Rick Santorum can occasionally make a lot of sense, even if he tends to do it unintentionally. Remember back in the fall of 2012 when he said this?
“We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side,” Santorum said in a speech to the gathering of conservative activists at a Washington hotel.
It wasn’t entirely clear who was included in Santorum’s “we,” but it wasn’t synonymous with members of the Republican Party. Little Ricky was speaking to conservatives. And he was telling them pretty plainly that “smart” people would never agree with conservative ideas. He didn’t see this as an indication that there might be anything wanting in conservative ideas, but he did know that smart people simply don’t believe in them.
There’s a degree to which this is true, but only if you restrict yourself to certain types of right-wing ideas. There are plenty of smart people who want a strong defense, more local control of government, lower taxes, stronger punishments for crime, and have a preference for traditional religiously sanctioned family and gender roles. But these are not really conservative ideas in the modern, contemporary sense. They are just Republican ideas.
To see a conservative idea, you need to keep listening to Santorum:
And, in discussing gay issues, he compared gay people getting married to napkins, saying: “I can call this napkin a paper towel. But it is a napkin. And why? Because it is what it is.”
You see, this is taking a simple idea (marriage is traditionally between a man and a woman) and turning into something so stupid that no smart person would agree with it.
Another example of the conservativization of a basic idea is going from concern that a porous southern border could be an entry point for terrorists looking to do us harm and taking it in this direction:
Recently, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) has beens sounding the alarm about a new and insidious plot involving so called “terror babies.” Infants are sometimes known to be terrors in their own right, but this diabolical plan involves terrorists sending pregnant women into the US to birth their America-hating spawns. The mothers and their kids then return home where, the congressman says, the children “could be raised and coddled as future terrorists”— and later, “twenty, thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life.”
There may be smart people who oppose reproductive rights for women or support spending absurd amounts of money trying to keep every last person from entering this country illegally, but there are no smart people who believe that there are terror babies. That’s just a conservative idea, not something anyone intelligent would entertain as a serious possibility.
I know that the meaning of words change over time, and “liberal” and conservative” are not exceptions. What I’m telling you is what “conservative” means today, not what it used to mean or what it ought to mean. Today, “conservative” means “fucking insane.”
And the Republican Party has been taken over by the fucking insane.
And let me tell you something about that. There’s value in having someone run for president as a Republican who is willing to stand up to the lunatics. Jon Huntsman made a half-hearted effort at it four years ago, and we saw how far it got him.
This time, it will be Jeb Bush who makes the effort. The elite, smart people in the media will love Jeb for it, even when he takes one step forward and three steps into the fetid bog. Most members of the media do hate modern conservatives because modern conservatives are submental, but they actually like many Republican ideas, whether we’re talking about Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt.
Traditional Republican ideas have their strengths and shortcomings, as do traditional Democratic ideas. But there are no strengths in Donald Trump’s birth certificate ravings or Rudy Giuliani’s certifiable comments about the president’s love of America. Mike Huckabee isn’t saying anything with merit about U.S.-Israeli relations and Ben Carson is making no sense when he advocates the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
It goes without saying that virtually nothing that Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Steve King, or dozens of other conservative lawmakers and politicians have to say about the president, entitlements, Obamacare, Benghazi, or rape is coherent or acceptable to “smart” people.
What they have to say isn’t even supposed to make sense in any ordinary way. They aren’t engaging in a debate where facts are brought to the table, enhanced, emphasized, deemphasized, shaded, and molded to persuade. They aren’t engaged in political spin. What they’re doing is engaging in a political argument in which reality is completely cast aside. They aren’t a part of “the reality-based community” and they don’t want to be. They won’t win on that playing field so they refuse to play on that playing field.
This decision may be the only rational decision that they make.
We can call them a freak show traveling in a clown car all we want, and naturally we are never going to be “on their side.” But conservatives control our Congress right now and they aren’t too far from the White House.
Jeb is a Republican who holds many traditionally conservative positions, and he’ll pander to contemporary conservatives to try to win the nomination, and he’ll have to rely on them and put them in positions of real power if he actually becomes president. But he isn’t actually insane and he hasn’t completely abandoned reality as a playing field.
So, the media will love him. Insofar as Jeb reminds people of his father, even some liberals will see in him some hope for a restoration of national sanity. But Jeb is no savior. The patient is terminal, and Jeb’s like a last ditch pointless round of chemo.
Conservatives own the Republican Party, and their grip won’t be loosened by a Republican, any Republican, winning the White House in 2016. The only way conservatives can be defeated is by losing so consistently that being insane is no longer a short-cut to political office and power.
