More pundit nonsense, and the real conservative divide
by David Atkins
E.J. Dionne has a Washington Post column today where he talks about the battle within conservatism as being between the visions of Santorum and Huntsman, of all things. It contains this remarkable paragraph:
If the Republicans want to have a genuinely searching debate about the future of their party, they’d send Santorum and Huntsman off for the long fight. Huntsman is a forceful economic conservative but also resolutely modern. He’s a defender of science, a hard-eyed realist on foreign affairs who rejects Santorum’s neoconservative moralism, and he speaks the policy language of an upper middle class that likes its politics to focus on deficits and our future competition with China.
It would be nice if Dionne could assemble just one piece of evidence to suggest that the upper middle class is obsessed with deficits and China. He and his fellow pundits, including Thomas Friedman who clocks in today with his usual out-of-touch technocratic utopianism, might fill their days with such reveries. But most middle-class people, even those making six figures, are usually more concerned about their mortgages, their jobs and their health insurance. Instead, modernism is linked inextricably in Dionne's mind with deficit hysteria.
The pundit class really, really wants Huntsman to be relevant because he culturally reflects their worldview. Fortunately, polling realities show Huntsman's ethic to be as out of touch with actual voters as those of Washington pundits.
Dionne also seems to fail to grasp that whatever Santorum's outward Spanish Inquisition moral sensibilities, his economic views are almost exactly aligned with Huntsman's. On economics, theirs would be less a debate than a love-in.
No, the real battle within the conservative movement is between the hard-line full-on Objectivists who want their totalizing philosophy to come fully out of the closet, and elitist plutocrats who subscribe to some Objectivist views but know that they can't fully admit it and still win elections, and that their staying rich depends on preserving at least the veneer of a middle class.
The bible-thumping crap isn't a part of the debate, so much as a way to keep people in line and pacified once all other social supports have been removed. But that's nothing new. That's just the latest edition of right-wing feudalism.
No, the only real battle line here is the Romney traditionalist conservatives who will win this cycle, but are increasingly besieged by the 75% of the conservative base that rejects them ("Tokyo Rove" is Karl's new nickname over at Free Republic) in favor of the Objectivist cult.
And given Romney's recent lurch toward Objectivist rhetoric, it would seem that battle is already almost over.
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