At last: the Santorum Surge?

Six months ago it was a joke to suggest that Rick Santorum, the former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, would get his turn among the front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination. The joke was funny because the idea was both absurd and logical; Tea Partiers were burning through all the available alternatives to Mitt Romney, but even Herman Cain got his turn before Santorum did. In fact, reactionaries had to rush through a forgetful flirtation with Newt Gingrich before they finally turned to the Pennsylvanian, who seemed even more of a non-starter than most because he'd been humiliated in his last campaign. Now, however, he appears to be peaking just in time for tonight's caucuses in Iowa, and David Brooks has taken it upon himself to explain why to readers of the New York Times.

In short, Brooks sees Santorum as this year's Mike Huckabee, an economic reactionary who yet seems capable of empathy with the white working class. As Brooks observes, "The Republican Party is the party of the white working class," -- not, of course, in the sense that it serves that class's interests, but on the evidence that, for whatever reason, that demographic element prefers to vote for Republicans. If the white working class seems dissatisfied with Mitt Romney, Brooks explains that Romney is self-evidently not one of them, as a matter of class, not religion. Santorum, the columnist explains, is "the grandson of a coal miner and the son of an Italian immigrant" and unafraid to make populist-seeming arguments against "Goldwater-style conservatism" and supply-side economics. He speaks, Brooks claims, for all the Republicans who don't read Ayn Rand and who see moral and economic decline as related phenomena. In fact, that linkage seems to be what makes these members of the white working class -- the majority, apparently -- Republican.

It’s a diverse group, obviously, but its members generally share certain beliefs and experiences. The economy has been moving away from them. The ethnic makeup of the country is shifting away from them. They sense that the nation has gone astray: marriage is in crisis; the work ethic is eroding; living standards are in danger; the elites have failed; the news media sends out messages that make it harder to raise decent kids. They face greater challenges, and they’re on their own. The Republicans harvest their votes but have done a poor job responding to their needs....

[Santorum] is not a representative of the corporate or financial wing of the party. Santorum certainly wants to reduce government spending (faster even than Representative Paul Ryan). He certainly wants tax reform. But he goes out of his way in his speeches to pick fights with the “supply-siders.” He scorns the Wall Street bailouts. His economic arguments are couched as values arguments: If you want to enhance long-term competitiveness, you need to strengthen families. If companies want productive workers, they need to be embedded in wholesome communities.

As some critics have already pointed out, Brooks has overstated Santorum's working-class status a little. The ex-Senator's immigrant father was a clinical psychologist, it turns out, and Santorum himself sports an MBA as well as a law degree, albeit not with Ivy League vintage.  Brooks is correct, apparently, about Santorum distancing himself from supply-side economics, according to this report. At least one observer from the conservative media notes a similar trend. A less-sympathetic reporter, however, heard Santorum recently talk of "incentivizing" the economy with "supply-side principles," so the candidate hasn't exactly repudiated the doctrine, though he may now be less dogmatic about it than some of his rivals.

Whatever his current economic policy, it appears inextricably linked to Santorum's family-values moralism. Brooks's paraphrase above says as much. The candidate has observed that single-parent families are suffering more from the sluggish economy, and that encouraging marriage would bolster everyone's resilience -- but on that principle we might all fare better if we pooled our resources and lived on a barracks plan. That's not part of God's Plan, however, so it isn't part of Santorum's, either. His plan envisions "Judeo-Christian morality" (sexual category) as an essential element to a healthily functioning economy, and his rhetoric caters to the suspicion of some in the white working class that economic decline has followed from moral decline -- from America's falling away from God. Some of Santorum's pieties even give Brooks the creeps, but he seems to feel that religion shouldn't be a deal-breaker for the Santorum campaign. It shouldn't be -- as long as the candidate can defend any position he takes with an argument besides "God says so," and does not expect every American to submit to the bedroom rules of ancient nomads and a deity whose authority need not be recognized. The real question is whether those requirements are deal-breakers for Santorum, but that question is probably moot, since Brooks himself expects Santorum to lose in the long run, spent into oblivion (should he survive Iowa) by the Romney machine. In that case, maybe the question Santorum should ask himself is whether his doom would be less inevitable if he shelved the revival act and emphasized the empathy without passing judgment on poor people's living arrangements. Even then, his foreign policy, like that of all Republicans except Ron Paul, disqualifies him from serious consideration outside the GOP base, but he might at least have a better chance of asking for consideration outside the base if more of his opinions weren't ... well ... so base.