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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