Speaking at the socially conservative Values Voter Summit in Washington DC today, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania made a comment that may be as long-remembered as his remark about Man-on-Dog sexual relations.
“We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.”
In fairness, I think that this quote doesn’t come off quite as badly if you put it within the full context of his remarks. Taken in total isolation from the rest of his speech, it really becomes completely farcical.
Yet, to some degree, it invites us to isolate it from everything else because it’s not a misstatement. It’s actually a logical peg in his argument. Forget about the ‘elite’ part of it for a moment. Let’s focus on the ‘smart’ part of it. What Santorum is saying is that regular folks of average intelligence are the backbone of this country, and their values are traditional American values that are essential to making America a special and worthwhile place. And I agree with Rick Santorum about all of that.
Where I differ is on the implications of that observation. The values of regular folks are solid, but their grasp of facts may not be. We need scientists and experts to help us make good decisions. We need them to educate us. We need leaders to listen to them. When our values turn out to conflict with science, or our beliefs turn out to lack expertise, we need to defer to smart people.
Think about the vehicle we just landed on Mars. Does Rick Santorum have any idea how to land a vehicle on Mars? Does he know how his cell phone works? Can he rewire his house without getting electrocuted? Does he have any idea how the Google search engine works? If you dropped Rick Santorum into a time machine and delivered him to 1865, would he be able to make a light bulb or an internal combustion engine or create an antibiotic or cure Polio?
The truth is, almost none of us could do any of those things because we don’t know shit compared to our scientists and experts.
Whether we are relatively smart or not, we don’t know shit. So, we rely on our values to see us through. And that’s fine. Most of our values make sense and have worked in human societies for thousands of years. But when people tell us not to eat wild mushrooms because they might be poisonous, we listen to them, don’t we? Because they know better than we do. That doesn’t make them more virtuous, and it doesn’t mean that they know better than we do on every subject.
But to align yourself against smart people as if they are the enemy? That’s crazy. Without smart people, Rick Santorum would be trying and failing to start a fire in some cave in the Kentucky mountains. So would most of you. So would I.
A political movement based on pride in being stupid is really stupid.
Finally, Rick Santorum is probably the only politician in America who thinks our problem is that our elites are too smart. In fact, I don’t know any smart people who think that.
And the celebration of ignorance finally comes full circle. Embraced with unanimous enthusiasm.
Umm, is he really surprised that smart folks won’t align with the willfully ignorant?
“It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.”
~PBO
The Teahadists and their predecessors have taken pride in their ignorance, and sneered at edjukatid people, for years. But only recently has it become so mainstream in one of our political parties that nobody influential dares give that phenomenon the ridicule it so richly deserves.
And plenty of smart people side with these folks. They’re the ones making shitloads of money by getting the yokels to agitate for policies that hurt the yokels, but make the smart (and conscienceless) even richer.
As for Rick Santorum, if you dropped him in 1865 he’d be complaining about the modern people of the mid-19th century not being sufficiently Biblical. And I bet in 1865 itself he’d have a very specific grievance.
“When our values turn out to conflict with science, or our beliefs turn out to lack expertise, we need to defer to smart people.”
That’s better thought of as the bare-minimum-acceptable response.
The far, far better response is: we need to become better/smarter/more knowledgeable OURSELVES.
“A political movement based on pride in being stupid is really stupid.”
27% of American voters resemble that remark!
Politicians think they can fool public but thinking like this they are making fool of them self.
Great site
Boo said: “Finally, Rick Santorum is probably the only politician in America who thinks our problem is that our elites are too smart. In fact, I don’t know any smart people who think that.”
I disagree. It is pretty generally true that leaders/people on the right won’t listen to smart people who aren’t conservatives and members of the cult in good standing. They actively work to exclude those voices from the public sphere and decision making.
I truly believe we need a new definition for “smart” as it relates to the highly educated on the right. Because many of these people are willfully stupid. Bruce Bartlett once told me that he thinks that Fox infantilizes the right, destroys their capacity for logical thinking outside of the narrow frame they inhabit.
There’s only one hitch when dealing with Christianists – the scriptures abjure “wisdom” and learning for the faithful in MANY places in the New Testament. Paul especially speaks in many places against those having “the wisdom of this world”. “Wisdom” among fundies refers exclusively to knowledge of God’s will, while book-larnin’ is supposed to take a back seat. That is why the meme of smarty-pants scientists and East Coast “pointy-heads” is so popular. This attitude will require a lot of work to dig out of the head of the low-information voter, if that is even possible.
Rove did say, in 2001: “As people do better, they start voting like Republicans — unless they have too much education and vote Democratic.”
You can tell that’s an older quote because he doesn’t use the “Democrat” slur that became in vogue shortly thereafter amongst the GOP.
No, what Santorum is saying here is considered gospel across the GOP coalition. For the dumbshits who work at Walmart and vote GOP because they want the rest of the middle class brought down to their level, there is the natural distrust of anyone who is smart. They hated smart people in grammar and high schools and hate them now.
For the teavangelicals – well they’ve always hated smart people. On occasion they’ve actually tried debating biology or history or even the bible with people who actually know the topic and they still have emotional scars from that. Dammit, evolution is a lie, the bible is the unerrant word of god, and anyone who says different is an agent of satan.
And for the business leaders, they have always had a certain level of smarts but they can’t stand the experts who too often constrain them. The dot.com stock evaluations can’t hold? Sorry, putting my fingers in my ear and shouting la-la-la. Deep sea drilling will inevitably lead to major spills? Bullshit, I found my own expert who says otherwise.
It has always been thus. In the 1870s it was very difficult to get a new railroad financed unless it followed the narrow gauge fad. The railroad engineering experts at the time knew the cost savings myth for narrow gauge was just that, but the financiers figured they were smarter than the experts. Only major busts of narrow gauge railroads in the early 1880s ended that fad.
No, the one thing that bonds the GOP coalition is distrust of smart people.
Why does Rick Santorum hate America? The country was founded by elite smart people for Christ’s sake. The Constitution was written by elite smart people. There’s an elite smart guy on the nickel, and another one on the ten dollar bill, and another one on the hundred dollar bill. I’m getting really tired of self-styled patriots who don’t know shit about our history.
The first thing Santorum’s quote immediately brings to mind is Dan Quayle’s “badge of honor” speech at the SBC in ’92. Iirc it was one of the few solid applause lines he ever enjoyed.
It’s about the clearest statement on record–next to Santorum’s–from a major office holder laying out the “us good folks vs the smart people” theme that, as noted by many others, keeps cropping up throughout the GOP narrative in recent decades.
Revisiting Quayle’s remarks now and comparing them with Santorum’s, it reads like John Edwards’s “Two Americas” as seen through the prism of the Culture Wars, rather than the income gap.