Orwell Santorum

Rick Santorum got high marks for his near-victory speech in Iowa. In the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne called it "by far the best speech Tuesday night." Santorum's address impressed me, too, but for a different reason: his astonishing endorsement of feudalism, wrapped up in a soaring tribute to something he called "freedom." A sharper illustration of the bad faith of at the heart of conservative rhetoric I never have seen in all my life.

He began by doing what conservative presidential candidates always do in this season of economic privation: talked about his family's one-time economic privation. It wasn't off the cuff. "As you know," he said, "I do not speak from notes, but there's a couple of things I want to say that are a little more emotional, so I'm going to read them as I wrote them." And what were the words he so carefully wrote to read at this, his moment of triumph? That his grandfather came to the United States from Italy in 1925: "because Mussolini had been in power now three years, and he had figured out that fascism was something that would crush his spirit and freedom and give his children something less than he wanted for them." He came because—why else?—he loved freedom.

(Brief digression: he says his grandpa came in 1925. Someone should look into this. The racist Immigration Act of 1924 had the previous year made it very, very difficult for anyone from such a dirty, disgusting, non-Anglo Saxon place like Italy to emigrate to the U.S. Maybe Santorum got the date wrong. In any event, the very fact of the 1924 law is another disturbance marring the official Republican cult of America-Is-And-Always-Has-Been-Perfect that I will be discussing below. End of digression.)

So, from the unfreedom of Mussolini, he marched into the rosy-fingered dawn of American freedom—which Santorum described thusly:

"He left to the coal fields of Southern Pennsylvania. He worked in the mine at a company town, got paid with coupons, he used to call them."

Let us dwell on that. Grandpa Santorum lived in a company town where he was paid in "scrip" in lieu of cash. That means what his grandson calls "freedom" was, well and truly, something more like slavery.read on ...