Norman Leahy hits the nail on the head:
It’s an interesting divergence and one I believe we are seeing, at least to some degree, within Virginia’s conservative ranks. And wouldn’t you know it? The roots of these differences were nurtured right here in Virginia (George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson make cameo appearances in Rauch’s piece).
A good friend of mine explained to me during my candidacy for House of Delegates earlier this year why he believed taxes were just as important an issue as abortion. The reasoning was this: the more power government has, the more power it has over the lives of the governed.
Santorum’s discourse on freedom (and no, I have not read his book; only excerpts, though I plan on reading it now) is a classic discussion on what precisely freedom is. Santorum is describing in a very poor fashion a view held by the late Bishop Fulton Sheen. Rather than freedom being the right to do what one pleases (which Santorum correctly rejects), freedom is the right to do as one ought (which Santorum correctly accepts).
Santorum’s problem thus far seems to be that he places the government as the arbeiter of right and wrong, whereas Sheen and the vast majority of the Catholic heritage Santorum is trying to pull upon would argue that it is the natural law that dictates what one ought to do — not government.
How does the government play a role? Certainly we don’t have the freedom to murder or rape, and the government rightly orders society by taking the natural law and forming human laws that conform to it.
Where Santorum goes disasterously wrong is when he extrapolates “ought” into “attend to one’s duties — duties to God, to family, and to neighbors.” Do we have these duties? Certainly. Should we fulfill these duties? Certainly. Whom should force us to do so against our free will? No one.
Herein lies the difference between liberty and license. Liberty preserves freedom, license destroys it. But just as license on the part of individuals is a perversion of freedom, so too is license on the part of goverment.
Government by its nature cannot create freedom. Government constrains by design, and in a free society it constrains those elements that seek to destroy society. Too much government constrains a free society, and when a threshhold is crossed, that society ceases to be free.
Santorum’s error is that he obligates virtue on behalf of the state. Santorum confuses freedom with action. Freedom is a state, acts occur within that state of being, and a government which demands of its citizenry virtuous acts is no longer free.
Here is where Santorum neglects to look back upon his Catholic heritage. St. Thomas Aquinas eloquently deals with the topic of a virtuous society and the source of laws. Concerning whether government has an obligation to create a virtuous society through lawmaking, Aquinas has this to say:
Human government is derived from the Divine government, and should imitate it. Now although God is all-powerful and supremely good, nevertheless He allows certain evils to take place in the universe, which He might prevent, lest, without them, greater goods might be forfeited, or greater evils ensue.
Accordingly in human government also, those who are in authority, rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain greater evils be incurred: thus Augustine says: “If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.”
Lest greater evils be incurred. That is precisely the problem with Santorum’s understanding of freedom. It is an understanding that comes not from a Catholic or Scholastic understanding of freedom as an obligation, but rather spins the order on it’s head by arguing the state has an obligation to impose freedom — a non sequitur argued not by Aquinas and other liberty-minded philosophers, but by Russell Kirk.
Norm Leahy is right. There are two understandings of conservativism in America today, and the fissures are already beginning to show.
Modernist defenders such as Santorum believe the state has an obligation to impose upon people the obligation to perform free and virtuous acts. But there is an older, much more sophisticated and eloquent defense of freedom rooted in Aquinas, Jefferson, and the Scholastic and classical liberal tradition upheld by Goldwater and Reagan; that individuals are to be trusted before society, that freedom to choose the right is as important as the obligation to do what is right, and that individualism is the best resource and defender of freedom against the social imposition of the state.