Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is running for president as a know-nothing, in the grand tradition of the Know-Nothings of the 1850s. He is unashamedly anti-intellectual and anti-education. In Florida, he has taken over and reconstituted the liberal arts-oriented New College in Sarasota, stocking it with rightwing cronies and remaking it in his image. And he’s taken aim at the Advance Placement test in African-American Studies. He’s talked (no joke!) about ending all AP courses in Florida. He will run on the theme that education (like the media) is a liberal plot. In fact, there are strong parallels between rightwing attacks on education and rightwing attacks on media – which we’ll talk about in a future post.
DeSantis isn’t the first Harvard Law School graduate to adopt this posture of cynical know-nothingism. Rick Santorum, the one-time Senator from Pennsylvania, called out President Obama for allegedly wanting every American to go to college. “What a snob!” Santorum sneered.
Right – it’s snobbish to want to educate oneself or one’s children, or to want the same opportunity for others. It’s the kind of snobbery that seeks a nation of active and informed citizens. And that is exactly what the likes of DeSantis and Santorum don’t want.
It’s hard to credit these proud Harvard grads with actually believing what they’re saying. Based on their academic credentials, it’s possible that they aren’t absolute idiots. (But there are many varieties of idiot, and low intelligence is one of the rarer types). The alternative is that they are rank hypocrites – and demagogues, because they are trading on, and furthering, a vast misunderstanding about the nature of American society, a confusion fanned by Republicans into a firestorm of anti-education sentiment.
The reactionary cynics want you to believe that America is dominated not by economic elites with all kinds of rightwing support -- Big Pharma, Wall Street, the Koch brothers, Big Tech, – but, rather by the well-educated, who dominate American discourse and political power, to the detriment of the less-well-educated. That false claim has been made with stunning success – not first, and not last, but most of all, by Donald Trump. Partly as a result, we are deeply divided as a country along educational lines. The division has created its own self-perpetuating reality, convincing people that education is their true enemy and the cause of their sense of powerlessness or loss.
Never mind that high school graduates have the same right to vote as college grads or Ph.D.’s Or that billionaires, millionaires, and CEO’s are mostly well-educated Americans. The less-educated, by and large, mistrust and hate the more-educated. They voted in 2016 for a guy who cheated on his SAT’s. (Oddly, it’s one thing he didn’t boast about).
The tragedy here is that education is – for all its many failures and shortcomings in America – an almost perfect form of social good. It’s an avenue of both personal and national progress. The education of anyone, in any way, adds to the sum of human social, economic, civic, and cultural capital. (Or to at least one of the above). And higher education remains the most reliable path of social mobility in American, or any other democratic, society. This isn’t Russia, where knowing Vladimir Putin is the only route to lasting success.
Republicans like Trump and DeSantis have deflected the rage of the left-behinds in America onto one of the avenues of their very salvation. (There are other avenues, however, and no decent society can be structured in such a way that only college graduates get to enter the middle class.) They might just as well have well chosen to demonize the military, another, if more limited, bootstrap to the middle class.
But these guys aren’t interested in the success of left-behind Americans. If that were the case, they would (among other things) support public education, support mass transit, support unions, tax the rich, demand a ban on AR-15s, and expand Medicare. The idea that conservatism favors the have-nots is as widespread as it is ludicrous. DeSantis and his ilk simply want votes and the power that comes with it. To judge by many members of Congress, they don’t even know what (if anything) they want to do with that power. They just want it.
This is the great con that progressive America needs to unmask. President Biden’s 2023 State of the Union speech was a start. But Democrats need to make a stronger case for education – for everyone who wants it or needs it, and education of whatever kind, from the liberal arts to cosmetology, and without $1.7 trillion of college debt.
Our higher education system has strayed far from its traditions – including the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, and the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1945, a.k.a. the GI Bill, which (in the widely-turned phrase) created the modern American middleclass. We need to make college and community college affordable. We need to de-demonize education and show it for what it is: the only path to true citizenship, whether the citizen be a professor or a bricklayer.