Rick Santorum (Adam Hunger, Reuters)Today, New Hampshire holds the first Republican primary in the 2012 Presidential campaign to nominate their candidate to contest the presidential election. The two stories to watch: 1) Will Mitt Romney win by enough to meet expectations, an absolute minimum of at least 30% of the vote? 2) Can Jon Huntsman, former Governor of Utah and US diplomat, emerge as a serious long-term challenger by finishing at least a close third to likely runner-up Ron Paul?
If Huntsman, who has concentrated almost exclusively on campaigning in the Granite State, can finish a close second to Romney, then he will face the same sudden media interest that Rick Santorum, the former Senator from Pennsylvania, has encountered after he was in a virutal dead-het with Romney in Iowa last week. And if that does happen, Huntsman may get the political honeymoon of the almost gushing reception that Santorum has garnered from some conservative pundits.
Last Thursday and Friday, heavyweight commentators David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, and Michael Gerson, all took to the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post to announce the emergence of, in Krauthammer's title, a “worthy challenger” for the Republican nomination. Here was a serious alternative to Romney's moderatism and Paul's extremism, with principled and moral ideas that should appeal to the common-sense values of mainstream America. All three heralded, to a greater or lesser degree, the return to the centre of American political discourse of “compassionate conservatism".
This style of conservatism is built around the notion that Government, even the Federal Government, can help strengthen the institutions --- primarily the family and the community --- that alone ensure a healthy civic society at the local level. It defends traditional values, arguing that their persistence through time in the face of constant challenges proves that they are the values needed to construct a moral, or "good", society. These traditionalist conservatives are especially keen to distinguish themselves from libertarians, who they see as the worst of all sinners --- individualists with no reliance on the social institutions that provide for a cohesive community.
As Michael Gerson argues:
Libertarianism is an extreme form of individualism, in which personal rights trump every other social goal and institution. It is actually a species of classical liberalism, not conservatism — more directly traceable to John Stuart Mill than Edmund Burke or Alexis de Tocqueville. The Catholic (and increasingly Protestant) approach to social ethics asserts that liberty is made possible by strong social institutions — families, communities, congregations — that prepare human beings for the exercise of liberty by teaching self-restraint, compassion and concern for the public good. Oppressive, overreaching government undermines these value-shaping institutions. Responsible government can empower them — say, with a child tax credit or a deduction for charitable giving — as well as defend them against the aggressions of extreme poverty or against “free markets” in drugs or obscenity.
The theory that Government has the authority to define the “public good” has a long history. It reached its ultimate expression in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan of 1651, which argued the government --- be it a dictatorship or a democracy --- should have the power to order the life of an individual for the public good, excepting only his or her right to self-preservation of life. The Government, to ensure that existence was not “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" could take the property, liberty, pursuit of happiness, or whatever it deemed fit from any individual to preserve the public good.
Which, believe it or not, brings us back to Santorum and proponents of “compassionate conservatism". Whether they acknowledge it or not, their ideology is authoritarian, just not as dictatorial as the Hobbesian model. A child tax credit is a perfectly defensible proposition --- and Santorum would triple it --- but at heart it is the taking of property from some people to give to other people in the name of morality and the common good.
Of course, you could make that same argument about any tax, and this is not a defensc of libertarian ideas on taxes as theft. But what is worrying is that certain conservatives still believe that the Government can legislate for a morality that fits only with their narrow worldview. David Brooks uses Santorum's success in Iowa to promote his own vision of compassionate conservatism, "A New Social Agenda", but he only differs from the Republican candidate because...
...he seems to imagine America’s problems can best be described as the result of a culture war between the God-fearing conservatives and the narcissistic liberals".
Like most Americans, including most evangelicals under 40, I find this culture war language absurd. If conservative ideas were that much more virtuous than liberal ideas, then the conservative parts of the country would have fewer social pathologies than the liberal parts of the country. They don’t.
Brooks still subscribes to the central tenet of authoritarian conservatism that Government can build a society that accords with certain ideas of what is right and wrong:“If you believe in the centrality of family, you have to have a government that both encourages marriage and also supplies wage subsidies to men to make them marriageable.”
The discord between this vision of a beneficent Government as a guiding institution and people's distrust that this Government could represent their interests was glimpsed yesterday in a couple of on-the-ground news reports.
In The Hill, retiring Rep. Dennis A. Cardoza (D-California), reporting on his experiences on his trip back home over Christmas, noted that the “message I am hearing loud and clear is that folks are so frustrated that they are questioning their political institutions":
A bright and talented young union firefighter who I have known his whole life summed it up with the following: “I’m so frustrated. I have nothing in common with the Republicans or the Democrats. It’s all blah blah blah. I don’t trust any of them. They never come through. What they are arguing about is irrelevant to my daily life. They don’t solve any problems, and it all just keeps getting worse. The Republicans are a bunch of clowns. Did you watch any of those Republican debates? Just a joke. The only thing good that came out of it is The Daily Show has plenty of new material. The president hasn’t done crap for the economy. My house is so underwater I should turn in the keys and start over.
If that was not discouraging enough, a report from New Hampshire in The Washington Post followed the same theme: "A Ron Paul Convert Questions How to Play a Role in a Future He Sees as Bleak". The story relates the personal journey of one of the increasing number of young white males attracted to Paul's message, a group who...
...see themselves as players in the grander struggle Paul describes: one in which decades of government expansion, disastrous economic policy, unjustified foreign meddling and lapsing civil liberties threaten to undermine the republic — unless, that is, people wake up from their nanny-state subservience and save the nation from tyranny.
Brooks, Krauthammer, and Gerson all see Santorum as a long shot to win the Republican nomination, but they hope that his showing in Iowa would encourage the eventual nominee to adopt some of his "compassionate conservatism" --- a government that believes it knows what is the best way to construct a "Big Society" and is prepared to enforce through legislation that social vision.
You can justifiably make the same arguments against a "progressive" Democratic administration, and both these old ideas of government are facing challenges from a growing number of people who want to reclaim their power as citizens: that is what both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement are about.
Who knows if the current energy to return to a more participatory democracy will sustain itself when the economy recovers? But in the meantime, as the nation's media concentrates its political attention on New Hampshire today, and possibly Jon Huntsman tomorrow, some American citizens are looking independently for a solution to the ever-growing distrust with politicians. As Dennis Cardoza related in his blog post:
People are so fed up with the partisan gridlock, that I have heard of at least one group considering a ballot initiative to ban party identification at the state level, much in the same way that parties are currently banned at the local level. If California were to ban political parties, could a national effort along these lines be far behind? Would it matter?
Yes. Yes, it would.