Ladies and Gentlemen, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, placing ideological purity over a well educated American population, speaking to a group of Tea Party supporters in Michigan this weekend:

President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob…there are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.

I’m not even sure how to respond to this. There are so many angles to criticize, the least egregious being the mischaracterization of White House educational policy, which is about giving everyone the opportunity to attend college, and removing economic barriers to doing so. It’s actually not so different (and by this I mean exactly the same) from Santorum’s stated position, as expressed on his old Senate web site. I think pretty much everyone agrees that college isn’t for everyone, but nobody should be denied the opportunity to get an education if such a thing is for them.

I could also take the cheaper shot by pointing out that by his own measure, Santorum’s at least 33% snobbier than Obama if you’re counting college degrees (Santorum’s got three, the President has only two).

But mostly, my problem is with his shameless playing on the fears of his audience. Conservative ideology has for years cast education as bad because it leads to liberalism, and liberalism has been portrayed as consistently and paradoxically both elitist and inferior. The movement has succeeded in recent years at convincing the mythical salt-of-the-earth Real Americans™ that make up the conservative base to resent the ideas of education and learning, by turning them into “the other”.

Conservatism has convinced all these older, white, low-education Tea Party voters that education is bad, and Santorum has spent the last couple of days telling them that sending their kids to college will causee those kids to reject their parents and their worldview, become seduced by the dark side of the liberal intelligencia, and be “remade into the image” of that <whisper>black fellow</whisper> in the White House they’re all so uncomfortable with.

Rick Santorum, with the statement above, told a bunch of old white people that a scary black manPresident Obama wants to steal and consume their children.

And on some level, he’s not wrong. A greater level of education does, in fact, correlate with a more liberal worldview. Above all, it comes from the experience of seeing and experiencing the world beyond their front door, and getting to know all the different kinds of people who live out there, and college is a great forum for that sort of thing. The more different perspectives a person is exposed to, the more tolerant they become of those perspectives, and the more they synthesize those other positions into their own personal worldviews.

In the end, everyone’s personal worldview comes down to serving the interests of themselves and the people they know and love. Liberal and progressive political views simply come out of a person’s knowing and loving a more varied and diverse collection of people.

Where Santorum and I differ is that he thinks this is a bad thing.

The part that Santorum leaves out is that education also correlates greatly to social mobility. People with college degrees have a greater opportunities to get better jobs and earn more money. As a parent, I know that I want my kids to do better than I’ve managed to; I’m pretty sure every parent feels that way; it’s a deep-seated evolutionary trait that continues to make our species successful and dominant. All of these statements from Santorum and his ilk; all the fearmongering and whatnot is about playing to even deeper-seated lizard brain motivations, fear and threat, in order to counter that strong desire for success for one’s offspring.

Because, at it’s core, despite all the talk of bootstrapping, conservative politics isn’t in the business in encouraging class mobility. It’s in the interest of making the rich and powerful richer and more powerful on the backs of the lower classes, who have been convinced to vote against their own economic interests through the proper application of bread, circuses, fear and prejudice.

Through the application of tactics like Rick Santorum applies in the statement quoted above.