What Santorum was obliquely referring to is his sense that today’s college and university campuses are hotbeds of socialism and liberal theology. Thus it has been for at least the past four decades, including when Santorum was a student at Penn State University. Somehow he managed to resist the tug of Marxism, atheism, feminism, Keynesianism and all the other -isms of GOP nightmares.
Santorum could have talked about those things and earned a rapt audience. The myth of college-for-everyone deserves to be challenged. The lack of intellectual diversity on most campus faculties deserves to be examined. He could have talked about that.
Instead, Santorum elected to pander to the idea that ignorance beats an education that might lead one to become an elite. His words, in addition to being false, were, dare we say, rather snobbish. How else to characterize speaking to people as though they aren’t capable of recognizing truth — or that their children aren’t smart enough to go to college and, grasping the flaws of liberalism, stay true to the conservative values with which they were raised?
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