What we hear from Rick Santorum is a profound renunciation of modernity, of the impulse to liberate thought and pleasure, in favor of a far harsher world that submits to authority and instructs its young by the light of the family hearth. Superficially the authority Rick Santorum promotes is that of Christian religion and Christian values. In this sense his politics are fundamentalist in nature, and reactionary, and they resemble the many other instances of fundamentalist rejection of modern world development––Christian fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, patriarchal fundamentalism, economic fundamentalism. But his espousal of an economic system derived from 19th-century industrialism is only a deferred espousal of modernity itself.
He believes in a universal divinely ordered economic system in which coal miners descend into the earth in unregulated mines and communities live in the shadow of coal-fired plants as the sun darkens. In this world he would be a prophet. In this world he would give birth to many miracles and lead a tribe of asthmatic children toward his clouded paradise where they will await assent from this world which we may mistreat because it is not our true home.
In short he is an hallucinatory shill for the new medievalism of the global order.
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