Last week, U.S. presidential hopeful Rick Santorum made a sojourn into the land of utter political bewilderment, admonishing Barack Obama for wanting more American youths to go to college. “What a snob,” the former senator proclaimed, going on to say with Biblical tact that university liberals wish to remake students in their own image. Of course, this is just one gaffe of many coming from the G.O.P. camp, but it is as fine an example as any of the linguistic muddle that has become American political discourse.
Hidden within Santorum’s comments was an unpardonable conflation, missed by many pundits which have scooped up this story: he equates liberalism with elitism. To marry these two terms is misleading. Santorum’s strategy was perhaps to conjure up an image of Kennedy-esque elitism, couple it with Ivy League northeastern sensibility, and portray the amalgamated picture as a representation of every American university. Surely that would stop anyone from voting for Obama.
Yet, of course, there are several missteps in this case. Firstly, in 2012 this view of education doesn’t hold water. Elitism is predicated on exclusion; and although you can surely find pockets of snobbery if you look hard enough, the biggest barriers to college enrolment have been largely chipped away. Enrolment of women went up 350 per cent from 1970 to 2009, compared with a 74 per cent increase in men. During the same period Asian and American Indian enrolment more than tripled, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. High tuition fees are still a barrier, but not one which will be broken by cracking down on a universal elitist clique which doesn’t exist.
So Santorum was wrong about the language of elitism—but was he right about the liberal conspiracy perpetuated by every college professor and administrator? Well, here comes the second linguistic gaffe, and this one I don’t think was on purpose. If Santorum meant “liberal” as a modifier of “arts,” then he was right on. Perhaps nowhere in the western world have the tenets of a classical liberal arts education been kept alive so well, and with such a large university system to proliferate it. But liberal arts was not what was alluded to in that stump speech in Michigan. Rather, the word “liberal” was, as is usually the case today, meant in the way George H. W. Bush did 20 years ago—a political philosophy deemed unutterable, and demonized as “The L-Word.” I can only imagine the negative effect Santorum’s remarks would have on a Republican high-schooler undecided about college applications.
The remarks made last week about education exacerbate an already discordant poverty of language in U.S. politics. Rick Santorum is still only commanding attention because the days are gone when, as the late scholar Tony Judt put it, “poor expression belied poor thought.” As Judt saw it, these days we are evaluated for what we are trying to say, not for what we actually say. As long as the intentions are good, your expression surely doesn’t belie your thought, good or bad. It’s time for any Americans out there (myself included) to start hearing the language of politics for what it is, and seeing the harm that it can do.
