As has been noted elsewhere, the Republican ascendancy that last week tightened its grip on government from the statehouse to the White House stands on two very different legs. One is made up of the small-government, free-market, every-man-for-himself folks. The other consists of the puritanical, family-first, every-woman-at-home people.
Can this marriage be saved? Some of us don't see how it can, and even those who share neither philosophy tend to look at the situation the way the civilized world once looked at the Hitler-Stalin Pact. It's scary, but the inevitable break-up is bound to be messy.
The fatal flaw in the relationship between the two wings of the Republican alliance is that those who vote for it, according to the polls, list strong moral values as their top issue, while those who pay for its campaigns are denizens of the marketplace, which is unalterably amoral.
The marketplace doesn't serve goodness. It provides goods and services and rewards those who provide the best services with the most goods. Its highest incarnation, the modern corporation, exists for one purpose and one purpose only - to take money away from its customers and give it to its stockholders. People who seek to run publicly traded corporations with any other goal in mind are committing fraud.
Some of the folks who do well in the amoral marketplace will always look down upon those in the religious wing of their alliance, with even more contempt than is found among left-leaning elites and arty types. Those rich folks know that it doesn't matter who is in the White House or on the Supreme Court. They will always be able to live with whom they want, have sex with whom they want and have abortions whenever they want. That's what money can do for you.
Fortunately, there have always been people who were successful in the marketplace but, eventually, found it all pretty empty. They still believe in individual liberty, they just think that such liberty ought to reach more people, and they are realistic enough to know that it will cost money to make that happen.
That feeling moves many successful business people to stop treating their fellow human beings as suckers and start worrying about how they can bear to leave their children a world that leaves so many people behind. Even if you don't really care about the less fortunate, too many of them are a clear threat to the good life enjoyed by the successful.
Jon Huntsman (now that he's been elected governor, can we please drop the "Jr."?) appears to be of the tradition of successful Americans who want to share what they've earned - The Huntsman Cancer Institute, etc. - and what they've learned - the practical and emotional benefits of people of all faiths and races and languages coming together to raise healthy families, realize their potential and invent cool stuff, some of which may save your life someday.
Building that kind of community is the kind of talk that makes Huntsman's eyes light up. He's not particularly excited about cutting taxes or dissing the U.N. or making sure that every able-bodied Utahn is armed and dangerous.
The new governor cleans up nice for the cameras and has just the kind of large Utah family that doesn't scare the straights. But he's also an ex-high school dropout and wannabe rock musician who, when he came back to the fold, didn't just hide out in the corner office of his family's giant chemical company. He got himself appointed ambassador to Singapore, and later worked as a big-deal trade negotiator.
Huntsman has seen the world and, unlike far too many of the people who vote red, he's not afraid of it. When he says, "Bring it on!" it's not a bellicose taunt but an optimistic belief that we can make it all better.
This optimism will have its limitations. There will be the dead weight of the homophobic fearmongers pulling Gov. Huntsman down from one direction and the dead weight of the selfish greedheads pulling him down from the other. Those are differences that can't be split. They will have to be overcome.
If Jon Huntsman can do it, he'll have shown the whole nation a better way to live.
If he can't, he'll have to go back to the family's favorite charity and do something simpler. Like cure cancer.
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George Pyle (gpyle@sltrib.com) is an editorial writer for The Salt Lake Tribune.
