I’ve written before about the antipathy that Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has for the libertarian wing of the Republican Party.
Therefore, I found this post on Catallarchy about the ideas expressed in Santorum’s book It Takes A Family: Conservatism And The Common Good very interesting, especially in the comparison of Santorum’s book with Barry Goldwater’s ground-breaking Conscience Of A Conservative.
As Goldwater repudiated Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, so Santorum repudiates Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. It’s now official: Philosophically, the conservative movement has split. Post-Santorum, tax-cutting and court-bashing can hold the Republican coalition together for only so much longer.
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.Where Goldwater denounced collectivism as the enemy of the individual, Santorum denounces individualism as the enemy of family
If Santorum’s ideas become the dominant ones in the Republican Party, then libertarians will likely no longer feel welcome there.
