David Frum continues to distance himself from the cesspool that the Republican Party has become as personified by Rick Santorum and the Christianist/Tea Party base. Frum's heresy among these knuckle dragging Kool-Aid drinkers is the fact that he looks at objective reality and is willing to speak the truth. And even as the polls in the GOP primary in Michigan remains up in the air (with Romney leading), it's worth looking at Frum's criticism and analysis of ongoing GOP circular firing squad insofar as it seeks to engender class warefare. Here are highlights from Frum's latest column in The Daily Beast:
Conservatives may have fiercely resented Barack Obama's "bitter clingers" remarks from 2008, but Rick Santorum's presidential campaign increasingly seems to take it for granted that Obama was right.
Ask yourself: For whose ears was Santorum's "snob" remark intended? Surely not for actual young people facing the actual 2012 job market. They know well what the future holds for people with only high school degrees. Since the recession commenced, young Americans have surged into higher education, and especially into community colleges.
No, as Dave Weigel and Talking Points Memo report, the "snob" remark resonated among the older, strongly conservative voters who identify with the Tea Party. So why do they hate college so much? Rick Santorum's speech . . . . makes two points:
1) College over-educates people who are more fit to work with their hands.
2) College indoctrinates people, changing their values to more closely resemble President Obama's.
Behind the "snob" remark is a dislike for two different but inter-related groups: the less affluent (who should be working with their hands) and the young (who should be listening to their parents, not some liberal college professor). The remark is powerful because it encapsulates in one word the most fundamental Tea Party emotions: anxiety about those economically beneath them, estrangement from those younger than them.
But the remark also illustrates the Tea Party's disconnect from reality. Except in the rarest cases, to work with one's hands in modern America is to face a lifetime of very low-wage work. (And the exceptions do things that I suspect Tea Party activists would dislike almost as much as they dislike college: artisanal cheese-making, restoration of antiques, high-end floral arrangement, etc.—and anyway people who do those things typically have at least some higher education and often quite a lot.)
Combine this mindset with a desire to eliminate the separation of church and state and the America envisioned by Santorum and the Christianist/Tea Party is a very scary place. Personally, it illustrates to me in modern day terms how ancient Rome could collapsed and see huge amounts of knowledge and learning lost as western Europe descended into the Dark Ages. People clung to religion and chose ignorance and all of society suffered as a result. That's what Santorum wants to bring to America.
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