The Rise of Rick Santorum

Well, it looks like it's Santorum's turn to be the Flavor of the Week in this Republican primary.

This is something that scares me deeply. Mitt Romney is a classic politician, in that he can be trusted only to say whatever will put him farther ahead in the race in question. He was solidly center of the road during his time as Massachusetts governor, to take one example, going to far as to seek Planned Parenthood's endorsement of his campaign. To be fair, even that kind of centrism is farther to the right than I prefer, truly... but at least it's something I could live with, for four or even eight years. That of course is assuming he is more center-right, in contravention of the way he's been acting this primary season.

Rick Santorum is a right-wing ideologue in the sense that I am a left-wing ideologue - he is a True Believer in the cause of conservatism. Really I shouldn't need to say any more than that to clarify why I fear him and his ideas taking the Presidency; we are representatives of diametrically opposed visions of the way American should be.

But I'm going to point out some things anyway. Not to clarify my intense dislike for him, but to demonstrate why he and I are not the same. While we are both firebrands, his vision of America is destructive in a way that mine is most assuredly not. In short, I explain what precisely I fear to show why everyone should fear his ideas and his vision of America.

I could point to specific policy ideas: his stance on certain military issues is beyond ridiculous. (He is also not a fan of gays openly in the military, despite that now being a settled decision.) Women and gays should, by all rights, be able to serve in the military just as well as anyone else, and inventing this kind of random pseudo-sciencey "women are more emotional" bullshit displays a fundamental disrespect for half of the human population.

Or I could suggest that he has no idea what he's saying. Requiring religious institutions to cover contraceptives is not new, given that the groups complaining often employ people who are not Catholic and should not be bound by Catholic dictates. There already is a narrower exception for specific groups that do employ primarily members of their same religion. And the idea that Rick Santorum should make this about government control is patently absurd. This is the same Rick Santorum who believes the government should be able to ban contraceptives outright, is it not?

And in large part because of his ideology, he is simply immune to criticism. The idea that the modern Republican Party spouts anything even approaching the truth on a regular basis is absurd. While I am so rarely called out on anything I believe, I would like to think that I am capable of listening to valid criticism and changing the way I act, however high my standard of "valid" might end up being.

For Santorum and the conservatism he represents, though, nothing short of a scorched earth policy will ever be appropriate. If Rick Santorum ends up in the White House from January 2013 onward, the society he will work to create will be frightening to behold: a regression to the world of centuries past, where women could be shoved back into the kitchen, where the One True Religion dominated society and government, and where the rich happily took all the money while oh-so-generously handing out tiny scraps of food to the poor.

What scares me more than anything else is that a large part of the Republican Party seems to agree with him.