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Santorum and The Bad Bargain of “New Fusionism”

At the Republican presidential debate on Thursday Rick Santorum was asked about Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’s suggestion that there be a social truce. Santorum answered, “Anybody that would suggest we call a truce on moral issues doesn’t understand what America is all about.” That is wrong. In fact, it’s the precise opposite of what America […]

At the Republican presidential debate on Thursday Rick Santorum was asked about Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’s suggestion that there be a social truce. Santorum answered, “Anybody that would suggest we call a truce on moral issues doesn’t understand what America is all about.”

That is wrong. In fact, it’s the precise opposite of what America is about. ~Jennifer Rubin

They’re both wrong in different ways. America is not “about” anything in the way that these two mean it. America isn’t a creedal or proposition nation, and it isn’t an idea or an ideological project. Genuine constitutional conservatism is worthwhile, and it involves more than Berkowitz’s warmed-over fusionism, but it isn’t reducible to individual liberty or limited government, and one cannot claim that America is “about” either of these things. Despite their wishes to the contrary, Christian and especially Catholic conservatives cannot correctly attach moral or religious significance to the founding principles of a Whiggish republic.

What I will say in Santorum’s defense is that he has made this mistake because he considers moral issues, especially those that concern the protection of life and family stability, to be vitally important to a healthy and flourishing culture. At times, Santorum seems to want to argue that eternal verities and pre-political loyalties should take priority in how we organize our society and our polity, and he is probably one of the few Republicans to have held federal office recently to understand that obligations to a community and the common good are not the same as accepting the encroachment of the state. Then he often veers off on some strange militaristic tangent or, as he did the other night, endorses the use of torture on detainees, because he has already made the earlier mistake of attaching too much significance to the nation-state. That in turn leads him to support measures that directly contradict the moral principles that he normally defends. Santorum’s views are the unfortunate mish-mash that results from combining Catholic social teaching with Americanism and militarism, as the latter two tend to overshadow anything interesting that Santorum might have to say from his understanding of the former.

On the specific question of Daniels’ proposed “truce,” Santorum is mostly knocking down a strawman, since the “truce” doesn’t really mean what he thinks it means, but his hostility to it is driven by the conflation of moral principles with the ideology of Americanism. This is the strain of Americanism favored by some Christian conservatives that holds that American “greatness” is a function of American “goodness,” and this strain does include the desire to engage in criticism and demand reform on moral issues, but it ultimately leads to another exercise in self-congratulation because it assumes that American power and the use of it are inherently morally justified and possibly divinely sanctioned. More than that, it yokes social conservatives together with supporters for U.S. hegemony, which reminds us that Santorum’s mish-mash of ideas is just an expression of the unfortunate “new fusionism” created to define the relationship between socially conservative Christians and militarists within the Republican Party.

For those who have been lucky enough to forget about this, “new fusionism” was the name Joseph Bottum gave to the marriage of convenience deeply principled alliance that had developed in the Bush years between pro-life conservatives and national security hawks:

Down somewhere in the deepest understanding of what America is for—somewhere in the profound awareness of what it will take to reverse the nation’s long drift into social defeatism—there are reasons that one might link the rejection of abortion and the demand for an active and moral foreign policy. Things could have fallen into different patterns; our current liberal-conservative divisions are not the only imaginable ways to cut the political cake. But neither are they merely accidental.

The opponents of abortion and euthanasia insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in domestic politics. The opponents of Islamofascism and rule by terror insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in international politics. Why shouldn’t they grow toward each other? The desire to find intellectual and moral seriousness in one realm can breed the desire to find intellectual and moral seriousness in another.

Of course, when it comes to starting new wars or escalating old ones, militarists are not the least bit shy in exploiting the rhetoric of “what America is for” to make opposition to the war seem anti-American. Rubin’s denunciation of Santorum is a useful reminder that things remain much as they have been for at least the last fifteen years in Republican intra-party politics. Many Christian conservatives go out of their way to align themselves with the militarists in the GOP, which includes making terrible compromises of principle to rationalize support for various wars and national security policies, but they get no credit for this from their supposed allies. For their part, militarists are free to ignore or disparage them and their issues. The moment that the Christian conservatives’ rhetoric or moral critiques become unwelcome to the militarists, the militarists make sure to put them in their place.

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