LVIV, Ukraine, 21 February, 2012— After a more than a week away from American news, using precious moments of unreliable internet service to keep in touch with friends and family, the opportunity to browse through American news stories for an hour is like a visit to a parallel universe.
Michelle Antoinette’s sixteenth vacation in three years is, sadly, completely unremarkable and not a sign that the universe has gone strange. Were she to be taking her down time now at Camp David, that would be a sure sign of a detour into the twilight zone.
But what’s this? Rick Santorum is now the big force in the GOP campaign? He’s challenging Romney in Michigan and Arizona? Santorum has Romney on the ropes?
Has the GOP become the party of Masoch? Who is Masoch?
Lviv, whence this is written, is the birthplace of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the man from whose name we get “masochism.” When visiting you might be tempted to try out the Masoch Cafe, where leather-clad servers will chain you to your chair and whip you while you eat your cake.
One shudders to imagine Santorum clad in leather and wielding a whip, but the GOP urge to dance with him, to let him lead it to a beating without even the reward of a piece of cake at the end, is dismaying.
It’s as if the party base is crying, “hurt me, hurt me more; please, sir, hurt me!”
Whatever psychiatrists might say of masochism, this is political madness.
Rick Santorum has said that states should be allowed to ban birth control pills and condoms if they like - even for married couples. He said of birth control, “It’s not OK. It’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
In his view, sexual behavior is strictly procreative, and anything else diminishes “this very special bond between men and women.”
Santorum’s views on abortion are as absolutist as they come. Most Americans understand that a fetus is more than a wart and that abortion isn’t morally equivalent to excising skin lesions, but they also think that women should not be required to carry a child to term under every circumstance.
Most of us fall somewhere between the extreme ends of free abortion for all women who want it, when they want it, for any reason they want it, and making a minor rape victim carry her attacker’s child to term.
Not Santorum.
His views on gays, working mothers, and women in the military are likewise out of step with most Americans. He now back-pedals on working moms - he plans to include some in his administration, suggesting that he no longer considers them morally leprous - but like any good, absolutist liberal, he’s ready to restrict rights without any strong evidence of compelling social benefit.
His views on sexuality are totalitarian rather than conservative. That’s no exaggeration, either: His strict views on social policy are little different than those once imposed on the Soviet Union.
That doesn’t make him wrong - only God knows whether He really exists and how He feels about American social policy - but a President Santorum would clearly be a religiously motivated president, and one whose deep religious convictions would let him interfere in private life to a degree more Soviet than American.
Social conservatism is a losing proposition at the polls. Rick Santorum couldn’t be elected president if the incumbent outed himself as an atheist and traded Michelle for a stay-at-home mom.
A lot of Americans are sick of Obama, but they aren’t crying out in heartfelt anguish for a return to a paternalistic, domineering state to replace the nagging, oppressively maternalistic nanny state that liberalism has bought us.
Ron Paul is far more in touch with the zeitgeist of America than Rick Santorum will ever be. Mitt Romney is at least likely to follow the Hypocratic injunction to “do no harm.” Santorum would be God’s and the GOP’s greatest gift to Obama, Reid and Pelosi, ever.
If Santorum is its choice, the GOP has gone from fractured to ridiculous in very short order. This is what happens when ego runs unconstrained by adult judgment and voters let their emotions blot out reason and good sense.
There will be no cake for the GOP.
After it endures a Santorum beating, its reward will be Speaker Pelosi and a strengthened Obama.
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