On Sunday's This Week With George Stephanopolous, Senator Rick Santorum put on a performance that is remarkable even by his own standards, demonstrating, as Mark Noll argued in the 1990s, that "the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind."
First, he admitted he supported a bill he knew in his heart was bad because he was part of the Senate leadership:
SANTORUM: I have to admit I voted for that. It was against the principles I believed in, but you know, when you're part of the team, sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader, and I made a mistake. You know, politics is a team sport, folks.
There followed this exchange:
SANTORUM: Well, the team I was playing for is making sure that we stick to the American principles that made this country the greatest country in the history of the world. And if you look at my record, in particular on education, what I've been proposing and fighting for is to get the federal government out of the education system, actually get the state less in the education business and bring it back to families and communities. And here in, you know, where education should be. It should be in the responsibility of the people in the community, and particularly the parents. They should be involved in making sure that we have customized education for every child in America.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But you did say that that goes against your principles.
SANTORUM: Well, looking back on it, that was the case. But here's the amazing thing, is that Governor Romney supports No Child Left Behind. I looked at No Child Left Behind after it was enacted and saw what happened and saw the expansion of the federal government and the role of education.
And I said, you know, that was -- that's not what I believe in. And Governor Romney still believes in that. Governor Romney defends No Child Left Behind and supports it today. I don't, because it's against the principles I believe in. It's obviously not against the principles that Governor Romney -- I have principles. I have principles that support the basic foundational principles of our country.
Looking back on it? Did he not know at the time? He was No. 3 in the Senate leadership- did staying one of the popular kids on student council trump his principles? After all he does "have principles. I have principles that support the basic foundational principles of our country." What does this confession prefigure as to how easily he could be rolled as President?
And if you can parse what that comment about principles means you can doubtless explain what SC Governor Nikki Haley knows are the true core functions of government.
After some other topics were aired, the conversation circled around:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me get back to education. We were talking about that at the top of this interview. You had -- you talked about President Obama and education yesterday. I want to show what you said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SANTORUM: President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob.
(LAUGHTER)
SANTORUM: You're good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to tests that aren't taught by some liberal college professor.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STEPHANOPOULOS: Now getting to college has been part of the American dream for generations, Senator. Why does articulating an aspiration make the president a snob?
And Senator Santorum was ready:
SANTORUM: I think because there are lot of people in this country that have no desire or no aspiration to go to college, because they have a different set of skills and desires and dreams that don't include college.
SANTORUM: -- and build their community.
STEPHANOPOULOS: All he said was he wants, quote, "every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training." In your interview with Glenn Beck this week, you seemed to go further. You said I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college, because they are indoctrination mills. What did that mean?
SANTORUM: Well, of course. I mean, you look at the colleges and universities, George. This is not – this is not something that's new for most Americans, is how liberal our colleges and universities are and how many children in fact are – look, I've gone through it. I went through it at Penn State. You talk to most kids who go to college who are conservatives, and you are singled out, you are ridiculed, you are – I can tell you personally, I know that, you know, we – I went through a process where I was docked for my conservative views. This is sort of a regular routine (ph). You know the statistic that at least I was familiar with from a few years ago -- I don't know if it still holds true but I suspect it may even be worse – that 62 percent of kids who enter college with some sort of faith commitment leave without it.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But Senator, when you put all this together—
SANTORUM: This is not a neutral setting.
STEPHANOPOULOS: -- it makes it sound like you think there is something wrong with encouraging college education.
SANTORUM: No, not at all, but understand that we have some real problems at our college campuses with political correctness, with an ideology that is forced upon people who, you know, who may not agree with the politically correct left doctrine. And one of the things that I've spoken out on and will continue to speak out is to make sure that conservative and more mainstream, common-sense conservative and principles that have made this country great are reflected in our college courses and with college professors. And at many, many, and I would argue most institutions in this country, that simply isn't the case.
It's a remarkable set of comments, not least because then Santorum segued into how Senator John F. Kennedy's speech on separation of church and state in 1960 made him vomit.
But, nausea aside, let's come back to education.
First, when it comes to loss of faith in college, Santorum's just wrong. Consider this from that bastion of liberal thinking, The Salt Lake Tribune:
Yet, with swiftness, American conservatism has become absolutist. There is a prescribed answer for everything, and there are prophets crowding the airwaves to tell you what it is. If you don't agree then you are, in Santorum's world, a frightening, un-American snob, a tool of the Father of Lies: "If you were Satan, who would you attack?" the former U.S. senator asked the students. "There's no one else to go after other than the United States, and that's been the case, for now, almost 200 years." (Santorum went on to explain how he thought the devil had attacked the United States in several areas: its foundations, academia, the Protestant Church and government.)
Santorum, who is in his 50s, really ought to get over his college days, when, recall, he whined, "This is not – this is not something that's new for most Americans, is how liberal our colleges and universities are and how many children in fact are – look, I've gone through it. I went through it at Penn State. You talk to most kids who go to college who are conservatives, and you are singled out, you are ridiculed, you are – I can tell you personally, I know that, you know, we – I went through a process where I was docked for my conservative views. This is sort of a regular routine (ph)."
I started college a few weeks after the resignation of President Nixon, when being a Republican was not a cool thing and, the previous spring, I'd talked myself out of a free ride to Duke trying to defend Nixon in an undergrad committee who were part of the interview weekend.
So when I started college, I started a College Republicans club. Getting my chain yanked about it was part of the territory. I didn't sulk, I argued my case. Some people agreed, most didn't. I expected no other outcome. You fight for what you believe in, and take the long view when it comes to the odds of prevailing.
It was the same in class. I got a paper back from on politics prof on which he wrote that he thought Whigs were long extinct, and here- like the coelacanth- was one, alive and free and wrong.
I waited fifteen years and, after the Soviet Union fell, sent the prof a postcard: "Revolution's over. My side won."
We remain friends after nearly forty years. I didn't lose my faith, either. Not in college, nor collecting two more degrees after that.
I can't imagine anything more boring than spending four or more years in academic institutions where the mandate is to teach you what you already know. That's truly a waste of time. And if you believe your world view is crumbling from attacks be evildoers- or Satan himself- what makes one a better warrior for your belief- your faith- than studying and confronting those views you know are wrong, the better to challenge and, in the end, defeat them?
Nobody crowds Rick Santorum out of the public square- he's a front-running candidate for president of the United States, for God's sake. Literally. Whose silencing him or his supporters?
It amazes me how people who, like Santorum, are irreducibly certain they are right about everything, and that theirs is the only way forward, are, at the same time, existentially terrified that no one will believe them.
So they have to make you believe it, for your own good:
...What I don’t understand – what just baffles me endlessly – are these dueling notions of America as the greatest, most super-fantastic nation on Earth and America as an immoral, decayed society under assault from all sides. We are God’s people but we’re also so vulnerable to Satan himself that we need a super-hero, super-holy president like Rick Santorum to save us.
The cult of American exceptionalism is, perhaps unsurprisingly, comprised by the same people who make up the cult of American decline. There’s an insecurity about it that I think shines a little light onto the conservative movement and the Republican Party. The pretense of toughness; the rah-rah-rah nationalism; the sense of victimization, of being endlessly put-upon. These are all forms within the language of American conservatism, or at least mainstream movement conservatism, that give shape to the broader dialogue on the right.
The “rebel complex” that Michael Brendan Dougherty described movement conservatives as having, forces its members to walk the thin line between American greatness and American decline. You can’t be a rebel against the Big Liberal Machine if everything is peaches and cream; but you have to manage this without being counter-cultural at the same time – without sacrificing that patriot street cred.
Now, you might argue that it’s not really contradictory to say that America is at once great and threatened with decline. But that’s not really what conservatives are doing. The juxtaposition of greatness and decay isn’t necessarily framed as your every day existential threat. Rather the two fraternize in tandem, complimentary and contradictory all at once.
America is invulnerable and yet deeply fragile.
We are the most morally superior people on the planet, but that morality is brittle.
Gays and leftists and secret Kenyan communist presidents threaten to shake and rend the very fabric of our at-once-mighty and yet oh-so-frail society.
Barack Obama is a socialist even though he governs like a moderate Republican.
We need less government (and of course government can never create jobs or do anything right) but we also need a savior in the White House who will yank us back from the brink and, while he’s at it, create jobs.
So we get a movement that is full of paradoxes; a movement that wants to shrink government without shrinking any of the really big, expensive parts of government like defense or Medicare. The result, just a couple years after the 2010 Republican sweep, is a natural, not-so-bewildering transformation of the Tea Party into Rick Santorum leading in the polls, of fiscal conservatism transforming into social conservatism.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled may have been convincing the world he didn’t exist. But I’m beginning to think the GOP is giving him a run for his money when it comes to pulling the wool over our eyes.
Or, as the evangelical said to the liberal, "I'll call you a Christian if you'll call me a scholar."
First, he admitted he supported a bill he knew in his heart was bad because he was part of the Senate leadership:
SANTORUM: I have to admit I voted for that. It was against the principles I believed in, but you know, when you're part of the team, sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader, and I made a mistake. You know, politics is a team sport, folks.
There followed this exchange:
SANTORUM: Well, the team I was playing for is making sure that we stick to the American principles that made this country the greatest country in the history of the world. And if you look at my record, in particular on education, what I've been proposing and fighting for is to get the federal government out of the education system, actually get the state less in the education business and bring it back to families and communities. And here in, you know, where education should be. It should be in the responsibility of the people in the community, and particularly the parents. They should be involved in making sure that we have customized education for every child in America.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But you did say that that goes against your principles.
SANTORUM: Well, looking back on it, that was the case. But here's the amazing thing, is that Governor Romney supports No Child Left Behind. I looked at No Child Left Behind after it was enacted and saw what happened and saw the expansion of the federal government and the role of education.
And I said, you know, that was -- that's not what I believe in. And Governor Romney still believes in that. Governor Romney defends No Child Left Behind and supports it today. I don't, because it's against the principles I believe in. It's obviously not against the principles that Governor Romney -- I have principles. I have principles that support the basic foundational principles of our country.
Looking back on it? Did he not know at the time? He was No. 3 in the Senate leadership- did staying one of the popular kids on student council trump his principles? After all he does "have principles. I have principles that support the basic foundational principles of our country." What does this confession prefigure as to how easily he could be rolled as President?
And if you can parse what that comment about principles means you can doubtless explain what SC Governor Nikki Haley knows are the true core functions of government.
After some other topics were aired, the conversation circled around:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me get back to education. We were talking about that at the top of this interview. You had -- you talked about President Obama and education yesterday. I want to show what you said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SANTORUM: President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob.
(LAUGHTER)
SANTORUM: You're good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to tests that aren't taught by some liberal college professor.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STEPHANOPOULOS: Now getting to college has been part of the American dream for generations, Senator. Why does articulating an aspiration make the president a snob?
And Senator Santorum was ready:
SANTORUM: I think because there are lot of people in this country that have no desire or no aspiration to go to college, because they have a different set of skills and desires and dreams that don't include college.
And to sort of lay out there that somehow this is -- this is -- should be everybody's goal, I think, devalues the tremendous work that people who, frankly, don't go to college and don't want to go to college because they have a lot of other talents and skills that, frankly, college, you know, four-year colleges may not be able to assist them.
And there are other -- there's technical schools, there's additional training, vocational training. There's skills and apprenticeships. There's all sorts of things that people can do to upgrade their skills to be very productive and --
(CROSSTALK) SANTORUM: -- and build their community.
STEPHANOPOULOS: All he said was he wants, quote, "every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training." In your interview with Glenn Beck this week, you seemed to go further. You said I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college, because they are indoctrination mills. What did that mean?
SANTORUM: Well, of course. I mean, you look at the colleges and universities, George. This is not – this is not something that's new for most Americans, is how liberal our colleges and universities are and how many children in fact are – look, I've gone through it. I went through it at Penn State. You talk to most kids who go to college who are conservatives, and you are singled out, you are ridiculed, you are – I can tell you personally, I know that, you know, we – I went through a process where I was docked for my conservative views. This is sort of a regular routine (ph). You know the statistic that at least I was familiar with from a few years ago -- I don't know if it still holds true but I suspect it may even be worse – that 62 percent of kids who enter college with some sort of faith commitment leave without it.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But Senator, when you put all this together—
SANTORUM: This is not a neutral setting.
STEPHANOPOULOS: -- it makes it sound like you think there is something wrong with encouraging college education.
SANTORUM: No, not at all, but understand that we have some real problems at our college campuses with political correctness, with an ideology that is forced upon people who, you know, who may not agree with the politically correct left doctrine. And one of the things that I've spoken out on and will continue to speak out is to make sure that conservative and more mainstream, common-sense conservative and principles that have made this country great are reflected in our college courses and with college professors. And at many, many, and I would argue most institutions in this country, that simply isn't the case.
It's a remarkable set of comments, not least because then Santorum segued into how Senator John F. Kennedy's speech on separation of church and state in 1960 made him vomit.
But, nausea aside, let's come back to education.
First, when it comes to loss of faith in college, Santorum's just wrong. Consider this from that bastion of liberal thinking, The Salt Lake Tribune:
“There is no statistical difference in the dropout rate among those who attended college and those that did not attend college,” said Thom Rainer, president of the Southern Baptists’ LifeWay Christian Resources research firm. “Going to college doesn’t make you a religious dropout.”
A 2007 LifeWay survey did find seven in 10 Protestants ages 18 to 30 who went to church regularly in high school said they quit attending by age 23. The real causes: lack of “a robust faith,” strongly committed parents and an essential church connection, Rainer said.
“Higher education is not the villain,” said Catholic University sociologist William D’Antonio. Since 1986, D’Antonio’s surveys of American Catholics have asked about Mass attendance, the importance of religion in people’s lives and whether they have considered leaving Catholicism.
The percentage of Catholics who scored low on all three points hovers between 18 percent in 1993 and 14 percent in 2011. But the percentage of people who are highly committed fell from 27 percent to 19 percent.
“Blame mortality,” D’Antonio said, “The most highly committed Catholics are seniors, and they’re dying out.”
Dennis Prager, a conservative writer on religious and political issues, decried secularism in Western universities in the National Review in April. He concluded, “With all the persecution that Judaism and Christianity have survived over the centuries, an argument that cites America’s top 310 colleges as a first order adversary is hard to credit.”
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrew Delbanco credits the American ideal as being one of constant striving to expand educational opportunity: not to make little Volvo-driving automata, but to build a well-informed work force who can handle the duties of citizenship as well as they do the requirements of their work. And of that experience, he rightly notes, "One of the difficulties in making the case for liberal education against the rising tide of skepticism is that it is almost impossible to persuade doubters who have not experienced it for themselves. The Puritan founders of our oldest colleges would have called it 'such a mystery as none can read but they that know it.'"
Santorum is trying to square a circle- defending people he says are being dissed because they aren't college material, and who don't need college, but who, somehow, ought to feel a sense of grievance- if not that they didn't go, then that others did. As H.L. Mencken put it, Puritanism is the lurking suspicion that someone, somewhere, is having fun.
Delbanco goes on to note that the key feature of education is what most annoys authoritarians of any stripe: an educated person wants to make up his own mind:
...One student, born and educated in China, who came to the United States recently to attend Bowdoin College, encountered the modern version of the Puritan principle that no communicants should "take any ancient doctrine for truth till they have examined it" for themselves. "Coming from a culture in which a 'standard answer' is provided for every question, I did not argue with others even when I disagreed. However, Bowdoin forced me to reconsider 'the answer' and reach beyond my comfort zone. In my first-year seminar, 'East Asian Politics,' I was required to debate with others and develop a habit of class engagement," he said in an interview with the Web site Inside Higher Ed about a book he and two other Chinese students wrote for an audience in China, about their liberal-arts educations in America.
"One day we debated what roles Confucianism played in the development of Chinese democracy. Of the 16 students in the classroom, 15 agreed that Confucianism impeded China's development; but I disagreed. I challenged my classmates. Bowdoin made me consistently question the 'prescribed answer.'"Yet, with swiftness, American conservatism has become absolutist. There is a prescribed answer for everything, and there are prophets crowding the airwaves to tell you what it is. If you don't agree then you are, in Santorum's world, a frightening, un-American snob, a tool of the Father of Lies: "If you were Satan, who would you attack?" the former U.S. senator asked the students. "There's no one else to go after other than the United States, and that's been the case, for now, almost 200 years." (Santorum went on to explain how he thought the devil had attacked the United States in several areas: its foundations, academia, the Protestant Church and government.)
Santorum, who is in his 50s, really ought to get over his college days, when, recall, he whined, "This is not – this is not something that's new for most Americans, is how liberal our colleges and universities are and how many children in fact are – look, I've gone through it. I went through it at Penn State. You talk to most kids who go to college who are conservatives, and you are singled out, you are ridiculed, you are – I can tell you personally, I know that, you know, we – I went through a process where I was docked for my conservative views. This is sort of a regular routine (ph)."
I started college a few weeks after the resignation of President Nixon, when being a Republican was not a cool thing and, the previous spring, I'd talked myself out of a free ride to Duke trying to defend Nixon in an undergrad committee who were part of the interview weekend.
So they have to make you believe it, for your own good:
...What I don’t understand – what just baffles me endlessly – are these dueling notions of America as the greatest, most super-fantastic nation on Earth and America as an immoral, decayed society under assault from all sides. We are God’s people but we’re also so vulnerable to Satan himself that we need a super-hero, super-holy president like Rick Santorum to save us.
The cult of American exceptionalism is, perhaps unsurprisingly, comprised by the same people who make up the cult of American decline. There’s an insecurity about it that I think shines a little light onto the conservative movement and the Republican Party. The pretense of toughness; the rah-rah-rah nationalism; the sense of victimization, of being endlessly put-upon. These are all forms within the language of American conservatism, or at least mainstream movement conservatism, that give shape to the broader dialogue on the right.
The “rebel complex” that Michael Brendan Dougherty described movement conservatives as having, forces its members to walk the thin line between American greatness and American decline. You can’t be a rebel against the Big Liberal Machine if everything is peaches and cream; but you have to manage this without being counter-cultural at the same time – without sacrificing that patriot street cred.
Now, you might argue that it’s not really contradictory to say that America is at once great and threatened with decline. But that’s not really what conservatives are doing. The juxtaposition of greatness and decay isn’t necessarily framed as your every day existential threat. Rather the two fraternize in tandem, complimentary and contradictory all at once.
America is invulnerable and yet deeply fragile.
We are the most morally superior people on the planet, but that morality is brittle.
Gays and leftists and secret Kenyan communist presidents threaten to shake and rend the very fabric of our at-once-mighty and yet oh-so-frail society.
Barack Obama is a socialist even though he governs like a moderate Republican.
We need less government (and of course government can never create jobs or do anything right) but we also need a savior in the White House who will yank us back from the brink and, while he’s at it, create jobs.
So we get a movement that is full of paradoxes; a movement that wants to shrink government without shrinking any of the really big, expensive parts of government like defense or Medicare. The result, just a couple years after the 2010 Republican sweep, is a natural, not-so-bewildering transformation of the Tea Party into Rick Santorum leading in the polls, of fiscal conservatism transforming into social conservatism.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled may have been convincing the world he didn’t exist. But I’m beginning to think the GOP is giving him a run for his money when it comes to pulling the wool over our eyes.
Or, as the evangelical said to the liberal, "I'll call you a Christian if you'll call me a scholar."
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