"F" Rick Santorum

In Rick Santorum's victory speech last night after the Alabama and Mississippi primaries, he invoked his belief in the three "F's" that are the centerpiece of his campaign and his identity as a politician: "free people and markets and free economy, and, of course, the integrity of the family and the centrality of faith in our lives."

Freedom, family, and faith. That does seem to sum up the modern Republican Party. But what's striking about that trilogy is the particular conception of freedom, family, and faith that Santorum in particular and Republicans in general seem to hold. Despite all of the blather about finding a true "conservative" candidate, the Republican Party today is not "conservative" -- at least not in the "Burkean" sense of pushing for slow change with a strong status quo bias. Today's Republican Party is quite radical -- indeed, reactionary -- in its goal to push American society back to the 1950s.


Let's start with "freedom." Benjamin Constant famously distinguished between the "liberty of the ancients" and the "liberty of the moderns." The liberty of the ancients was a participatory liberty or, as Justice Breyer calls it, an "active" liberty -- the right to engage as a full and equal member of a civil society. The liberty of the moderns was a more passive liberty -- the liberty to be left alone. But the two conceptions of liberty sometimes clash. Sometimes, allowing one to flourish means curtailing the other.

The "freedom" that is sought by Republicans is the most modern form of modern liberty. Government is best that governs least, period. It's a freedom of the 1950s -- before the Great Society, before environmentalism, before the Civil Rights era. It's a freedom to engage in anti-social behavior, consequences be damned. I recently re-read Dr. Seuss's The Lorax, and what struck me most was when the Once-ler stubbornly insisted that he had "the right" to cut down all the Truffula trees he wanted. It is this freedom -- the freedom to impose negative externalities on other people -- that Republicans love, and it is one that I had hoped we had left behind in the 1970s.

Rick Santorum also believes in the "integrity of the family." But what family is that? A family with a working father and a stay-at-home mother. Nevermind that with the stagnation of middle-class wages in the last 30 years that that father's income cannot support the family. Nevermind that without access to birth control or pregnancy termination women will merely be incubators for the next generation of beautiful Republican babies. Nevermind that a home with two dads or two moms (or one mom or one dad) can provide just as good an environment for children as one of each.

My favorite book of all time is Robert Heinlein's (libertarian!) novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. One of the excellent points that Heinlein gets across, in his own way, is that family structure is highly contingent on features of the society in which it originates. Given different social constraints, families can evolve to look very different. The world of 2012 is very different from the world of 1952, and the notion of the "family" can -- and must -- evolve to keep pace with those differences. (Sorry, Leah, I just used science fiction to support my argument.)

Finally, faith. I won't spend long talking about faith because I've dealt with it so much in other places. Furthermore, I won't criticize faith. Faith, conceived as pursuing a certain way of life as an object of "maximal devotion," is not a bad thing, and it has certainly been responsible for much good in the world. If being a good person requires recognition of and devotion to something that is greater than and beyond yourself, then so be it. But such devotion comes in many forms, and it can have many objects. The epigraph to my senior thesis came from John Stuart Mill, whose critics called his utilitarianism a godless philosophy: "If it be a true belief that God desires, above all things, the happiness of his creatures, ... utility is not only not a godless doctrine, but more profoundly religious than any other."

But Rick Santorum's not talking about "faith" so broadly conceived. He's saying that if you don't believe that Jesus died for your sins and that a fertilized egg has a spirit and a soul, then you are un-American. What he means by "faith" is devotion to an archaic set of values that has no rational basis and is entirely impractical for the 21st century world.

So, freedom, family, and faith. These define Rick Santorum, because Santorum is the face of the new Republican Party. It is the Republican Party of the "Tea Party" and of John Boehner -- a man who feared that Barack Obama was "snuffing out the America that I grew up in." Just remember, Speaker Boehner -- the America you grew up in had segregated lunch counters and was well on its way to having silent springs. The Republicans may want to go back there, but they had better not make me go with them.