The other Rick/other Santorum
Now that Combat! blog’s endorsement of Jon Huntsman has somehow failed to catapult him to front-runner status, we are forced to consider Rick Santorum. The former Senator and Very Good Boy from Pennsylvania is running third in the most recent Iowa poll, suggesting that he might conceivably win tomorrow’s caucuses. There is still no way he will become President. He won’t win the Republican nomination, either. The man who once compared gay marriage to sex with dogs and corpses will never win a national contest, for the historical reason that bigotry only works on the state level. And bigotry is Santorum’s whole damn raison d’etre.
It is only a mild exaggeration to say that all of Rick Santorum’s ideas pertain to gay people. He has articulated positions on China and quantitative easing and stuff, but those are part of his campaign the way high heels are part of the swimsuit competition. Santorum is really selling stuff like this. It takes a special kind of reasoning to argue that fewer straight people are getting married because more gay people are getting married. Santorum knows that gay people are wrecking marriage the way your grandpa knows that a black kid keyed his car. That’s causality with a universal adaptor on it, and Santorum’s ability to turn it into a presidential campaign rests not so much on explaining it to people as on convincing the ones who already agree with him that his is the most pressing problem.
A successful campaign of bigotry requires two ingredients. First, there have to be enough members of the victim group around to convince bigots that they’re a problem. You can’t ride to the presidency on your promise to be tough on pyromaniacs. You could maybe do it with child molesters. Second, there can’t be so many people in the victim group that they constitute a large portion of the electorate. That’s why an ironclad pledge to keep women from voting stopped being an effective campaign platform around 1920. The inherent problem for a bigoted candidate is therefore one of balance: too few gays and you can’t rile people up, too many and they’ll all vote against you.
That’s why Santorum’s particular brand of bullshit works well on the state level. Elderly Iowans and suburban home-schoolers know that a bunch of the gays are out there waving their things around, because they hear about it on the news. They get the perception of a creeping threat, but the actual gay people are safely ensconced in New York and California. Santorum can come to town and trade on the national phenomenon of advancing acceptance of homosexuality in society, while locally he only loses the vote of the high school choir teacher.
That doesn’t work on the national level, of course. On the national level, each gay dude who wants to get married corresponds to an actual human being who votes. You can rely on sheer numerical advantage for a while, but as society becomes more tolerant more gay people make straight friends. Eventually, everyone in your category has a name, and it’s harder to blame Steven and Todd for your son’s divorce. The votes you gain from increased prominence in society of the group you hate are undercut by votes lost to members of that group and their supporters, and bigotry becomes a zero-sum game.
Ask Strom Thurmond. You’ll need to bring a virgin’s left hand to the gypsy queen, but after you do, he’ll tell you how he got trounced in the 1948 presidential election yet managed to serve in the Senate for 47 years. As long as he stuck to South Carolina, Thurmond found the national specter of black equality big enough to scare his supporters and small enough, in his actual districts, to not torpedo his campaigns.
Santorum is our generation’s Strom Thurmond. He has committed himself wholeheartedly to the wrong side of history, and he might win a few elections in those states that progress through time most reluctantly. He will never win the nation, though, for the simple fact that the nation is what he is running against. The thing about Rick Santorum is that most people think he’s an asshole. That’s a good way to win the sympathy of the assholes, but it won’t get you far with the silent majority.
High heels at a swimsuit competition. That’s perfect, and I’ve never seen it before. How do you come up with your metaphors?
Good work.
I’m indeed tempted towards Huntsman, because he believed in science for a week or so. But my old man says I can go and vote “undecided”. That seems like the least detrimental way to sate my curiosity for this cultural event.
This whole article/point about bigotry being a state-centric strategy is moot, at least regarding Santorum. He got trounced the last time he ran in a state election. I hope that, one day, he finds something he’s good at.
Strom Thurmond won South Carolina over and over with overwhelming support from the black community late in his career. His mea culpa after being a straight racist candidate went a long way in helping him garner black support.
I think you’re being unfairly biased against Santorum, so I’d like to counter your article with some actual Santorum campaign promises. Naturally, I want to get my facts straight, so I’ll need to do some research by Googling his name first, and… Oh my God! Oh my God!
What the heck does “You’ll need to bring a virgin’s left hand to the gypsy queen” mean? I Googled that, and I’m still mystified.
Mostly it means that you shouldn’t marry a joke when the sentence isn’t working out. The premise was that Strom Thurmond is dead, and that communicating with him would therefore require some sort of occult ritual.