Good morning, dicks!
Clearly god exists, because Rick Santorum is the front-runner for the Republican nomination. He’ll do really well in the general, too, except for with women, homosexuals, hispanics, people on public assistance, recipients of student loans, libertarians and atheists. But he’s got the white male Christian high school graduate vote sewed up. If you draw a Venn diagram of all the bias groups in the United States—straight, Christian, male, dumb—the region where they overlap is the Santorum constituency. It’s a group that defines itself by what it is not, and the word for what it is not is elite. Santorum gave us a usage example yesterday, when he described the Obama administration to his audience at a campaign rally:
They don’t believe that you can make these decisions. They need to make these decisions for you…Don’t you see how they see you? How they look down their nose at the average American. These elite snobs.
Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link.
The President of the United States and his cabinet are definitely elite snobs. If you sat down next to Hillary Clinton at Buffalo Wild Wings and started explaining why we should seize control of the Strait of Hormuz, she would dismiss your opinion as irrelevant. That is a wise policy decision. In certain matters, the American people are what Edmund Burke called retards. Morality compels us to let them govern themselves—partly because that’s the only way for us to govern ourselves—but we must not let them actually, you know, run stuff. Otherwise the United States takes on the qualities of the loudest guy at the bar, rounding up gay people for AIDS Island and nuking Saudi Arabia on September 12th.
The political theory described in the previous paragraph is classical conservatism. It holds that it is immoral to both A) rule people without their consent and B) let them govern themselves in ways that eventually make everybody dead. The solution is little-r republican government, which allows the people to choose who runs the country while reserving day-to-day power for those who are actually competent. Conservatism is undergirded by the idea that institutions—be they churches or old universities or big business or wealthy families—are what makes a society work. It is a fundamentally aristocratic ideal.
That’s why it’s so interesting to see Santorum, branded as the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, rail against “elite snobs.” In theory, Santorum is a soldier for the aristocracy. He thinks we should abolish the inheritance tax and dismantle social welfare programs. He has criticized the direct election of US Senators. And, as he told the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, he believes that federal law should reflect the dictates of the grand old Catholic church:
Rights come to us from God, and that when God gives us rights, He doesn’t say, “well, here are your rights, just do whatever you want to do with them;” that in fact He has laws that we must abide by.
First of all, stop using “that” as a conjunction. Second of all, does this statement jibe with what Rick Santorum told his supporters about trusting them to make their own decisions?
It jibes not. In his ideology, Santorum is a classic conservative; he believes that people should not be left to do whatever the fudge they want, but rather that they should be governed according to the old verities. Yet in his rhetoric, he is a populist. Nearly everything Santorum says extols the wisdom of the many against the authority of the few. Nearly all of his policies do the opposite.
The contradiction epitomizes a contemporary Republican Party that, over the last few decades, has created a massive gap between what it sells and what it buys. The policy and ideology of today’s GOP is conservative to a point between classical and archaic. It insists that government do nothing but unfetter the rich and uphold tradition. Yet it sells these principles as populism, as the struggle of ordinary Americans against a condescending elite. In its appeals if not its ideology, today’s Republican conservatism has replaced the old verities with popular prejudices.
Santorum says the difference between the elites and the ordinary is that the ordinary want everyone to be free. Yet what distinguishes Santorum’s good Americans from Washington’s elite snobs is that they hate gay people, want to deny birth control to women and free medicine to the elderly, believe—as Santorum said a Texas border agent told him—that Spanish-speaking Muslims are crossing the Rio Grande.
This is not common wisdom. These are common prejudices. They are exactly what classical conservatism sought to restrain in favor of an aristocratic ideal. In his policies, Santorum pursues this ideal with anachronistic zeal. In his rhetoric, he advocates the opposite. That’s either deeply cynical or deeply condescending. Take your pick, and consider how a genuinely elitist attitude might talk to the American people.
I could never have written this post. One, because I can’t write a complicated notion simply, as you did here, “morality compels us to let them govern themselves—partly because that’s the only way for us to govern ourselves….”
And two, because I could not sit down and trace out Santorum’s policy positions. I would try, but I begin tapping my foot, and then stretching my collar. I would look past my furrowing brow and watch my typing hands slowly ball into fists until I was sweeping a muscled green arm across my desk and leaping out the window. So good job.