Tristereo thinks so:
Of course, Huckabee will lose a general election. But in the process of losing, maybe even by a landslide, the worst subculture of rightwing extremists and religious fanatics may very well gain a mainstream audience and an influence over that audience that makes their current reach look trivial. Let's not forget, folks, that the current "conservative movement" is traced to Goldwater's landslide defeat.
That is a very real risk and the reason I cannot muster any snarky whoops at Huckabee's win in Iowa.Now, at least one commenter pointed out that all the GOP contenders are equally awful, implying that the great thing about Huckabee is that he would be uniquely weak in a general election, and therefore his win in Iowa is great news.
That viewpoint represents a failure to recognize the uniquely dangerous qualities of Huckabee and the reasons why you would really, really want to prevent him and his followers from gaining any more national attention. Here's one: There are extremely good reasons why this country's founders went out of their way to discourage the kinds of bald appeals to religious exclusion Huckabee wallows in.
I think this gets it precisely backwards.
These opinions and viewpoints already exist. All Huckabee's candidacy is doing is shining a very bright light on them.
Watching our national media and political establishment react to Huckabee's rise has been - for me, at least - incredibly illuminating. I've long assumed that everyone took religious conservatives seriously. As I've said numerous times before, these people say what they mean and mean what they say. But watching everyone else react, I now see that our professional political classes have never really internalized that. And nowhere is that more true than on the right. For more than 25 years, conservative politicians have been able to campaign using the language of religion, but govern focused almost entirely on economics. And religious voters, it seemed, were content to allow them to do so. But no longer.
And that's why I think Tristereo has this backwards. Huckabee's candidacy is forcing everyone to wake up and realize that these people aren't joking. When they say they want to make this nation a "Christian nation," they mean it. When they say they want to put the Bible at the center of our legal system, they mean it. When they say they want to save this nation and the world for Christ, they mean it. This isn't a joke. It's not a game. And Huckabee is forcing people to realize that.
Will his candidacy give these views "more national attention?" Absolutely. But that's precisely what this country needs. You don't defeat a movement this big by ignoring it. You defeat it by standing up and forcing it to back down.
In a crowded field, Huckabee can build a coalition that delivers the GOP nomination. But in the general election he will get stomped. 1964 began the national conservative movement; 2008 will end it. Huckabee will force the "Reagan Democrats" to come home to the Democratic Party. He will convince the Millennial Generation that the Republican Party is the party of the past. He will shatter the link between economic and religious conservatives. In short, he won't build on what Goldwater built. He will tear it down.
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