Last week, Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig at the New Republic wrote a piece dismissing Mike Huckabee’s presidential chances in 2016. Her conclusion was not a particularly controversial one—I doubt even Mike Huckabee thinks he’ll win so much as scare up some new names to advertise to on his email list—but the reasoning she used to get there was totally misplaced. “But the culture wars are over, and things did not shake out in evangelicals’ favor,” she writes, arguing that Huckabee is a relic of a time long ago (okay, just a few years ago), and the time of the Bible-thumper has passed.
It would be nice if it were true, but it’s not. Bruenig’s main evidence for this is that the battle over gay marriage is winding down, with the homophobes on the losing side, but she ignores the simultaneous resurgence of anti-choice sentiment that has resulted in abortion clinics around the country shutting down at a record rate. Nor does she acknowledge how the religious right has widened the net, seeking ways to reduce contraception access, a crusade that has already resulted in an anti-contraception Supreme Court decision and the shuttering of a Colorado contraception program that had previously led to a 40 percent reduction in that state’s teen birth rate.
Her piece also assumes that the recent past was some sort of halcyon days for Huckabee, when he was riding high on the evangelical tide that has started to pull out. “By 2008, Huckabee was well positioned to inherit the allegiance” that evangelical voters had given George W. Bush before, she writes.
Bruenig credits the collapse of Huckabee’s campaign to his association with corrupt people, but the likelier explanation was that Huckabee never had a chance in the first place. There’s never been a candidate who coasted to the Republican presidential nomination on evangelical support alone. Bush’s success was, if anything, a result of his ability to successfully hide how radical his rightwing leanings were and to convince voters he didn’t mean all that Jesus-and-abortion stuff.
For Republicans, especially when it comes to the presidential contest, it’s all about balance: They both have to get the evangelical vote to win, but they can’t be seen as too Bible-thumpy, or they will scare off ordinary voters. There is no evidence that this equation has changed. The way they do this is by running campaigns where they trot out a lot of rhetoric about jobs and foreign policy, but as soon as they get into office, they start passing a bunch of bills that are sloppy wet kisses to the evangelicals. If anything, with the rash of anti-choice bills on both the state and federal level, this strategy is becoming more ingrained.
Bruenig is right that cultural conservatives are currently reshuffling their priorities. That is not evidence that they are going away, but the opposite: They are restructuring to maintain their power. Saying that the culture wars are over because the anti-gay marriage movement is losing steam is “like saying because in 1978 social conservatives in California wanted to outlaw gay teachers, and in 2006 they no longer did, social conservatism was dead in 2006,” historian and author Rick Perlstein explained in an email. “Conservatism reacts to the expansion of the frontiers of freedom, whatever those happen to be in any given moment. That’s its essence. Miss that, and you miss everything.”
That’s what we’re seeing right now with the Christian right. Sure, they’re not paying as much attention to the anti-gay movement, but that’s because they’re doubling down on attacks on reproductive rights. Which isn’t a surprise, if Perlstein is correct in his belief that the religious right is malleable and reactive. Improved contraception use has led to an overall drop in the pregnancy rate, and while the birth rate is bouncing back a little because of the economy, it remains low for unmarried and teen women, suggesting that women really are getting better at taking control of their own fertility. The HHS requirement that contraception be covered by insurance without a copay is bound to improve things even more.
In other words, women gaining control over the own lives—and being able to have more sex without losing that control—is a much bigger problem, from the religious right perspective, than gay couples getting married. And they’re shifting their attention. But that doesn’t mean the culture wars are over, much less that evangelicals have lost their stranglehold over the Republican Party. The sheer amount of legislative attention being paid to trying to turn back the clock for women alone should demonstrate that.
Mike Huckabee can’t win the nomination, but then again, he doesn’t have to. He’s the showy Bible-thumper who will allow the actual nominee to look more moderate in comparison. And whoever that real nominee is, should he ride that “moderate” look to victory, will immediately turn around and start signing bills restricting abortion and contraception access. That’s because while the rhetoric has shifted slightly, the fundamentals haven’t changed: Evangelicals can’t win national elections outright, but they can manipulate Republican politics enough to control the country.
Amanda Marcotte is a freelance journalist who writes frequently about liberal politics, the religious right and reproductive health care. She’s a prolific Twitter villain who can be followed @amandamarcotte.
