Santorum's Rise

As I watch the unexpected success of Santorum in the primaries, I'm struck by how many of his supporters are the working poor (or below), the dispossessed, the needy…the people, in short, who have been left-behind, alienated, or terrified by our postindustrial age. To them, it offers little but poverty, indignity, and a loss of self-worth as wounding as annihilation. They are looking for someone to blame, and pretty much anyone will do.

It is the great fault of Liberalism that it did not recognize those individuals nor seek them out as allies. (Let us face it, the Conservatives had a point. The Left of the last few decades has sympathized far more with spotted owls than unemployed men.) It is the great power, and shame, of the Right that it recognized those people before anyone else, and was eager and willing to exploit them.

Yet, in this the Right invited its own enslavement if not destruction…as I think, now, it begins to realize. With Santorum's rise, the Right of the Elite finds itself confronting another, very different Right, one that has very little sympathy with its libertarianism and secularism.

Already, the Elite has reason regret the forces it has unleashed. In time, I suspect, it will learn to fear them.

Santorum's America

The idea that Santorum is now neck and neck with Romney is disturbing to say the least. That he might be the Republican nominee is appalling. That he might be president of the United States is horrific. The man has no more business running a nation than he does operating a nuclear reactor in his basement.

Though I do wonder. If the unthinkable should happen, and he gets the nod, what will the young libertarians of Mr. Paul think of the Santorum vision of an America governed like a giant parochial school? With condoms forbidden by law, uniforms required, and serious discussion of whether patent leather shoes really reflect up?


(news story here)

Santorum, The Bad, The Mad, and The Passive

The fact that Rick Santorum took not one but three states in yesterday's primary is most unsettling to me (particularly as I'd just written on Monday that Romney's lead was large and comforting). I'm not at all certain how to interpret it.

Two possible explanations, both troubling, occur to me. First is that there are far more lunatics in the world (or at least in the GOP) than I'd believed possible. Second is that the average Republican voter has become so disgusted with the extended Freak Show that has been the GOP primary season so far that he/she has simply withdrawn from the affair, leaving the field to the mad and the bad.

I'm not quite sure which would be the more distressing—the number of the lunatics, or the passivity of the sane.