Culture of Death Watch
Requiem for a Neocon: The Tragedy of Rick Santorum
by Thomas J. Herron
As is its habit, from the years before the
downsizing mania hit its succession of owners, Philadelphia’s newspaper of
record has a big spread on the candidates for the major offices on the weekend
before the general election. In
2006 The Philadelphia Inquirer continued the tradition even as they
transitioned from the Knight-Ridder chain to local ownership and a continuing
firing of editorial staff. So as a
public service, to help the voters get to know the major candidates for
Pennsylvania’s governor and senator as well as the senate candidates across the
Delaware River in New Jersey, the Inquirer asked them a whole series of
questions to help people get to know the candidates, not just as proponents of
issues but as human beings. This means that the Democrats and Republicans at
the top of the ticket in New Jersey and Pennsylvania have to answer deep
questions such as “what kind of music do you like?” For the record Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum likes
country and his challenger, Bob Casey Jr., likes Top 40 while across the
Delaware both Tom Kean, Jr. and Bob Menendez both like rock & roll. Senator
Menendez added that, since he was from Hoboken, he loves the music of their
most famous native son, Old Blue Eyes himself. Be that as it may, that for me wasn’t the most revealing
question.
The Inquirer also asked all the candidates what magazines they
read, which was a little more informative. Pennsylvania Governor Rendell said
he gets so many briefings he has no time for magazines, while Tommy Kean reads The
Economist, and both Bobs, Menendez and Casey, like Time and Newsweek. But for me the most
revealing piece of information was of a mind formed in the Catholic version of
the neocon ideology and that it belongs to Mr. Santorum, who stated that he
read First Things, Crisis, The Weekly Standard, and
National Review. For
someone who had been writing in these pages that there was a neoconservative
movement and that there were noted Catholics, like Senator Santorum, who were
members of it, here was proof positive that a leading Republican Catholic
leader in the Senate had his mind formed from neocon sources. However, I have given up trying to
convince a whole group of young Catholic bloggers who speak in words that echo
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in his attempt at putting the
bureaucratic language of the Pentagon into the form of haiku, spoke of “unknown
unknowns.” The Secretary was
actually much more poetic saying,
“As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.”
In context I believe Mr. Rumsfeld was speaking about
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Be that as it may, for many of the Catholic bloggers hold that anyone
like the writers in Culture Wars who speak of a neocon penetration of
conservative Catholicism are just blowing smoke and that no such movement
exists, as we can’t define what is known and unknown about it. Speaking of Secretary Rumsfeld at the
moment the Inquirer were asking the candidates questions about their reading
habits and music tastes President Bush was stating that Donald Rumsfeld would
hold his job as Defense Secretary until the end of his term in 2009; which
pulled the rug out of the campaign of the Republican senate candidate in New
Jersey, Tom Kean, Jr., who called for Rumsfeld’s replacement over the failures
of the Iraqi campaign. President
Bush “stayed the course” on Mr. Rumsfeld until the day after the mid-term
election when he chose to “cut and run” to another Defense Secretary, when it
was too late to help Republican candidates like Tom Kean, Jr., who had, as a
group, gone down to defeat.
But the defeat of Pennsylvania’s own Senator Rick
Santorum by the state Auditor General, Robert Casey, Jr. was more massive than
the others. It was also more
shocking, because Santorum was the third most powerful Republican in the U.S.
Senate. It also involved the
defeat of one of the most stalwart defenders of President George W. Bush,
American military intervention in the Middle East, free market economics, and
all the other themes that have come to exemplify what is known as the contemporary
American conservative movement. In
the defeat of Rick Santorum for a third term in the U.S. Senate, the voters of
Pennsylvania were saying that they disagreed with the political philosophy that
their senator gleaned from National Review, The Weekly Standard,
and The Wall Street Journal.
Since exit polls indicated that the majority of Pennsylvania’s Catholic
voters voted for Casey over Santorum, it might be inferred that this group of
voters rejected the marriage of orthodox Catholicism and the neocon ideology
that Rick Santorum found in the pages of First Things and Crisis. Nothing in this article should be
inferred to indicate that Robert Casey, Jr. is the same consistent prolife
champion that his late father was, who was Pennsylvania’s governor from
1987-95. Mr. Casey, being a
contemporary Democrat has also proved himself beholden to the teachers’ unions,
which are a major factor in that party and publicly opposed aid to religious
schools, like the ones he attended and sends his children to. However, Mr. Casey and his Democratic
handlers, who gave him room to announce that he opposed abortion, turned the
election into a referendum on Senator Santorum’s support for the president and
the Iraq war, and this was enough in November, 2006 to cause a 59-41 percent
blow-out for the Democratic candidate.
The demise of the American conservative ideology has
been announced at regular intervals ever since at least 1964, when true
believer Barry Goldwater carried only six states in that year’s presidential
election. It was expected again
after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace a decade later, and again after Bill
Clinton’s first victory in 1992.
More recently much discussion in both the print and electronic media has
been undertaken analyzing the 2004 presidential election when George W. Bush
surprised many by winning reelection. Analysis continued a year later when
right-wing icon William F. Buckley, Jr. celebrated his 80th birthday at a White
House ceremony that also marked the 50th anniversary of the magazine he
founded, National Review.
The confusion is always pronounced because of the assumption that the
Republicans are a conservative party and that a defeat for them in an election
is a defeat for the movement.
On the margins there are always discussions about
how conservative Republicans like Nixon, the Bushes and their core advisors
really are, and whether Leon Trotsky or Robert Taft would be more comfortable
with George W. Bush’s second inaugural address when he spoke of freedom and
democracy being a “fire in the minds of men” for which the United States had
the responsibility to stoke everywhere in the world. Of course, Comrade Trotsky being from Russia, would
immediately recognize the quote as coming from Dostoevsky, which is more than
can be said for George W. Bush.
If indeed the contemporary American conservative movement that was
founded in the early ‘50s by Bill Buckley and Russell Kirk has in fact died,
the autopsy would show that it suffered from head wounds. Contemporary American conservatism died
because it ran out of ideas and started taking stuff from the intellectual
descendants of Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky and telling the world that they
reflected American values.
But perhaps Senator Santorum was being too modest in
his pre-election interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer. Senator
Santorum wasn’t just a subscriber to First Things and Crisis, he
was a monthly columnist for the latter, contributing his perspective from deep
inside the Beltway in From the Hill.
In it Rick Santorum would give his readers his take on what a prolife
member of the “family values” party was observing as the major issues of the
day. By the end of the senator’s
term, the hold of the Republican Party on the “family values” label was
becoming a subject for late night television comedy with the outing of
Congressman Mark Foley for propositioning male pages. Foley made the trendy
excuse for his behavior as an adult by attributing it to alcohol addiction and
the fact that his parish priest in Florida had taken him naked into a sauna
decades before. In Mr. Santorum’s
home state of Pennsylvania, a representative from a safe Republican district,
Don Sherwood, was in the headlines for having attempted to strangle his
mistress, who then went to the press.
These issues were never covered in the senator’s From the Hill column no
more than the fact that the people who had originally voted him to the House
and Senate from western Pennsylvania were angry at him, the devoted Catholic
family man and father of six children, whose wife gave up a career to home
school them, because the Santorums made no pretense of living in Pennsylvania,
maintaining a two bedroom house in the Penn Hills suburb of Pittsburgh for
voting purposes, which was rented out to relatives, while they resided in a
$750,000 mansion in Leesburg, Virginia, a suburb of the District of
Columbia. As some indication that
he actually believed that the ends justified the means for him and his family,
Senator Santorum then pressed the local Penn Hills public school district to
install a T1 line into his Virginia home so his children could attend the cyber
academy conducted by that district.
Karen Santorum would address prolife groups on the blessings of being a
stay-at-home mom while Rick would write a book, It Takes a Family, that
was interpreted as condemning working mothers, and the Santorums would not
discontinue the T1 line until it became a big issue in The Pittsburgh Post
Gazette. When the votes were
counted in the last election, the Pittsburgh area, the Senator’s base, showed
the same 20 percentage point margin for Robert Casey.
There was another issue in Senator Santorum writing
for Crisis magazine, namely, if he was so moral, why didn’t he cease writing
for that magazine when the editor and Republican party operative, Deal Hudson,
was exposed two years ago in the National Catholic Reporter, as having
sexually molested (to put it mildly) a female student while he was a professor
at Fordham. Again, this champion
of Catholic morality had a blind eye for questions that impacted his family and
associates. In the final days of
the campaign Rick Santorum accepted campaign help from another pillar of
virtue, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, a loud champion of the
prochoice position in the Republican Party, whose collection of wives,
mistresses, and girlfriends defies calculation.
But it would be argued that Santorum’s columns in Crisis
were only the meditations of a Catholic public figure on the major issues of
the day. And that would be true if
both of these neocon journals for Catholics had not adopted an expansive notion
of infallibility in what they claimed to be the Catholic interpretation of
contemporary questions. We have
only to look at the November issue of Crisis, which contains the Senator’s
cry for war against Islamofascism and his equating of the president of Iran
with Adolf Hitler (more on that in a moment) to examine some of the other
articles it contains. The former
disgraced editor, Deal Hudson, has the second of a two part article on how
Catholics should examine issues and vote in the forthcoming election. The
November issue also contains a very strange article, the cover story, by noted
Catholic blogger, Mark Shea, on an issue that we have covered at length in Culture
Wars, namely Is The Gospel of John Anti-Semitic? This is a very strange article in a number of ways. To begin
with, Mr. Shea has stated in his blog that his education consisted of a B.A. in
English from the University of Washington and has never implied that any graduate
or seminary studies in scriptural exegesis at any Catholic or Protestant
institution were part of his resume.
The article contains no references to the sources for his interpretation
of the Fourth Gospel, and we are left to wonder if the statements Shea makes
are his own or from unnamed authors.
The essay in question is also very strange from a
literary point of view, authored by someone who studied literature and
composition in college, because it doesn’t make clear the conclusions that are
obvious from Mark Shea’s interpretation of St. John’s Gospel. We would also wonder if the current
editors of Crisis were asleep when they reviewed the article and made it
their lead story for November. In
his introductory piece for the November issue, Brian Saint-Paul, Crisis’
editor is too busy condemning those Catholics who judged Rod Dreher’s “soul,
intellect, personal character and eternal destination” when it was proven that
this favorite of Catholic bloggers had secretly some months ago become a member
of an Eastern Orthodox Church but had still masqueraded as a Catholic for
apparently business reasons.
As best I can understand Mr. Shea’s piece, he seems
to say that this Gospel was addressed not to the unbelieving Jews but to Jewish
Christians in Ephesus or to the followers of John the Baptist who didn’t accept
Christ as the Messiah. Therefore, then and now, Jews who don’t accept Jesus as
the Messiah, are exempt from the condemnation in St. John’s Gospel that their
“father is the devil” as well as the one in Revelation which refers to Jews as
the “synagogue of Satan.” Only Jews (or gentiles) who believe in Christ’s
claims, which Mr. Shea equates to the “cafeteria Catholics” of our times, are
subject to His condemnations! Those who don’t accept them aren’t impacted
by what John the Evangelist was talking about. Specifically the author states:
As the conversation continues, we discover that not
all reject Him. Some ‘believe in
him.’ And this is where the plot
thickens. For notably, it is not
to the Jews who reject Him, but to ‘the Jews who had believed in him’ (Jn
8:31), that Jesus addresses His next remarks, including the shocking statement,
‘You are of your father the devil and your will is to do your father’s desires’
(Jn 8:44). In short it’s ‘interested
inquirers’-people like the unbaptized catechumens and ‘inquirers’ in the
evangelist’s own community-not hostile Pharisees and ‘outsiders,’ who are told
they are the children of the devil.
Perhaps this is why English major Mark Shea can’t be
too clear on this. He and some of these other converts from Evangelicalism (like Bill Cork, author of Anti-Semitism
and the Catholic Right, who claims that the sin against the Holy Ghost for
Christians is to hold a supercessionist position on the validity of the religion
of Judaism) believe in a form of dual covenant theology, although they would be
the first to scream when someone points this out. But the fact remains
that from this alleged “Christian” perspective, the smartest thing a Jew could
do would be not to believe in Jesus’ claims, because if you don’t, you are not
subject to His condemnations. It is humorous that Shea and some of
these other allegedly orthodox Catholic bloggers are constantly attacking
Robert Sungenis’ academic background even though (while I make no claims about
his doctorate) he does have a Master of Divinity degree from a reputable
Evangelical seminary, Westminster Theological Seminary, in the Philadelphia
suburbs, as do some of the convert bloggers who attack him. We may wonder if Crisis, which
prides itself on its Catholic orthodoxy, is promoting dual covenant
theology. Whatever the case, it
must be that writers like Mark Shea are presumed to speak infallibility on
doctrinal matters, since they don’t have to provide footnotes or show any
academic competence on their topic.
But Crisis’ companion magazine of neocon
Catholic thought, First Things, is also guilty of infallible commentary
on contemporary issues. In a lengthy article, that was much quoted in Catholic
blogdom, their editor Joseph Bottum also managed to write an article on
American Catholic culture of the past four decades that echoed without
attribution many pieces that have run over the years in Culture Wars. The title of the story in the October,
2006 issue of FT was “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano: Catholic Culture in America.” As I said it was interesting to note
that Mr. Bottum used as his theme the enduring value of a Spanish mission in
California to contrast it with the state of the contemporary American church,
as E. Michael Jones had done last year in the pages of Culture Wars when
describing the wedding of his son and daughter-in-law in the area. That wasn’t the only echo of Jones’
work in Mr. Bottum’s piece. Jones had recently quoted Robert Blair Kaiser’s
autobiography, Clerical Error, in a piece discussing the charges of simony
leveled by opponents of Nostra Aetate against Cardinal Bea and then
Father Malachi Martin, S.J. Father Martin, according to Kaiser, took money from
the World Jewish Congress in exchange for lobbying the council for the
declaration on the Jews.
Mr.
Bottum has the following statement about Kaiser’s autobiography towards the end
of his very long piece:
Clerical Error is an odd book, its
authorial self-obsession and downright weirdness making its accusations hard to
believe. But as a description of that generation, it really can’t be bettered.
Before his death in 1999, Martin would move to New York and become a
bestselling traditionalist of ambiguous clerical standing. Kaiser would go on
to publish volume after volume: each demanding ever-more-unlikely reforms, each
raging against the Church for its failure to be sufficiently like Robert Blair
Kaiser. If this is what Catholicism was like in those days, we are better off without
it.
What did Mr. Bottum find so hard to believe in what
what Mr. Kaiser wrote? Was it Kaiser’s description of the affair between the
Irish Jesuit and the Time reporter’s first wife? Somehow we doubt that. The thing that
these neocon Catholic journals want people to ignore is the clear statements
about Jewish groups lobbying at Vatican II in a book that has basically been
ignored since it was published in 2003.
For the record I met Robert Blair Kaiser in October when he addressed
the Philadelphia chapter of Voice of the Faithful, and while he is now an old
man he is still a “spirit of Vatican II” liberal who knew Crisis founder
Michael Novak and First Things’ Richard John Neuhaus when they were on
the left of the spectrum both religiously and politically. He also is aware that these magazines
serve non-Christian neocon masters as their first priority. While I may not agree with Mr. Kaiser
on many issues, he is not self-obsessed, weird or hard to believe when he
describes what he experienced at the Second Vatican Council. But people who read First Things
can dismiss my comments because they have another infallible teacher in Mr.
Bottum.
So the closing thoughts I will present on Rick
Santorum’s essays in Crisis have to be judged as no worse than a lot of
other strange stuff in these neocon magazines for Catholics. In the November, Pennsylvania’s junior
senator took time from his busy reelection campaign to contribute one of his
occasional From the Hill pieces describing the so-called Global War on Terrorism
which America has been involved with for the past five years. It was a call to the Christian soldiers
who read these neocon Catholic journals to be prepared for more sacrifice and
not to question what President Bush required of our nation. Rick Santorum stated:
The ideology we are fighting is not terror;
terrorism is only a tactic. The ideology we fight is Islamic fascism. Islamic
fascists are the heirs to the Nazis and others we fought in World War II. The
foot soldiers of this worldwide jihadist movement subscribe to a radical,
perverted form of Islam, and they seek to dominate or destroy the United States
and freedom-loving people everywhere…. Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, they have
expanded their presence to nearly every continent. They even have invaded the
Americas through Iran’s ties to the Cuban and Venezuelan dictatorships… This is
a war of attrition, and we either fight the fascists or perish…. The president
is right: This is our hour to lead by promoting the only possible antidote to
radical Islam in the Middle East—democracy. As leading Middle East historian
Bernard Lewis says, “We free them or they destroy us.” We can seek political advantage to win
the next election, or we can confront the reality of this hour and fight
Islamic fascism. On my watch, even though I am facing a challenging reelection
campaign in Pennsylvania, I am going to confront this threat. Islamic fascism
threatens our civilization, and I pray we have the courage to defeat it.
Actually what Rick Santorum wrote in his Crisis
column was just an excerpt from a very long campaign speech which he gave
incessantly in the final weeks of the campaign across Pennsylvania titled “The
Gathering Storm.” Since we have
been speaking of unattributed echoing among neocon Catholic authors of what has
been published in Culture Wars and Fidelity, the speech, which
was reprinted verbatim in the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer and other
media outlets was, bore a title
which was taken from one of the volumes of Winston Churchill’s history of World
War II. Among President Bush and
his Republican stalwart supporters of our invasions of the Middle East the
allusions are always to Churchill and the Battle of Britain because we’re
supposed to believe that the time is 1940 and we’re facing the Adolf Hitler du
jour. In fact, read in its
entirely, Senator Santorum’s speech was incredible for its bloodthirstiness. It
read like one of Victor Davis Hanson’s writings on steroids.
One thing about the devout prolife Catholic senator
from Pennsylvania, there is no obfuscation in his words: the current president
of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the Hitler of our time, and Islamofascist Iran
intends to dominate the earth just as Nazi Germany did six decades ago,
Santorum’s words recall the phrase of the late libertarian economist Murray
Rothbard about the “Hitler of the Month Club.” Anyway, we know this character Ahmadinejad is bad because he
has denied at least part of the Holocaust story and was probably behind a
jihadist plot to bomb the main synagogue in Prague during the recent Jewish
High Holy Days. The senator points
with pride to his sponsorship of legislation pushed by prominent neocons titled
the Iran Freedom and Support Act, which pushed the American government on a
course to overthrow the leadership in Tehran and which that government might
view as an act of war against it.
Turning to our own hemisphere, Senator Santorum
noted that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has entered into an alliance with Iran; he
then goes on to triangulate Chavez, Ahmadinejad, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro as
being in league to destroy American initiatives for economic and political
liberalism in Latin America. Rick
Santorum did not include Sandinista leader of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, who
apparently has, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, shed his Marxist philosophy for
nationalism and returned to the Catholic Church. Former Comandante Ortega was more successful in his
November, 2006 reelection to the presidency in Managua than was the senator
from Pennsylvania in his reelection bid, despite heavy handed interference from
the U.S. State Department.
While his stump speech doesn’t state this openly,
Rick Santorum argues that nationalism, whether practiced by Iran, Venezuela,
Russia or Nicaragua, makes a nation the enemy of the United States, unless it
subscribes to the global economic liberalism mandated by the elites of
Washington, D.C. Any sign of
intransigence in this regard means that we then have the moral duty to crush by
any means necessary. Senator
Santorum believes in “free trade,” which means enmeshing the nations of the
world into larger and larger trading blocs, which destroys the economies of
both advanced nations like the U.S. and poor countries like Nicaragua, sending
good-paying jobs to Third World countries and millions of impoverished farmers
to el Norte as their traditional way of life gets destroyed in the
globalization process. Anyone who
objects to this process on a nationalistic or religious basis, whether from
Islamic, Catholic, or Orthodox principles is, to the devout Catholic Senator
Rick Santorum, an enemy of this country and must be destroyed.
And that brings us to the tragedy of a good Catholic
family man like Rick Santorum who did try to champion the Church’s position on
life issues like late-term abortions, stem cell research, gay marriage and a
host of other issues during his years in Congress. The tragedy was not that he was defeated in the last
election; the tragedy is that he didn’t understand and accept the totality of
the Church’s moral teachings. In
this he allowed his conscience to be formed by non-Christian neocons and their
Catholic camp followers like the founders of Crisis and First Things.
Santorum accepted as infallible the prowar and procapitalist spin of a former
leftist like Michael Novak when he interpreted away the clear pronouncements of
two successive popes on the immorality of America’s war in the Middle East, as
well as the clear prolabor thrust of Catholic social thought from the time of Rerum
Novarum.
Jewish Critic
It is interesting that Senator Santorum would quote
a Jewish critic of Islamic culture like Princeton’s Bernard Lewis in his From
the Hill column. In May of 2006
the Philadelphia World Affairs Council held a luncheon in Dr. Lewis’ honor, at
which such notables as Vice President Cheney and Senator Joseph Biden of
Delaware were present. The
Philadelphia media didn’t report if Rick Santorum was there, but he was in town
a month later at Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum meeting where according to his
official press release he was “honored” to be speaking with Israeli Likud
politician Natan Sharansky on the topic of “Religious Freedom, Democracy, and
the Middle East.” Mr. Sharansky
has become something of a hero to neocon Republicans in Washington with even
President Bush stating that he had read his latest book, The Case for
Democracy, which opined that the Arabs need to become “democratic” before
Israel and America have to deal with them. Natan Sharansky used to be Anatoly Sharansky, a Communist
Party member who ran afoul of his party in what used to be the Soviet Union and
when imprisoned launched a world-wide campaign to be allowed to immigrate to
the “true homeland of every Jew.”
Once in Israel, Mr. Sharansky gravitated to the hard-right of the
Israeli political spectrum, which denies the right of Palestinians to return to
what was their homeland. Hence, the book on the Arabs needing to prove their
devotion to democracy. In this he
is only a little more diplomatic than another Israeli political figure who
immigrated from the Soviet Union, Avigidor Lieberman, who has recently been
made the Israeli government’s point-man in seeking a “final solution” to what
they, and Rick Santorum, believe to be the threat from potential Iranian
nuclear weapons. Mr. Lieberman
does not demand that the Arabs adopt democracy—only that Israel expel all
remaining Arabs from all the territory it occupies.
Which proves that the godly Senator Santorum had a
very interesting choice of friends, especially when you include in that circle
the host for the Middle East Forum, Philadelphia’s Daniel Pipes, who as we have
stated earlier was morally responsible for the Danish cartoon series critical
of Islam and Muhammad which caused riots in the Muslim world about a year ago. Shortly after the Forum’s meeting in
Haverford, Pennsylvania in June, 2006, the Israeli Likud government, of which
Mr. Sharansky has been a member, used the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by
Lebanese Hezbollah forces as a pretext to conduct a month of invasions and
aerial bombardment of the civilian infrastructure of that nation, while
Republican senators like the very Catholic Rick Santorum supported every bomb
that Israel dropped. Which makes
you wonder, does reading magazines like First Things and Crisis
cause a danger to the Catholic faith?
We hope that Senator-elect Casey sticks with Time and Newsweek.
Thomas J.
Herron lives in
This article appeared in the January 2007 issue of
Culture Wars.
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