Here it is, stated baldly and without any evident embarrassment. Rick Santorum states exactly why what he represents is a dangerous and stupid movement.
This country has always contained a significant resentment toward intellectuals, knowledge, an active distrust and occasionally hatred of reason and understanding. We have been watching a “grass roots” movement develop since the late Seventies that embraces the anti-intellectual, the retrograde, the regressive as if being ignorant is a virtue. They have turned a refusal to face reality, to come to grips with facts, into a virtue, and an unwillingness to change ones mind into a kind of uber-patriotism that would, if fully empowered, destroy this country.
The difficulty in countering this is that he wraps his idiocy around two things that make anyone who would argue with them appear churlish if not downright immoral. This is a rhetorical game of false choices. It is not intelligence vs. family, it is not reason vs. church. It is not education vs. patriotism. This is a lie. By stating it this way, he makes it seem anyone who supports enlightenment, progress, rationality is somehow an enemy. It divisive in the most heinous and absolute way and it is exemplary of all that is currently wrong with the Right.
Smart people will never be on the side of ignorance and bigotry. Smart people will never support the idea that we should live by a code written by people who not only knew less than we do but also had completely different expectations of what life meant. Smart people will never be on the side of stupidity.
Out of the mouths of people like Santorum and Todd Akin and Michele Bachman we have heard a call to turn dumb into a desirable condition, to ignore ramifications, discard causal thinking, just “trust them” and America will be great again.
I appreciate that they no longer feel they need to couch their positions in user-friendly phrasing that softens their meaning. I’m delighted that they’ve decided to reveal who they really are.
This is one or two steps away from book burning.
Let me leave you with a few choice quotes.
Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.
Adolf Hitler
Education is dangerous – Every educated person is a future enemy—– Hermann Goering
What good fortune for governments that the people do not think.
Adolf Hitler
It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge.
Adolf Hitler
Who says I am not under the special protection of God?
Adolf Hitler
