The day before the Michigan and Arizona primaries, Rick Santorum
took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to lay
out a supply-side tax plan coupled with spending cuts to balance
the budget. That is to be expected of a leading Republican
presidential candidate, which Santorum has become. But for the
former Pennsylvania senator, the proposal had an added side
benefit: dispelling the charge he is a fiscal liberal.
Santorum isn’t a fiscal liberal, of course. During his
congressional tenure, the National Taxpayers Union gave Santorum an
average career score of 75.2 percent. That’s slightly higher than
the average Republican score during that time period and much
higher than the average for all his colleagues combined. It’s hard
to imagine that Mitt Romney, whose surrogates are the ones painting
Santorum with a liberal brush, would have done better. Newt
Gingrich certainly didn’t (though Ron Paul did).
As Santorum reminded us in the recent Arizona debate, he “took
one for the team” in voting for a massive expansion of the federal
Department of Education via No Child Left Behind. He also was a
team player in backing the unfunded Medicare prescription drug
benefit, which was the biggest new entitlement since LBJ’s Great
Society, and the 2005 energy bill, which sowed the seeds of
Solyndra.
Most of Santorum’s fiscal transgressions were due to support for
a Republican president’s domestic policy initiatives and parochial
concerns (he backed the Northeast dairy compact, for instance). A
handful of others stemmed from the “compassionate conservatism” of
using statist means to traditionalist ends.
This doesn’t exactly explain away the defects in his record.
Parochialism, partisanship, and misguided attempts to spread
conservative values through the state contribute mightily toward
government growth when Republicans are in power. But it does put
those flaws in a context that makes Erick Erickson’s claim that
Santorum is a “pro-life statist” seem overly broad.
One reason Santorum’s occasional big government votes get so
much attention is that he is running as the principled conservative
alternative to Romney. That case becomes harder to make when,
during the Bush era at least, Santorum and Romney supported some of
the same government-growing legislation. But there is one
additional important reason: Santorum has no use for
libertarianism.
Like Mike Huckabee in 2008, Santorum is running on social
traditionalism unleavened by libertarian principle. Neither man
completely rejects Republican fiscal orthodoxy on taxes and
spending. In fact, Santorum’s actual record is to the right of
Huckabee’s. But in neither case do the two social conservatives
base their support for tax and spending cuts in abstract
libertarian principle.
Perhaps hoping to attract angry emails, Santorum once declared,
“I am not a libertarian, and I fight very strongly against
libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the
conservative movement.” This is reminiscent of Huckabee complaining
about the libertarian influence at the Conservative Political
Action Conference. “CPAC has been becoming increasingly more
libertarian and less Republican over the last few years, one of the
reasons I didn’t go this year,” he said in 2010.
That’s not how Ronald Reagan spoke in an
interview with Reason magazine in 1975. “If you
analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is
libertarianism,” he said. Reagan didn’t endorse every libertarian
precept or dogma. “We have government to insure that we don’t each
one of us have to carry a club to defend ourselves,” he said. But
Reagan recognized the right’s libertarian streak.
It’s a current in conservative thought every Republican
presidential candidate has at least paid lip service to since the
GOP nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964. (That is, until Huckabee and
Santorum.) Even Pat Buchanan had a sizeable libertarian contingent
behind his 1992 and ‘96 campaigns, drawn in part by his foreign
policy message.
Modern American conservatism is the union of libertarian and
traditionalist thought. The late National Review senior
editor Frank Meyer called this intellectual marriage “fusionism.”
Meyer explained that the two strains tend to be self-defeating when
separated: “truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the
authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral
value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave
the way for surrender to tyranny.”
Santorum’s anti-libertarianism manifests itself in the fairly
exapansive view of state police powers he appears to endorse in his
criticisms of, naturally, Griswold and Lawrence v.
Texas (the latter decision struck down Texas’ anti-sodomy
laws). The one exception is Santorum’s strong criticism of the
state-level individual mandate imposed by Romneycare. Otherwise, he
seems concerned only by the legal limits on government imposed by
the Constitution rather than other principled limits on government
power.
That might not matter if Santorum became president. But the
effect of his candidacy has been to pull apart libertarians and
conservatives. Already we see libertarian commentators
mischaracterizing the mainstream social conservative view of
contraception (and
misconstruing Santorum’s position too). Some of Santorum’s
social conservative supporters are
equally hamfisted in their treatment of libertarians.
But conservatives and libertarians need each other. Without a
conservative influence, libertarianism frequently becomes unmoored
from the common good and the reality-based community. Conservatism,
Russell Kirk wrote, is “negation of ideology.” William F. Buckley
Jr. called it the “politics of reality.” Without libertarianism,
conservatism often degenerates into Bismarckian welfarism mixed
with moralism.
What some people consider warring factions of anti-drug warriors
and sexual counterrevolutionaries others call the conservative
movement.
