Barack Obama is often maligned by social conservatives such as Rick Santorum as, in Santorum’s words, “a person of the left.” According to Santorum, Obama “is someone who believes in big government.” That support for big government is apparently worse than support for a big society.

If Obama is a big government kind of guy, then Santorum is a big society kind of guy. In Santorum’s world, colleges and universities are centers of indoctrination for political correctness and “values that are, unfortunately, the dominant values” in the United States. Santorum objects to Obama’s support for higher education because “he wants to remake [students] in his own image.” If students are subject to such indoctrination, Santorum warns, parents will be unable to “remake their children into their image.”

That just begs the question — is Santorum opposed to indoctrination, or is he opposed to indoctrination that he disagrees with?

Aside from the fact that it is patently false that institutions of higher education are about indoctrination, to say as much is to ignore the alternative: that, instead of exercising control through formal political regimes, Santorum would rather live in a country that is ruled by families and churches — social institutions that are free to reject and spit out anyone who does not comply with the rules set by the leaders. 

One of the main complaints in current events is the amount of power that nongovernmental agencies have over people’s lives. Occupiers object to the control arbitrary business decision-makers hold over the lives of ordinary people, and feminists object to the social constructs of manliness and femininity. 

You want to know why racism, an object of much recent attention at Iowa State and in the Daily, is such a tough issue to eradicate? Because to eliminate racism would be to eliminate a social construct, and changing the hearts and minds of individuals is something no law enacted by political processes can do. “The laws of man,” John Adams said, “may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they can never make him wise, virtuous or happy.”

Social coercion is a problem because, unlike governmental coercion, it cannot be changed through your participation in the system. Indeed, unlike politics, your participation in society only perpetuates the norms and mores it imposes on you.

Politics is different. Participation in the political councils that govern the United States and it subdivisions, right on down to the board responsible for delivering water to rural areas, is open to anyone who can meet a few broad requirements (such as age and citizenship) and who is willing to put forth a little time and energy into making a difference by either persuading people out of their positions or by persuading them that their positions are untenable.

We change the world through collaboration in politics, not through authoritarian social arrangements that can be taken or left, but if left sever us from all connection and alienate us from the institutions, such as family, church and media, to which we belong.

Santorum and those who agree with his attitude would have nothing to fear if they would participate in the vast array of political institutions that exist in the United States, from county boards of supervisors, city councils and mayoralties to state legislatures, governorships and bureaucracies to those at the national level.

The story I always hear from conservatives warning me against support of policies that enlarge government is that of a frog. If you put a frog straight into a pot of boiling water, it is said, the frog will immediately jump out. If, however, you put the frog into water of a tolerable temperature and slowly increase the heat to the boiling point, the frog will stay put and roast for you right there.

They ought to take their own advice. Instead of diametrically opposing “the left,” members of “the right” ought to work upon the system — change it, act upon it, make a difference in it — from within.

If Santorum is worried about policy indoctrination, he should worry about where his own views will take him. At least the truths that prevail among American leftists respond to their factual surroundings and vary with circumstance. It is the ideas on the right that are rigid and unfeeling.