“The Snooty Eastern Establishment”: Rick Santorum Didn’t Restart The Culture War–It Never Stopped
Since the firestorm over contraception and religious freedom erupted, there seems to be some kind of consensus that the “culture war” has returned to the fore of American politics. The consensus is wrong. The culture war never stopped.
In fact, former Sen. Rick Santorum explicitly says so himself!
While campaigning in Columbus, Ohio, Santorum said President Obama’s “agenda” is,
not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.
I’ve been trying to make this case (though not in the way Santorum is making it) all along.
Out of political convenience or cultural distance, Beltway conservatives refuse to see this: Hardcore conservative opposition to Obama has always been cultural and theological. The pop-theological mainstream of American evangelicals has so thoroughly assimilated the ideal of American capitalism that any deviation, however modest, from it is tantamount to radical godless humanism. And, in an extension of an older intradenominational debate, conservative Catholics like Santorum deeply mistrust the ideal of “social justice” as championed by the Catholic left.
As I’ve argued before, the line between culture and economics is disappearing. Santorum has muddied this picture somewhat with rhetoric aimed at blue-collar voters to the effect that he doesn’t believe that if we just cut taxes, “everything will be fine.”
But such rhetoric, while interesting, is hollow; his economic agenda is full of tax cuts, and I see nothing in it that’s affirmatively different from Republican orthodoxy.
There’s a sense in which the proxy cultural war is nothing new. In Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment: Where History and Literature Intersect, historian Peter Viereck argued compellingly that the long strand of populism, from William Jennings Bryan to Robert La Follette to Joseph McCarthy, was all about “smashing Plymouth Rock” (i.e., the snooty Eastern Establishment). What McCarthy really hated about the likes of Alger Hiss wasn’t the communism per se, but his resemblance to the likes of Dean Acheson.
As McCarthy said in a famous 1950 speech in Wheeling, W.Va., the ones “who have been selling this nation out” were those
who have had all the benefits … the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in government that we can give. This is glaringly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouth are the ones who have been worst.
Unlike McCarthy, the Tea Party never felt it had to define Obama as an “enemy within”; born in Kenya, he was the “enemy without”!
Make no mistake. Such has been the animating spirit of the Tea Party all along. That’s what is fueling the Santorum “insurgency” right now. Culture war is the big picture. Fail to see it, you won’t fully understand the 2012 presidential campaign.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, February 22, 2012
Tone Deaf Mitt Romney Lacks The Common Touch
As is the case with many politicians, Mitt Romney’s greatest strength is also his biggest weakness. His experience as a corporate executive should make him a good presidential candidate in a year when the economy is bad. However, while the former liberal and former governor of Massachusetts can speak fluently about the economic big picture he is completely tone deaf when he tries to relate to the middle class families who are hurting so badly.
Romney can’t even relate to the average race fan. Yesterday, at the Daytona 500 track, a reporter asked him if he followed NASCAR. Romney said he didn’t follow the sport “as closely as some ardent fans, but I have some friends who are NASCAR team owners.” That’s Romney’s problem in a nutshell. He knows the owners of most corporations but doesn’t know any of the employees.
Friday, speaking in Detroit, which is the poorest city in America, Romney told voters that his wife “drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually.” Romney could promise to put two Cadillacs in every garage but it wouldn’t have the same ring as Herbert Hoover pledging to put a single chicken in every pot.
Last June, Romney told voters, “I’m also unemployed.” It’s easier for Romney to be unemployed than other people since he has stashed millions of dollars in bank accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. If he keeps talking like that he’ll still be unemployed next year.
Last August he told an Iowan, “Corporations are people, my friend.” If corporations are people, why isn’t the investment firm Goldman Sachs doing a long stretch in a federal pen for defrauding thousands of investors?
Instead of sympathy from the former Bain capitalist, voters get a 59 point economic plan and power point presentations. Then, of course, he asked Texas Gov. Rick Perry to agree to a casual $10,000 bet. I could go on and on, but I don’t have the space here to chronicle every misstep Romney has made when he tries to relate to working families.
Romney’s platform betrays his background as much as his personality.
Mitt supported the Wall Street bailout for bankers and billionaires but opposed the GM bailout that saved the jobs of thousands of auto workers.
Mitt supports the Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget which decreases federal spending for financial assistance for seniors who can’t afford to heat their homes but preserves the federal freebies to big oil to the tune of $4 billion a year.
Romney, like many other prominent politicians, is of the manor born. But Mitt, unlike the others, never developed the common touch. Franklin Delano Roosevelt came from the same privileged background as Romney, but he could talk to an assembly line worker or a farmer without sounding patronizing. When Bill Clinton told Americans in 1992 that “I feel your pain,” he meant it because he had felt the pain as a boy growing up in a poor town in Arkansas. In contrast Clinton’s opponent, the patrician president George H. W. Bush didn’t even know what a super market scanner was.
You can take Mitt out of the manor but you can’t take the manor out of Mitt.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, February 27, 2012
“The New Elite Aristocracy”: Mitt Romney’s Wealth Problem
Americans have come to expect a certain patrician baseline from their political class. Congress is stocked full of millionaires, and in the 2008 campaign Joe Biden was considered working class for riding Amtrak, despite having a net worth in the hundreds of thousands. No one bats an eye now when Rick Santorum whines about his meager means on the debate stage then releases tax returns revealing that he rakes in over $900K a year.
Yet, Mitt Romney’s wealth has served as an albatross to his campaign. We might be used to millionaires running for president, but Romney would rank among the richest handful of presidents if elected. His vast fortune is more than double the total worth of the past eight presidents combined. Newt Gingrich played on resentments of Romney’s wealth to great success in South Carolina before dialing back his attacks once the Republican establishment turned on him, accusing the former speaker of employing leftist critiques of capitalism.
Romney’s campaign has danced around the issue throughout the campaign, but over the weekend TPM‘s Pema Levy noticed a new strategy emerging from Romney and his friends:
On Friday, Romney had another one of his out-of-touch moments when he said that his wife Ann “drives a couple of Cadillacs.” But rather than try to walk back the comment, team Romney appears to have a new tactic for dealing with this problem.
When Romney and a surrogate were asked about Ann’s Cadillacs on the Sunday talk shows, their response was not to hide or apologize for Romney’s wealth. Instead, their message boiled down to: Yes he’s rich, get over it.
When questioned about the line on Fox News, Romney said, “If people think there’s something wrong with being successful in America then they better vote for the other guy.”
Mitt Romney wants to have it both ways. He sees himself as the fulfillment of the American ideal; the personification of the 1% that many middle class Americans believe they will one day reach, even if upward social mobility is increasingly difficult.
Yet, Romney also presents himself as attuned to the travails of normal working folks. He calls himself unemployed, claims to have once worried about receiving a pink slip, and litters his stump speeches with folksy tales of his normal upbringing (leaving out the years spent in a governors mansion) and starting his own, typical small business.
While the two personas appear to be at odds, Romney could get away with the contradiction if his wealth had been earned through other means. The self-made millionaire is a bedrock part of the American tale. But Romney’s struggles are as much about how he accumulated his vast fortune. Private equity is a largely unknown sector of the American economy, and its mysterious practices have a whiff of the under-the-table financial Wall Street instruments that brought economic ruin to the country. Romney earned most of his $21 million 2010 income, not from direct earnings, but from gains accrued off his investments. Rather than exemplifying the entrepreneurial spirit Americans love, the continued growth of Romney’s bank account highlights the divide between the normal working class and the new elite aristocracy whose fortunes continue to rise based on their already accumulated wealth.
By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, February 27, 2012
Rick Santorum’s “Liberty, Happiness And The Role Of Stuff”
Today’s Wall Street Journal features an op-ed in which Rick Santorum pledges that “…in my first 100 days as president, I’ll submit to Congress and work to pass a comprehensive pro-growth and pro-family Economic Freedom Agenda”. No one is more receptive than I to an “economic freedom agenda”, yet Mr Santorum’s has my bullshit detector howling like an air-raid siren.
In a recent speech at the First Redeemer Church in Cumming, Georgia, Mr Santorum said that economic policy focused on the accumulation of wealth is unhealthily concerned with “pursuing stuff”.
Property is just stuff. And America isn’t just about pursuing stuff. That’s one of the problems I have sometimes with our fellow conservatives, is that all we talk about — ‘Oh, Rick, presidential candidates just focus on stuff. Focus on taxing and spending, the economy. Don’t talk about anything else. Just focus on stuff. That’s what Americans really care about.’
Mr Santorum here is discussing rival interpretations of the idea of “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. Though it is nonsense to think that there is any one thing that “Americans really care about”, Mr Santorum is surely right that Thomas Jefferson and his fellows in the founding 1% had more than just the accumulation of property in mind. But he is wrong that they were committed to the pre-modern Catholic interpretation of freedom and happiness Mr Santorum invoked in his speech:
America and our founders understood that if we were just a bunch of folks that cared about stuff, we have a very, very narrow view of freedom. We have a very, very narrow view of what God’s call is in our lives. Because that’s why He gave us these rights. To pursue happiness.
…..’Happiness’ actually had a different definition, ‘way back at the time of our founders. Like many words in our lexicon, they evolve and change over time. ‘Happiness’ was one of them. Go back and look it up. You’ll see one of the principal definitions of happiness is ‘to do the morally right thing.’ God gave us rights to life and to freedom to pursue His will. That’s what the moral foundation of our country is.
As a matter of historical fact, the dominant conception of happiness at the time of the founding was the empiricist hedonism of John Locke. Locke had it that we are moved by our beliefs and desires, and that the master desire is to enjoy pleasure and avoid pain. As for happiness, Locke said, “Happiness then in its full extent is the utmost Pleasure we are capable of…” “Property” almost took the place of “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration precisely because the founders’ notion of happiness was so materialistic. Happiness is pleasure, and property or “stuff” is such an indispensable source of pleasure and bulwark against misery that the pursuit of property and the pursuit of happiness almost come to the same thing. For Christians such as Locke, and many of the founders, it was so important to heed God’s will not so much because divine commands are inherently authoritative, but because Heaven’s promise of infinite pleasure made Christian virtue a prudent bet.
Anyway, the likes of Jefferson would have agreed that to be happy is “to do the morally right thing” only to the extent that “to do the morally right thing” is already defined in terms of conduciveness to happiness. And the idea that the point of freedom is to do God’s will would have been affirmed only to the extent that it is due to God’s will that we are constituted to seek “the utmost Pleasure we are capable of…” The big political idea of the Enlightenment is that earthly happiness, not divine authority, is the only credible moral foundation of political authority. The long and short of it is that Mr Santorum is guilty of revisionist history. One only has to remember that John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, tried to make it illegal for Catholics to run for office in New York to get a sense of just how unlikely it is that the founders would have signed on to anything resembling Mr Santorum’s interpretation of liberty, happiness, and the role of “stuff”.
It’s no surprise, then, that Mr Santorum’s ten-point plan makes only incidental contact with economic freedom as many free-market-minded folk understand it. It may or may not be a good idea to rig our regulatory structure to make it easier for giant petrochemical companies to frack or build giant pipelines, but it’s unclear what it has to do with economic freedom. Do pipelines and fracking have something to do with God’s will in Mr Santorum’s mind?
Mr Santorum promises to “triple the personal deduction for children and eliminate the marriage tax penalty”. What does any of this have to do with economic freedom? If paying people to have children makes them more free, why don’t the childless deserve equal freedom? Because freedom is the freedom to do God’s will and God wants us to have big families? The “pro-family” elements of Mr Santorum’s plan are transparent attempts at social engineering through fiscal policy.
Mr Santorum says he’ll “cut means-tested entitlement programs by 10% across the board, freeze them for four years, and block grant them to states—as I did as the author of welfare reform in 1996.” This is unintelligible. If subsidising families through the tax code somehow adds to their freedom, then reducing subsidies to the relatively poor—to those who qualify for means-tested benefits—must logically decrease theirs. This is simply upside down. There is a compelling case that individuals require a certain material minimum to ensure that their economic liberties have real worth. If Mr Santorum’s cuts would leave Americans below that threshold, they would amount to an assault on the economic freedom of the disadvantaged.
If “economic freedom” means “a system rigged to the advantage of petrochemical companies and large middle- and upper-class families”, Mr Santorum’s proposal might have a lot to be said for it. I could be wrong, but I suspect it doesn’t really mean that.
By: W. W., Democracy in America, The Economist, February 28, 2012
“Mitt’s Legacy”: Health Reform Worked In Massachusetts
On February 8 the Center for American Progress hosted an event featuring Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, where she discussed the success of the Massachusetts health care reform law signed by former Gov. Mitt Romney (R) in 2006.
Attorney General Coakley discussed the framework of the law and explained how it’s played an essential role in providing unparalleled access to health care coverage for Massachusetts residents. She and CAP President Neera Tanden also discussed why the Affordable Care Act’s adoption of the Massachusetts framework fits comfortably within the United States’ constitutional authority.
In her introductory remarks, Tanden said that “the Massachusetts law, though sometimes maligned in our national debates, is actually an incredible success story, and has really demonstrated to the country how effective health care reform can be, and the Affordable Care Act can be.”
She mentioned the new CAP report “The Case for the Individual Mandate in Health Care Reform,” and said that Massachusetts’s embracing of the individual mandate in addition to its nondiscrimination over preexisting conditions has allowed its health care reform to flourish.
Flourish so much, Tanden said, that “98.1 percent of the state’s residents were insured at the end of 2010, compared to 87.5 in 2006, when the health care law started. Almost every child in the state is insured, and premiums in the individual market dropped 40 percent as the Massachusetts law was fully implemented.”
In her speech, Attorney General Coakley described the Massachusetts health care law, saying that “in some, but not all particulars, the Massachusetts Act of 2006 was really the prototype for what has become the Federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” Like the Affordable Care Act, Massachusetts’ reform includes a state-operated health insurance exchange, subsidies for low- and moderate-income individuals, and a mandate that all individuals who can afford health insurance purchase coverage, or an individual mandate.
Coakley said, “The law has resulted in the highest health care access rates in the nation, it has improved both access to and affordability of health care for hundreds of thousands of residents, while maintaining a high level of quality, and I think that’s important.
“We don’t talk about quality so much, but it’s part of what we are concerned about. Access, cost, quality: Ensuring two is relatively easy, if you want to do all three, not so much. And this has been, and is still, our challenge and our goal, and as a work in progress, I think the facts demonstrate that rather than our experiment proving a risk to the rest of the country, Massachusetts as a test laboratory has a lot to offer.”
She said, “We’ve seen significant improvements in the care of our residents. From 2006 to 2010, adults from all income groups, but in particular lower-income adults, experienced a significant decline in reported unmet health care needs due to cost. … we also have seen significant overall economic benefits for our state as a result of this.”
In terms of costs, she said, “[w]e’ve seen a sharp decline in the amount of spending on the so-called ‘free care,’ [when an uninsured person visits an ER, for example, and costs get passed on to the insured in higher rates] about $300 million, and that’s 33 percent less than we spent in 2006.” And nongroup or individual insurance premiums cost 40 percent less.
Attorney General Coakley also discussed why she believes the Supreme Court will not overturn the individual mandate. Massachusetts, she said, is giving a very positive endorsement for the mandate, and it is “a constitutional act by Congress.” It would be quite surprising if the Supreme Court overturned “the 70 years of precedent that have been set” by case law establishing what Congress has constitutional authority to regulate, including commerce such as health care.
After her speech, Attorney General Coakley spoke with Tanden about health reform. In response to an audience question about the constitutionality of the mandate, Tanden said that “when you say that people have coverage when they go to the emergency room, that immediately means that they’ll be cost-shifting, and the individual mandate is just a way in which people have the same responsibility for their own health care so they’re not shifting costs anymore.”
As Attorney General Coakley asserted, Massachusetts is an essential—and the only U.S. example—of the importance of the individual mandate in ensuring affordable access to health care for all.
By: Center for American Progress, February 27, 2012
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