Here's to the Academics

A few months back, conservatives took umbrage at the results of some social science research conducted by David Campbell and Robert Putnam. The duo's findings threw cold water on the right's preferred narrative framing the Tea Party as disgruntled small government types with a laser-like focus on fiscal policy:

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

Though these two were derided in some corners as egghead academics pushing a liberal agenda, the Republican primary is putting some of their findings to the test. And, surprise, they were spot on, as the candidacy of Rick Santorum is demonstrating. Santorum, of course, is a classic big government conservative, happy to wield the levers of government to advance a radical social conservative agenda. And there's no doubt he craves a significantly larger presence for religion in the public sphere and in public office. And the Tea Party is eating it up.

Writing yesterday in the libertarian magazine Reason, bona fide fiscal conservative Gene Healy (the vice president of the Cato Institute) seemed none too happy about the Tea Party turning out to be theoconservatives:

The Tea Party movement was supposed to represent an end to this sort of moralistic Big Government conservatism. Animated by "fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free markets," as the Tea Party Patriots' credo put it, the movement had supposedly put social issues on the back burner to focus on the crisis of government growth.

At one time, Santorum seemed to share this view of the Tea Party -- and it troubled him. In that same talk in Harrisburg, he said, "I've got some real concerns about this movement within the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement to sort of refashion conservatism and I will vocally and publicly oppose it."

Santorum needn't have worried: In this year's contests, he's regularly drawn more support from Tea Party voters than Ron Paul, who has been described as the "intellectual godfather of the Tea Party movement."

Exit polls show Santorum beating Paul among self-described Tea Party supporters in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida, trailing him only in independent-heavy New Hampshire and Nevada.

A recent Time magazine symposium asked leading thinkers on the Right, "What Is Conservatism?" Anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist offered this answer: "Conservatives ask only one thing of the government. They wish to be left alone."

Tell that to Santorum, whose agenda rests on meddling with other people, sometimes with laws, sometimes with aircraft carrier groups.

"This idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do," Santorum complained to NPR in 2006, "that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn't get involved in cultural issues ... that is not how traditional conservatives view the world."

That version of conservatism has a new standard bearer, and he's rising in the polls.

Nice job on hitting the nail on the head, Campbell and Putnam.