Ever since the Cold War ended, its been increasingly apparent that the conservative and libertarian wings of the Republican Party really don’t have all that much in common. This has been made even more apparent in the years since the 2000 election and the rising influence of cultural conservatives within the GOP. Now, via Reason’s Hit & Run, comes this quote from Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, a probable 2008 Presidential candidate:
One of the criticisms I make is to what I refer to as more of a libertarianish right. The left has gone so far left and the right in some respects has gone so far right that they come around in the circle. [...]
This whole idea of personal autonomy — I don’t think that most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. And they have this idea that people should be left alone to do what they want to do, that government should keep taxes down, keep regulation down, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, that we shouldn’t be involved in cultural issues, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world. And I think that most conservatives understand that we can’t go it alone, that there is no such society that I’m aware of where we’ve had radical individualism and it has succeeded as a culture.
Well, you are right, Senator, that no society has fully implemented the ideas of individualism that this nation was founded upon, but we came pretty close during the early years of the Republic and things seemed to work pretty well, thank you very much. We had men like Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe leading us and none of them worried about the definition of marriage or wrote books on whether it takes a village, or a family, to raise a child. They were leading a country founded on the idea that people had a right to be left alone and had fought a war to establish that principle. Now, we’ve got a Senator from Pennsylvania who quite obviously believes that we don’t have any rights other than those the government chooses to grant us.
I’ve never been comfortable with what I will now call the Santorum wing of the GOP to begin with. When I was volunteering on the Congressional campaign of a libertarian-minded law professor running for a then-new Congressional seat here in Virginia, I encountered several evangelical/fundamentalist supporters of one of his opponents. Their single-minded focus on issues was amazing, and their consistent desire to discuss my religious beliefs with me was, in a word, disturbing (especially when they made it clear that being Catholic was not the same as being Christian in their world). I could not be part of a Republican Party that was dominated by such persons, which is the primary reason I haven’t been actively involved in electoral politics since then. Apparently, they’ve taken over on a national level.
