I've observed that the Tea Party movement is already a de facto truce between secular pro-free-marketers and the more religious wing of the right, who have joined together and agreed to overlook their differences on the "social issues" in order to fight against a government takeover of the economy.
Well, now someone has openly stated this idea of a truce and set off a fierce debate within the right. The Weekly Standard has a long and very worthwhile profile of Indiana Governor—and potential 2012 presidential candidate—Mitch Daniels, which contains this passage:
And then, he says, the next president, whoever he is, "would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We're going to just have to agree to get along for a little while," until the economic issues are resolved.
The Weekly Standard article is too good to excerpt—go read the whole thing. Daniels looks like an excellent standard-bearer for Tea Party ideals. The main link below is to a shorter follow-up article, which indicates that Daniels is not backing down in the face of criticism.
Leading the charge in criticizing Daniels is former Arkansas governor and 2008 presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee. This makes sense, because Huckabee campaigned on exactly the opposite platform: he wanted to stick the economic issues onto the back burner—or worse, he wanted to appease the left on economic issues, abandoning the fight for the free market—in order to focus more energy on promoting a religious agenda.
Consider Huckabee's rejoinder to Daniels:
"The issue[s] of life and traditional marriage are not bargaining chips nor are they political issues. They are moral issues," Huckabee said in response to Daniels, the governor of Indiana. "I didn't get involved in politics just to lower taxes and deficit spending, though I believe in both and have done it as a governor. But I want to stay true to the basic premises of our civilization."
Huckabee implies that taxes and debt—the eating of the productive by parasites and of the future by the present—are not moral issues. He certainly implies that they aren't worth getting into politics for. And the "basic premises of our civilization," in his view, have to do, not with liberty, property rights, the rule of law, free markets—but with what? Abortion and gay marriage?
This is exactly backwards, and it is what got us into the financial crisis that we're still digging our way out of. Under the leadership of people like Huckabee, the right abandoned the case for capitalism. But limited government, free markets, and property rights are at the basis of our civilization and our system of government, and they are the pressing moral issues of the day.
Daniels is not totally consistent on this, but I do think he starts from the right perspective in this passage from the Weekly Standard profile:
"Never take a dollar from a free citizen through the coercion of taxation without a very legitimate purpose," he said in an interview last year. "We have a solemn duty to spend that dollar as carefully as possible, because when we took it we diminished that person's freedom."
A "very legitimate purpose" is far too vague a criterion. But what I like is the fact that Daniels recognizes that taxes are an abridgment of freedom, and that freedom is a moral issue. Which puts him way ahead of Huckabee.
"Mitch Daniels Is Dead Serious About His 'Truce'," Mark Hemingway, Washington Examiner, June 15
I got a call this morning from Indiana Governor and rumored presidential candidate Mitch Daniels. In my column yesterday on his remarks about a "truce" on social issues, I left the door open to the possibility that the Governor's remarks may not have been a "rhetorical misstep."
Of course, if you know anything about Mitch Daniels in this respect he's the anti-Obama. He's far more concerned about communication than rhetoric, he's thoughtful and rarely speaks without consideration. Rhetorical missteps are exceedingly rare.
And indeed, Daniels called me to say that he's dead serious about the need for the next president to declare a truce. "It wasn't something I just blurted out," he told me. "It's something I've been thinking about for a while."
He's emphasized the need to focus like a laser beam on the existential threats facing the country -- the two big issues he's previously identified being the war on terror and the country's precarious fiscal position. "We're going to need a lot more than 50.1 percent of the country to come together to keep from becoming Greece," he said….
Many Republicans might regard a "truce" as a non-starter, but Daniels' social conservative bona fides and impressive gubernatorial record might mean he's the rare politician that deserves the benefit of the doubt as he continues to explain himself.
