Huckabee: conservativism and liberalism

Patrick Deneen, one of my colleagues at Georgetown, has a terrific discussion of Jonah Goldberg’s critique of Huckabee:

I can’t remember a more deceptive piece of agitprop in recent American politics. Goldberg is a free-marketeer, small government (i.e., let the market do as it will), big national defense (i.e., U.S. should run the world in our best interest), secular-minded “conservative”: i.e., there’s not an actual conservative bone in his body. In “Old Europe” he would more accurately be called a liberal. What galls in this exchange is Goldberg’s apparent Burkeanism which is a thin mask on his deeper commitment to the instabilities fostered by “free” markets and the preeminence that contemporary Republicans place on individual choice and thoroughgoing mobililty. The call to “just stand there” is a “conservative” defense of liberalism (i.e., “just stand there” means “let us be as free and mobile and individualistic as ever”); the call for “change” in several cases (Huckabee in particular) points in the direction of being a “revolutionary” defense of conservatism. This is the paradox and conundrum of contemporary American politics: the true conservative appears to be the revolutionary whereas the “conservative” is a liberal in wolf’s clothing.

Read the whole thing.

H/T to Russel Arben Fox, himself the author of a great post on Huckabee.