I'm sure you know about this:
Rick Santorum, the erstwhile Republican presidential candidate with a penchant for controversy, appeared on Fox News' O'Reilly Factor on Thursday night and memorialized the passing of South African leader and global visionary Nelson Mandela by equating Obamacare with apartheid.People like Santorum just can't help it. And the reason they can't is that they've taken their cues from books (which they may or may not have read) that have them convinced that they really are suffering from injustices equal to slavery, apartheid, and other human rights atrocities.
Praising Mandela for standing up to a "great injustice," the former Pennsylvania senator continued by ascribing his own conservative principles to the civil rights pioneer:Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that, and that's the reason he is mourned today, because of that struggle that he performed...and I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people's lives, and Obamacare is front and center in that....
When you're part of a party whose favorite nonfiction book on economics is titled The Road to Serfdom, it's inevitable that you're going to believe that a moderately sized social safety net adds up to "an ever increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people's lives," and that this is exactly as bad as slavery or apartheid. You're similarly going to lose perspective if your favorite novel is Atlas Shrugged, in which the best and the brightest revolt after reaching the conclusion that society has puts constraints on them that are as intolerable as, well, apartheid was to South African blacks.
It's just never going to be possible for the right to comprehend the genuine horrors suffered by people for whom they don't have an affinity, because right-wingers are so conditioned to describe their own alleged suffering and alleged persecution in maximalist terms. They're always going to talk the way Rick Santorum just did, until they lose the Hayek and the Rand.
