“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.”
~from Paradise Lost
“This is not a political war at all,” Rick Santorum told Catholic students at Ave Maria college. “This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country – the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age. There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.”
More of the transcript here.
Santorum’s 12th century rhetoric is par for the course when it comes to the conservative movement during culture war season. Blending religiosity and politics is as old as either, but one still can’t help but cringe a little when you listen to the former Senator from Pennsylvania and his alleyway doomsday sermons. Perhaps it’s because we’ve had such a long bout of fiscal conservatism that the emergence of good old fashioned culture war trash-talking is a shock to the system.
So I won’t talk about the culture wars. I’m more interested in the right’s incoherence than in its issue-arsenal at the moment.
What I don’t understand – what just baffles me endlessly – are these dueling notions of America as the greatest, most super-fantastic nation on Earth and America as an immoral, decayed society under assault from all sides. We are God’s people but we’re also so vulnerable to Satan himself that we need a super-hero, super-holy president like Rick Santorum to save us.
The cult of American exceptionalism is, perhaps unsurprisingly, comprised by the same people who make up the cult of American decline. There’s an insecurity about it that I think shines a little light onto the conservative movement and the Republican Party. The pretense of toughness; the rah-rah-rah nationalism; the sense of victimization, of being endlessly put-upon. These are all forms within the language of American conservatism, or at least mainstream movement conservatism, that give shape to the broader dialogue on the right.
The “rebel complex” that Michael Brendan Dougherty described movement conservatives as having, forces its members to walk the thin line between American greatness and American decline. You can’t be a rebel against the Big Liberal Machine if everything is peaches and cream; but you have to manage this without being counter-cultural at the same time – without sacrificing that patriot street cred.
Now, you might argue that it’s not really contradictory to say that America is at once great and threatened with decline. But that’s not really what conservatives are doing. The juxtaposition of greatness and decay isn’t necessarily framed as your every day existential threat. Rather the two fraternize in tandem, complimentary and contradictory all at once.
America is invulnerable and yet deeply fragile.
We are the most morally superior people on the planet, but that morality is brittle.
Gays and leftists and secret Kenyan communist presidents threaten to shake and rend the very fabric of our at-once-mighty and yet oh-so-frail society.
Barack Obama is a socialist even though he governs like a moderate Republican.
We need less government (and of course government can never create jobs or do anything right) but we also need a savior in the White House who will yank us back from the brink and, while he’s at it, create jobs.
So we get a movement that is full of paradoxes; a movement that wants to shrink government without shrinking any of the really big, expensive parts of government like defense or Medicare. The result, just a couple years after the 2010 Republican sweep, is a natural, not-so-bewildering transformation of the Tea Party into Rick Santorum leading in the polls, of fiscal conservatism transforming into social conservatism.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled may have been convincing the world he didn’t exist. But I’m beginning to think the GOP is giving him a run for his money when it comes to pulling the wool over our eyes.
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What I don’t understand – what just baffles me endlessly – are these dueling notions of America as the greatest, most super-fantastic nation on Earth and America as an immoral, decayed society under assault from all sides. We are God’s people but we’re also so vulnerable to Satan himself that we need a super-hero, super-holy president like Rick Santorum to save us.
There are two things going on here, from what I can tell.
First, we have the long-standing belief that Satan will prioritizing that which or those whom are closest to God for his spiritual attacks. Saints have written about the path of holiness leading to greater temptations and the like.
Second, we have what I’d call an idolatrous idea of this country, an idea that’s considered in the abstract, divorced from the messiness of reality. Think of it as a Platonic Form, this exceptionalism of America. All the decadence and depravity, all the progressives and socialists and atheists and every other villainous devils under the sun are not real Americans or expressions of the American ideal. Obama harms America, but actually from the outside, because he’s not really American, you see. He’s nominally American, but not theologically American.
So what the country needs is a savior, a hero who can restore the less than real America that we all experience to the really real ideal America that has God’s blessing.
The USA is strong and virtuous, a mighty rampart against the evils of the world– as long as we remain focused and on guard. With our wealth and our technological skills, we can accomplish anything.
Sadly, however, with our greatness there are also weaknesses. Not all Americans understand the necessity for strength and alertness, not all understand the seductive perils of foreign cultures. Many foolishly believe they can indulge secularism and hedonism — movies, rock ‘n roll, ice cream, indiscriminate sex — without risk to their spiritual core. Even worse, other Americans have surrendered to the basest of desires — homosexuality, pacifism, liberalism, atheism — all shamefully indulged by TV-watching housewives and college professors and well-meaning but immature teenagers.
It’s not enough to keep a strong military and a watchful eye on the outside world, in other words. Decay and depravity are internal ills as well. But alas, bullets and napalm can’t be used against our domestic foes. The patriot numbers are too few, the knowledge of our peril too seldom made explicit. Our only sanctioned protections are our prayers, the ties that unite our families, the natural bonds that establish themselves when men of good character come together to defend their property and their loved ones. Act now, Americans!
Now, isn’t that simple enough?
You’re kidding, right?
David Cross had a bit very similar to this on his most recent standup album, if that’s your sort of thing.
My take on Santorum is that he despises the idea of politics. He’s on a crusade, after all, to save America while there’s still time. The Tea Party loves it, but the rest of America won’t. He’d get blown out of the water in November if he got the nomination.
Thanks – you’re not the only one to tell me this.
Edit to add: Which is to say, I’ve now watched it and am posting it. Appreciate the tip.
I have to admit that I kinda like Rick Santorum, at least more than the other Republican prospectives. He seems to say what he means, and panders less than the others: I remember in one debate, he said he’d bring top income tax rates back down to the Reagan minimum of 28% (as opposed to everyone else’s much steeper cuts), and was booed by the crowd, but held his ground.
It’s an abstract admiration though: I could never bring myself to vote for him. Nor, I suspect, could most Americans: he’s dour, whiny, and locked into his culture warrior perspective. But the boy has moxy.
I appreciate your view, Mr McSnarkSnark, but what you call Santorum’s “moxy” may be clinical delusion. Most of what he claims is reality isn’t, according to ordinary sources like history books, fact checkers, simple math, yet he seems to believe it is, he seems to actually believe he is on a crusade to save America from the forces of evil. His personal record exposes his delusions best: he claims to be a super Catholic/Christian but he gives little of his great wealth to help the poor.
Kain, your beloved “freed” market is a BEEG part of American Exceptionalism.
yet you dont mention it here.
I disagree. Take a look at especially Northern Europe. They have very free markets there. They’re often rated as even more free than American markets. It has nothing to do with it, though a mangled version (or slogan, really) certainly does.
Along the lines of what Kyle Cupp said, for people like Santorum, at least, I think you can look to Biblical representations of Israel to explain this contradiction. Israel was the chosen land for gods chosen people, yet they periodically slid into sin and so were destroyed. To many social conservatives, America is the new Israel–this is god’s chosen land for god’s chosen people, but if god’s chosen people don’t live up to their responsibility, they will be destroyed.
It is the specifics of the moral battle ground that baffle me. How contraception is a sign of moral decay and preventable child mortality is not is frightening.
It really is frightening.
“Rather the two fraternize in tandem, complimentary and contradictory all at once.”
It’s just a variation on the religious Heaven or Hell sales pitch…you’re on a thread dangling over the Pit but there’s salvation in the Kingdom. One dueling notion is emphasized over the other to motivate another to adopt a certain viewpoint or to reinforce an individual’s own beliefs. Or to legitimize or de-legitimize points of view.
Still a sales pitch, however.
Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of its own. . . . The wonder was, it was there at all. It had been ruined so often, that it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks. Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined, when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. . . . Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used — that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts — he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’ This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.
— Charles Dickens, Hard Times
What I don’t understand – what just baffles me endlessly – are these dueling notions of America as the greatest, most super-fantastic nation on Earth and America as an immoral, decayed society under assault from all sides.
These are the same people who were telling us in the 80s that the Soviet Union was the most super-powerful, dangerous empire with a super-fantastic, ruthlessly efficient military (that had to be countered with a massive increase in the US military budget); and simultaneously an immoral, decayed and miserable society because of the inherent corruption and rottenness of communism.
A decade alter, after we’d spent a shit-ton on military toys now rotting in the Arizona desert and run up huge deficits, we found out that the Soviet military had been decaying for decades and was basically a hollow facade, and everyone seemed to have known it but the US corporate media.
Actually a lot of those military toys are finding their way into police departments all across the country…
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