With Sen. Santorum seems With Sen. Santorum seems headed for a profound defeat in Pennsylvania, it's worth pointing out this David Brooks column examining his sustained and serious support for antipoverty initiatives. I didn't often agree with him on means, but he's doubtlessly part of an emerging Republican faction that takes the problems of the downwardly mobile seriously and is trying, in starts and stops, to craft an ideology that reflects their concern. That's why, weeks ago, I lashed out against nostalgia for Goldwater by arguing that, "judging from Rick Warren and Sam Brownback and First Things, it's this new breed of religious Republican who may actually be willing to discuss social and economic inequality, not Goldwater."
Santorum is unquestionably in that group, and though his vision was weak and his steps towards a Christian economic progressivism timid, they were nevertheless important. The old Republican Party -- on strong display in this e-mail lambasting Santorum's poverty work -- is dying, incapable of responding to an era of extreme financial turmoil and turbulence. Tomorrow's fight will be between a resurgence of recognizable neopopulism on the left and a volatile mixture of family-focused progressivism and rearguard corporatism on the right. Santorum's book, It Takes a Family, is an early template of what that will look like, though one too trapped in the small government conservatism of yesteryear to craft a resonant policy platform. As Matt smartly puts it, there's a wrongheaded belief on the right that the problem with Bush was his abandonment of true conservatism for some harebrained "compassionate" strain. In fact, Bush's problem* was that he didn't go far enough. But someone else will.
*Also, he launched a polarizing, failed war on a foundation of lies and fear. It's sort of weird to watch conservatives ignore that, complaining instead that he spent too much on pork or something.
