz]

This blog is, without question, the best white-hot-refined-anger bullshit detector on the entire internets.

[actor212]

Huckabee's Arkansas days are rife with selling himself out for cheap crap: if K Street hasn't bought him yet, it's only because they have yet to make an offer.

There's a reason his nickname is The Huckster, you know...

[lambert strether]

I always thought irony was like herpes.

Now I'm sure. Gad.

[lambert strether]

And you know, if I had a lifestyle choice to make, torturing and killing animals wouldn't be high on the list. But that's just me.

[flory]

Brooks's column smacks of the things a Sensible Conservative had to tell himself last night before the Ambien kicked in

Interesting take. Thers is convinced, as am I, that the Village will destroy Hucksterbee because they'd rather keep control of a losing party than lose control of a winning one.

Is Bobo the vanguard of a Village faction that will actually get behind the Huckster in an attempt both win and keep control?

My paranoid side is now wondering if the destruction of working class America wasn't a deliberate attempt to drive people to evangelism as their salvation, knowing that, once in Jesus's embrace, very few of them would ever support a democrat.

[julia]

Yeah, divorce is the issue, because for some inexplicable reason a single person working full time can't lift themselves above the poverty level. It has jackshit to do with globalization and the WalMart effect and decent-wage jobs pouring overseas, perish the thought.

I particularly enjoyed, though, how the morally-upright voters of the Republican party are going to take a deep breath and embrace the generational change represented by twenty-five year congressional veteran divorced septuagenerian John McCain

[SteveB]

the Village will destroy Hucksterbee because they'd rather keep control of a losing party than lose control of a winning one.

Yes. Jonathan Schwarz has written some excellent posts on this, the "Iron Law of Institutions", as it applies to the Democrats.

[the Rev Jerry Gloryhole]

Thank you, Molly. That was wonderful.
Crushing Hucklebee asap is in our best interests, though I can't shake the feeling the GOP honchos intend to lose this one, to saddle the Dems with the hopeless tasks ahead, that they can for eternity brand Libs as taxers and against religion.

Restoring some middle American prosperity would help.

[Poicephalus]

Molly,
I think Chuck lost to an Oriental in "Way of the Dragon". But, maybe you don't consider that one of "his" movies.
SRY
C

[Molly Ivors]

I think Chuck lost to an Oriental in "Way of the Dragon".

Thanks for the tip!

[Bloix]

Something happens that you did not predict. Then, based solely on information you knew before the thing happened, and doing no further investigation, you explain why the thing happened.

This is called making shit up.

[rea]

I had not realized Chuck Norris got his start playing the villian role in a Bruce Lee movie . . .

[Herr Doktor Bimler]

Anyone who can write phrases like "crisis of authority" without any hint of hostility or rebellion against the "leadership class" has already died inside, and been reincarnated as a cocker spaniel, without noticing it.

[flory]

and been reincarnated as a cocker spaniel, without noticing it.

Not fair to cocker spaniels everywhere.

I think Bobo has been reincarnated as an earthworm, myself.

[Batocchio]

commodius vicus of recirculation

5.8! I haven't seen one of those executed that well since college!

Seriously, great post. I particularly like your dissection of Bobo's third point, and the Chicago Dyke excerpt is pretty heart-breaking.

[Shane in Utah]

I'm a couple of days late chiming in here, but can I just say that I love this blog? Where else will you find an obscure Finnegan's Wake allusion right after David Brooks is called an "insufferable prick"?

[lambert strether]

> Bobo has been reincarnated as an earthworm

No I said no:

Cocker spaniels have tongues, and earthworms don't, so...

* * *

Look, I'm sorry for the picture that put in your mind, but we need some clarity here, OK?