What Ayn Rand Novel Should You Read to Understand Republicans
With his virtual tie in the Iowa Caucuses, Rick Santorum is the last flavor-of-the-week conservative alternative to old Massachusetts Governor Paw Romney.
While it might be tough for voters to decide which Republican candidate all-time represents the principles of Ronald Reagan, it is easy to determine who is antithetical to the Gipper's values: that opponent of liberty is Rick Santorum.
WHEN REPUBLICANS LEANED TOWARD Freedom
Bourgeois Republicans favor traditional values, seeing families and religion equally essential to social lodge. In contrast to libertarians, they would sometimes allow regime to interfere with lifestyle choices, especially sexual morality. But almost conservatives, like libertarians, favor individual freedom and costless markets, with government strictly limited in scope and power; they rightly fear that the country is the greatest threat to the traditions they value.
Thus Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP presidential candidate wrote, "The first thing… [a conservative] has learned virtually man is that each member of the species is a unique creature. Man's most sacred possession is his private soul." The 1964 party platform stated that "Every person has the right to govern himself, to fix his own goals, and to make his own way with a minimum of governmental interference."
When Reagan ran for president in 1980, the platform began with a section entitled "Gratis Individuals in a Gratuitous Social club." It read "Information technology has long been a fundamental conviction of the Republican Party that government should foster in our society a climate of maximum private liberty and freedom of choice. Properly informed, our people equally individuals or acting through instruments of popular consultation can make the right decisions affecting personal or general welfare."
SANTORUM THE COLLECTIVIST
Santorum fundamentally disagrees.
According to Santorum, "This whole idea of personal autonomy—I don't think that well-nigh conservatives concur that point of view." Specifically, "I of the criticisms I make is to what I refer to as more of a libertarianish right."
Concerning libertarians—though he tends to confuse them with liberals—he says "They take this thought that people should exist left alone, exist able to practise whatsoever they want to do. Government should continue our taxes down and keep our regulation low and that nosotros shouldn't become involved in the chamber, we shouldn't become involved in cultural problems, you know, people should do whatever they want."
Santorum will have none of information technology. His book It Takes a Family was meant to be an respond to Hillary Clinton's Information technology Takes a Village. Nosotros see that his goal is not to move us away from regime interference with families. Rather, it is to move the government abroad from protecting private liberty.
Santorum argues that American liberals "say 'it takes a village' just really what their credo is based around is the private." No Rick! A village is a commonage, not an individual. Liberals favor bulk votes in villages trumping the liberty of individuals. Libertarians favor individual choice.
Santorum continues "We understand that the bones unit of society is the family, that the individual needs to be nurtured and supported and molded and shaped through this family structure, through the real village, which is the church building, the customs organizations…."
FREEDOM Every bit SLAVERY
Santorum's campaign banners read "Faith, Family, and Freedom." The inclusion of the last term is disingenuous. He would replace the "liberty to be left alone" with the Orwellian notion of "the freedom to attend to one's duties—duties to God, to family, and to neighbors." And if you don't want to travel the path of self-sacrifice that he, our would-exist ayatollah, prescribes, y'all will exist, in the words of Rousseau, "forced to be gratuitous" by the authorities.
In his breathtaking distortion of history—he can't be this ignorant—Santorum rejects the notion that the Founders endorsed the pursuit of individual happiness as a correct the protection of which is the purpose of government. Does he have any clue who Thomas Jefferson was? Does he have whatsoever apprehension that "happiness," along with "life" and "liberty" as listed in the Declaration, are attributes of individuals, not groups?
More OBAMA THAN REAGAN
Santorum has more than in common with Barack Obama than Ronald Reagan. He is a collectivist, only his collective is the family, not the village nor, as with Marx, order equally a whole.
Traditional conservatives and most libertarians acknowledge the importance of families in a free, stable social club. Just they empathise that the moral unit of measurement, the living, breathing entity that thinks and chooses and acts, and that has goals and aspirations, is the individual. They thus agree that in society with others individuals must seek values such as career and family unit based on common consent, respecting the rights of others.
Santorum might mouth support for free markets and limited government. But as a committed anti-individualist he is probably the Republican who would about endanger liberty. Those Republicans who favor what was the core value for Reagan and Goldwater had better understand what Santorum is all near earlier they enter the voting booth.
EXPLORE:
Near THE AUTHOR:
Edward Hudgins
Edward Hudgins is research director at the Heartland Institute and onetime director of advocacy and senior scholar at The Atlas Lodge.
cawthornreack1999.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.atlassociety.org/post/rick-santorum-the-most-anti-reagan-republican