My fellow Badger Herald columnist, Charles Godfrey, recently wrote an op-ed in which he agreed with Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s contention that academia is decidedly liberal. On the campaign trail, Santorum stated, “There are good, decent men and women, who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them.” Santorum’s statements are demagoguery. Godfrey’s approval of those statements shows the public’s willingness to accept such demagoguery.
By agreeing that academia leans too far to the left, Godfrey is trying to prove that he does not fall for his professors’ “liberal dogma.” That’s fine. What’s not fine is what Santorum actually means when he talks about “liberal college professor[s].”
When Santorum starts throwing out words like “liberal” and “academic,” he’s trying to allude to those who don’t adhere to his fundamentalist Christian views. Political pundits would call Santorum’s comments a “dog whistle attack,” meaning that his words, while seeming politically correct to the untrained ear, actually communicate Santorum’s ethnically and racially exclusive message to voters who share his belief that white Christians are an oppressed minority in this country.
Political historians would call the rhetoric that Santorum is using when he talks about those “good, decent men and women,” populism – the idea that the common man and woman should exert greater control over the government. This sounds good on paper, but populism has been and continues to be a guise for nationalism and nativism, especially when conservative politicians use it.
Go back to the days of William Jennings Bryan, when populist reformers blamed the country’s economic woes on Jews and foreigners. Go back to the days of George Wallace, a conservative southern Democrat, who used populist rhetoric when espousing his segregationist views.
But we don’t even need to go back that far in history. During the 2008 presidential campaign, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin heaped praise on “real America,” or small towns. Real America, small towns, likely have little diversity, both racial/ethnic and religious, or, as Palin, Santorum and others like them may see it, places that don’t suffer from the scourge of diversity. Santorum is just part of a long tradition of politicians who try to pass their white, Christian nationalist views off as a “love of the people.”
So why does Santorum resort to this tactic? He does it to appeal to voters who feel they are being marginalized and that their accomplishments are being undermined by people who are different from them. I’m not saying that Godfrey shares these feelings, but he mirrors that sentiment when he writes, “Many students who take sociology classes for humanities credits struggle with the notion that white, middle-class American men are responsible for everything that is wrong in the world.” This paranoid mischaracterization of what occurs in the classroom is part of the myth that makes “white, middle-class American men” feel that they are under attack from some sort of boogeyman. Sadly, politicians like Santorum use this rhetoric to get votes, and even worse, my colleague at The Badger Herald listens to this rhetoric without hearing its true meaning.
Jeff Schultz ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in history.