Pennsylvania Politics -- Santorum, the Thinker

Jonathan Rauch over at the National Journal has a nice review on Rickey Santorum's It Takes A Family. In it he recognizes that

The book is worth taking seriously for several reasons, not least of which is that it is a serious book. The writing and thinking are consistently competent, often better than that.... Santorum wrestles intelligently, often impressively, with the biggest of big ideas: freedom, virtue, civil society, the Founders' intentions....

It's nice to see someone finally recognize that Santorum is a cut above your average Senator -- one who takes ideas and principles seriously and thinks deeply about the goals and means of public policy. I remember how during his first run for the Senate Democrats tried to pigeonhole him, as they do almost all Republicans, as not-too-bright. They were wrong, then and now, to underestimate him.

Moreover, despite efforts on the left to portray him as such, Santorum is anything but a radical ideologue.

As a policy book, It Takes a Family is temperate. It serves up a healthy reminder that society needs not just good government but strong civil and social institutions, and that the traditional family serves all kinds of essential social functions. Government policies, therefore, should respect and support family and civil society instead of undermining or supplanting them.

What sets Santorum apart, though, is his attempt to redefine conservatism.

It Takes a Family is more than a policy book. Its theory of "conservatism and the common good" seeks to rechannel the mainstream.

He explains:

In Santorum's view, freedom is not the same as liberty. Or, to put it differently, there are two kinds of freedom. One is "no-fault freedom," individual autonomy uncoupled from any larger purpose: "freedom to choose, irrespective of the choice." This, he says, is "the liberal definition of freedom," and it is the one that has taken over in the culture and been imposed on the country by the courts.

Quite different is "the conservative view of freedom," "the liberty our Founders understood." This is "freedom coupled with the responsibility to something bigger or higher than the self." True liberty is freedom in the service of virtue -- not "the freedom to be as selfish as I want to be," or "the freedom to be left alone," but "the freedom to attend to one's duties -- duties to God, to family, and to neighbors."

This kind of freedom depends upon and serves virtue, and virtue's indispensable incubator and transmitter is the family. Thus "selflessness in the family is the basis for the political liberty we cherish as Americans." If government is to defend liberty and promote the common welfare, then it must promote and defend the integrity of the traditional family. In doing so, it will foster virtue and rebuild the country's declining social and moral capital, thus fostering liberty and strengthening family. The liberal cycle of decline -- families weaken, disorder spreads, government steps in, families weaken still further -- will be reversed.

Here the echoes of Pat Moynihan's footsteps are unmistakeable, and for a good reason. Both Moynihan and Santorum bring to their work a deeply Catholic sense of the nature of public service -- one that emphasizes moral ends. It is not insignificant that major figures on both the Democratic Left and the Republican Right should find themselves in such substantial agreement.

And, as Rauch points out, Santorum's real opponents lie within the conservative movement itself, because It Takes a Family constitutes a direct repudiation of some of the more extreme aspects of Reaganism.

Whereas Santorum can trace the roots of his philosophy back to George Washington and John Adams, both of whom argued that freedom must serve virtue, Goldwater, Reagan, and mainstream conservatives today embody a tradition that derives from Jefferson and Madison who saw freedom as an end in itself.

Freedom, for Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and others, was an end, not just a means. A government that allows individuals to pursue happiness in their own fashions, they believed, is most likely to produce a strong society and a virtuous citizenry; but the greatest benefit of freedom is freedom itself. Civic virtue ultimately serves individual freedom, rather than the other way around.

It was in this tradition that Goldwater wrote, "Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development." Note that first "and": Individual and social welfare go together -- they're not in conflict. All the government needs to do, Goldwater said, is get out of the way. "The conservative's first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?" Reagan spoke in the same tradition when he declared that government was the problem, not the solution to our problems.

Goldwater and Reagan, and Madison and Jefferson, were saying that if you restrain government, you will strengthen society and foster virtue. Santorum is saying something more like the reverse: If you shore up the family, you will strengthen the social fabric and ultimately reduce dependence on government.

And it goes beyond this.

Where Goldwater denounced collectivism as the enemy of the individual, Santorum denounces individualism as the enemy of family. On page 426, Santorum says this: "In the conservative vision, people are first connected to and part of families: The family, not the individual, is the fundamental unit of society." Those words are not merely uncomfortable with the individual-rights tradition of modern conservatism. They are incompatible with it.

Read it here.

Here we have the fundamental divide in contemporary conservatism -- between what are conventionally described as "social conservatives" and "libertarian conservatives." A divide that threatens the unity of the Republican movement. But I think Rauch sketches the opposition too starkly.

Santorum quite clearly rejects extreme libertarianism [as, I would point out, did Reagan], but he, as Rauch notes, is also a foe of big government. He fits comfortably in neither philosophical camp. Instead Santorum is articulating a Tocquevillian tradition that finds accommodation between the conflicting demands of freedom and virtue in the intermediary institutions of society -- in the family, the community, in voluntary associations. Here he finds company with conservatives like George Bush and liberals like Robert Putnam. In short Santorum stands squarely in the mainstream of contemporary American political culture, seeking to mediate the antagonistic philosophical tendencies enshrined in the American tradition.

In the end Rauch shows Santorum as he is -- a man of the middle, a serious and occasionally profound thinker, and a formidable force in contemporary political discourse. Complaints like this from the Reaganite right can only strengthen, rather than diminsh his appeal. I, for one, wish him well.