Huckabee: conservativism and liberalism

8 January 2008, 0110 EST

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.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.