Goodbye to Goldwater: Rick Santorum's Republican crusade for big government.

• Author: Rauch, Jonathan
• Position: It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good - Book Review

It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, by Rick Santorum, Wilmington, Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 464 pages, $25

In 1960 a Republican senator from Arizona named Barry Goldwater published a little book called The Conscience of a Conservative. The first printing of 10,000 copies led to a second of the same size, then a third of 50,000, until ultimately the book sold more than 3 million copies. Goldwater's presidential candidacy crashed in 1964, but his ideas did not: For decades, his hostility to big government ruled the American right. Until, approximately, now.

Rick Santorum, a second-term Republican senator from Pennsylvania, has written a new book called It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good. The book is worth taking seriously for several reasons, not least of which is that it is a serious book. The writing and thinking are consistently competent, often better than that. The lapses into right-wing talk-radioese ("liberals practically despise the common man") are rare. Santorum wrestles intelligently, often impressively, with the biggest of big ideas: freedom, virtue, civil society, the Founders' intentions. Although he is a Catholic who is often characterized as a religious conservative, he has written a book whose ambitions are secular. As its subtitle promises, it is about conservatism, not Christianity.

Above all, it is worth noticing because, like Goldwater's Conscience, it lays down a marker. As Goldwater repudiated Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, so Santorum repudiates Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. It's now official: Philosophically, the conservative movement has split. Post-Santorum, tax cutting and court bashing cannot hold the Republican coalition together much longer.

As a policy book, It Takes a Family is temperate. It offers a healthy reminder that society needs not just good government but strong civil and social institutions, and that the traditional family serves essential social functions. Government policies, therefore, should respect and support family and civil society instead of undermining or supplanting them. Parents should make quality time at home a high priority. Popular culture should comport itself with some sense of responsibility and taste.

Few outside the hard cultural left--certainly not Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who makes several cameos as Santorum's bete noir--would disagree with much of that. Not in 2005, anyway. Moreover, Santorum's policy proposals...