Rod Dreher starts to get a clue:
It’s funny, but when it looked like Rudy Giuliani, a social liberal, was going to be the nominee, we didn’t see many, if any, establishment Republican opinion leaders freaking out over what kind of danger to the future of the party and the nation he represented, even though as Ross points out, Giuliani hasn’t exactly been deep on policy…I think it’s fair to say that it was assumed that Giuliani would be a sound representative of the Republican Party, and that the social and religious conservatives would do like they always do and get in line. Pat Robertson sure did.
But lo, it turns out that the candidate who’s caught fire comes straight out of the religious/social conservative wing of the coalition, and he is unsound on issues most important to the fiscal wing. It’s not supposed to work that way. Nobody at the elite level seems to expect the economic conservatives to suck it up for the sake of party unity. What does that say about the place of social conservatives in the party all these years?
Here’s the answer. The economic conservatives think you are idiots. And you are. The average evangelical Christian has absolutely no commonality of interest with a bond trader. Here’s another way of putting it.
The [GOP Establishment is] panicking because a) Huckabee is a wild card who could lose massively in the general election; b) Huckabee doesn’t owe any of them anything; and c) Huckabee’s rise shows how badly, perhaps irretrievably, the fusionist settlement (uniting social and economic conservatives) has broken down, leaving the GOP in a shambles.
The Democratic Party certainly has its problems. But those problems pale in comparison with the situation in the GOP. George W. Bush did more to empower the social conservatives than any previous president (most famously, filling the ranks of the bureaucracy with Liberty University graduates). He appointed two rabidly right-wing judges to the Supreme Court. He blocked federally funded stem-cell research. And the result? The worst presidency in the history of the nation.
The economic conservatives are absolutely appalled. The social conservatives are simultaneously discredited and left feeling betrayed. They can see the conservative press doing all that is in their power to help Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, neither of whom is a friend of the evangelical movement. It’s become obvious that the social conservatives were just a convenience for the Republican Party. Yet, much to the Establishment’s chagrin, the social conservatives now have control of the party. The beast has taken over the host. And it’s highly amusing to see the angst in the country clubbers’ countenance. They’ve got a new term for it: “Huckenfreude.”.
