I must confess to a special pleasure that the sanctimonious little twit Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania lost. He is the worst of the breed of Big Government Conservatives, not only wanting the government in peoples' bedrooms but also endorsing almost every federal welfare program that holds out the false hope of helping the poor or beefing up families.
Here's a recent piece by Laurence M. Vance, who actually read Santorum's book, "It Takes a Family," which I haven't brought myself to do yet. Vance is the kind of evangelical Christian who not only doesn't want the government to use other peoples' taxes to promote his religion, but believes excessive contact with politics demeans and cheapens Christianity. Perhaps that persuasion will grow in the wake of the election.
Anyway, Vance checked Santorum out with The New American's congressional rating service, which emphasizes constitutionalism (Ron Paul generally scoress 100). In the four ratings for the 109th Congress Santorum got 60, 20, 22 and 70. Not exactly sterling.
It's so easy to be a "compassionate conservative" with other peoples' money. But it's consistent for Santorum, who thinks the government needs to do a lot of supervision of us wayward Americans, and actually said that the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" was unfortunate because it had gotten America in a lot of trouble. He seems to instinctively distrust freedom, and the fact that so generally sensible a person as Peggy Noonan actually wrote a column saying she would miss him if he lost says something exceedingly unattractive about modern "conservatism."
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Santorum so was willing to blow billions of dollars on highly dysfunctional programs -- the deficit-ridden Amtrak system being just one example -- that I don't know how he could call himself a conservative and could keep a straight face.
Based on his book, Santorum was not the kind of conservative that those of us weaned on Barry Goldwater viewed as conservatism. But there's a more authoritarian brand of conservatism extant, perhaps rooted in European monarchism or authoritarianism -- I'm tempted to call it darker -- that sees humanity as a breed that requires a great deal of supervision and control by the "better" people in society and gives short shrift to the idea that ruling others almost always always makes "better" people worse.
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