My first instinct upon reading National Review Online‘s “libertarian” defense of Rick Santorum was that it had to be, at best, a “modest proposal” sort of put-on, and at worst an act of disingenuous desperation that even its own author couldn’t possibly believe sincerely. But then I noted that the author, in this case, was
the cogenitally confused Jennifer Roback Morse, so I suppose anything is possible. Standing on its own, the piece is a potent test of the snicker-reflex, so any response at all, let alone one that piles on in the wake of Reasonoid Dave Weigel’s able riposte might seem like overkill. But the combination of Roback Morse and Santorum makes for such a target-rich environment that I can’t quite help myself.

What’s perhaps most impressive about this piece is how abyssmally thin a “libertarian” case for Santorum ends up sounding even when you get to cherry pick your metrics. Conspicuous by their absence, for instance, are Santorum’s stalwart support for both the fiasco in Iraq and George Bush’s Louis XIV theory of exective power. Instead, Roback Morse prefers to build her case on the observation that, while Santorum earns the ire of the lefty Children’s Defense Fund, he is much beloved by the Family Research Council. This should seem immensely cogent to any libertarians who have never, ever heard of the Family Research Council, and utterly terrifying to the rest—as well as being a tidy refutation of the maxim that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” And that maxim seems to be implictly doing a lot of work here, as we’re led to believe that Santorum’s style of aggressive conservative social engineering by goverment—soft-pedaled here, to put it mildly— is the lone alternative to equally aggressive leftist social engineering. We had to intervene in civil society in order to save it from intervention, you see.

If, perchance, you’re repulsed by Santorum’s enthusiasm for commingling of Church and State, and in particular by his vocal hostility to gay people, Roback Morse will inform you that you are “not a libertarian” but rather a “single-issue gay-rights voter.” And anyway, lots of gay people have leftist views, so denying them political inequality shouldn’t be a problem. By the same token, presumably, the civil rights movement’s support for affirmative action should have made libertarians allies of segregationists.

The positive case for Santorum consists of a painful-to-behold attempt to make him out to be a fiscal conservative—at one point by way of the argument, as tortuous as it is tortured, that the top issues for the FRC, which approves of Santorum, didn’t require additional federal spening. Oy. It might’ve been simpler—though surely less helpful to her argument—to look directly to Santorum’s own avowed positions. As a review of his recent book It Takes a Family reveals:

In an August interview with National Public Radio, he acknowledged his quarrel with “what I refer to as more of a libertarianish Right” and “this whole idea of personal autonomy.” In his book he comments, seemingly with a shrug, “Some will reject what I have to say as a kind of ‘Big Government’ conservatism.”

They sure will. A list of the government interventions that Santorum endorses includes national service, promotion of prison ministries, “individual development accounts,” publicly financed trust funds for children, community investment incentives, strengthened obscenity enforcement, covenant marriage, assorted tax breaks, economic literacy programs in “every school in America” (his italics), and more. Lots more.

Though he is a populist critic of big government, Santorum shows no interest in defining principled limits on political power. His first priority is to make government pro-family, not to make it small. He has no use for a constitutional (or, as far as one can tell, moral) right to privacy, which he regards as a “constitutional wrecking ball” that has become inimical to the very principle of the common good. Ditto for the notions of government neutrality and free expression. He does not support a ban on contraception, but he thinks the government has every right to impose one.

The extent of Santorum’s actual demonstrated commitment to “fiscal conservatism” appears to consist of his support for tax cuts, which in the current political climate ought to count for pretty close to nothing with libertarians. Tax cuts are not smaller government; smaller government is smaller government, and the evidence that tax cuts tend to produce it is quite thin. If anything, there’s good reason to think that tax cuts without commensurate spending reduction just delink the provision of government goodies from the pain of paying from them, making it easier for government to grow. Something that, again, Santorum seems to have no problem with provided the well-intentioned programs it funds are his.

Which brings us to the real point: Rick Santorum is at least as important for his symbolic value as his Senate vote. It’s possible, though only barely, that if you lined up the next six years worth of votes Santorum or Casey would cast in some oracular ledger, I might agree slightly more with Santorum on net. It’s also just stunningly, irrelevant. National Review did not put Rick Santorum on their cover last week because he shares their policy preferences 2 percent more often than a dozen other Republicans. They put him on the cover because Rick Santorum is an archetype, or at any rate a larval one—a symbol of what the Republican Party has spent the last decade becoming, and of the further transformations ahead of it. If we take him at his own word, Santorum stands for a GOP stripped of its last vestiges of fealty to autonomy and limited government as political goals. Even if he were marginally better than Casey on the issues in the short term, which I doubt, he would be worth defeating if he teaches Republicans that libertarian votes can’t be taken for granted, and shows Democrats that they’re worth vying for. Fiscal conservatives may not like the estate tax, but this is one case where the birthright would soon start to look a lot more like a mess of pottage.