Unless you live in US flyover country and are intimately familiar with the types of people who live there, you won't understand Santorum. It's just a cultural gap.
For what it's worth, I could name some popular opinions and ideas in, for instance, Europe that are just as shocking and repugnant to me.
Curious to hear some European opinions that are shocking to you. I wonder if they would be shocking to Americans in general and I wonder if Europeans would agree that those opinions and ideas are uniformly European.
One European idea (as practised in a reasonable sub set of Europe) that I can see many Americans finding shocking are the legal limits to free speech. Gun control is another one which would shock at least a fair number of Americans (again this varies a bit across Europe, but is always far stricter than in the US). Various ideas on taxation is a third, depending slightly on your political leaning. The lax (from a US perspective) attitude towards punishing criminals as yet another.
When was the last time the bay area was referred to as flyover country? And so far Santorum has won 10 and seconded quite a few other primaries. Crazy or not he appears to reflect the ideas of a large portion of the american populous. He regularly gets 20-30% of the vote.
The nazis were a broad popular movement. It wasn't just some dictator and his family who could be removed in a day. Most of the intellectual elite was either dead or had left the country. The nazis had replaced everyone who held any kind of official role with their own people. All the judges, university teachers, school principals, police officers, civil servants, etc, they were all nazis or opportunistic collaborators with questionable political attitudes.
There was no way all these people could have been removed from their posts or put in jail where they really belonged. Preventing them from being politically active, banning their symbols and everything they might reunite behind in order to regain power, was seen as the only practical way to diffuse a very real threat.
Also, the laws were made at a time when no law could be made without the approval the US government. After all, a large number of US, British, Russian, and other soldiers had just lost their lives liberating Europe and removing the nazis from power. It would have been insane to just let the nazis resume their political activities.
But 66 years on they are no longer a threat. They have almost no popular support, and the very specific laws that violate free speech could now be replaced by general laws against inciting violence like they exist in all countries.
Judging by the experiences of footballers like Samuel Eto'o, Mario Balotelli, and Patrice Evra, Europe is decades behind the United States in tackling the problem of racism. I've never heard of black athletes on the field of play being the subject of racist taunts either by the fans or by opposing players in the United States. It is unbelievably taboo.
I'm shocked that in Italy, it is apparently possible to simultaneously be the richest man in the country, the majority owner of a major media conglomerate, and Prime Minister. And that's setting aside all the other unsavory things about Berlusconi.
Now, I kind of expect a lot of Europeans--on HN at least--to be embarrassed about neofascists or racism or Berlusconi, but hey, I'm just as embarrassed about Santorum.
Alas, then you don't really understand the GOP. These beliefs are representative of a large chunk of the GOP base. Santorum's success is not a fluke in that regard.