Meaningless Santorum

A month ago I tried to tell you that you should treat Rick Santorum and his comrades with the disregard they deserve. Shockingly, my blog post didn’t change the course of national political discourse and Santorum has been making more headlines than ever. As a result, it has now become strikingly evident that he is speaking absolute, utter nonsense.

Take, for one small example, Santorum’s stance on gay marriage. Unfortunately (and still surprisingly) he doesn’t stand out for thinking that gays should not be allowed to marry. But his comments on the matter do strike a profoundly inane chord. Speaking to NBC, Santorum stated that the fact gay marriage has gained support in the nation does not imply that it should be legalized. "Just because public opinion says something doesn't mean it's right. I'm sure there were times in areas of this country when people said blacks were less than human."

Somehow, Santorum just equated denying gay marriage to ending segregation. Somehow, in our current political climate, making such an outlandish statement does not turn heads. Somehow we expect these sorts of things and find them acceptable. Of course people disagree, but few have questioned the fact that Santorum is able to make these claims at all. 

When I say Santorum is speaking utter nonsense, I’m not searching for an effect. I mean that very literally. And when I say that we should all ignore him, I mean that very literally too. The fact is that society requires communication, a form of discourse in which there are standards of meaning and in which one person can reasonably expect to have another understand her. The problem with Santorum--as well as his campaign opponents--is that he conflates concepts and ideals, refuses to care about what’s true and what’s meaningful, and thus fails to maintain any sort of standard of communication.

What I mean to say, very simply, is that Rick Santorum isn’t saying anything at all. To equate himself or Pat Robertson to MLK and Malcolm X isn’t faulty logic, it isn’t logic at all. It’s blind, deaf, and dumb.

The outcome of modern political strategies is the devaluation of actual discourse. Rather, we now have dueling monologues that invoke various ideals, none of which mean anything to another party. How can Newt stand for family values after his personal debacles? Santorum cannot coherently run his populist campaign at the same time that he decries public opinion. Yet his position is precisely that, and its accepted as a legitimate one, even if ill-informed or misguided.

No one is challenging Santorum on the precise grounds of his failure. Many explain exactly how his arguments are wrong or point to the missteps in his positions, but what we must do is show how Santorum isn’t arguing at all. His positions are incoherent, but it doesn’t matter because modern politics doesn’t require any actual arguments. It asks for positioning, for steadfast opposition to another’s ideas, for slogans. 

But a slogan is not yet a position in the argumentative, philosophical sense. And Santorum has yet to develop the complexity in his views to reach a point at which a position, in this sense, could be held. Rather, he stands behind opaque, ill-defined concepts that can take the brunt of any counter-arguments precisely because there aren’t any arguments in them that can be found faulty.

This idea is something Stanley Cavell argues for in Senses of Walden. Santorum is a proud ‘American’, but he doesn’t have any idea what America might mean. Nor does he care. He needs no rigor to his thought, no systematic understanding, no purpose to his words. His nonsense is enough. As Cavell argues, too many people today stand on ideas they don't bother to understand. This fact is how Santorum is still a public figure being debated in the news.

What we need today is not to show that Santorum’s logic is unsound, but the audacity to separate the meaningful from the not. We must not give him more respect than he deserves. One cannot argue with a person who doesn't bother to mean anything. We must be bold enough and diligent enough to demand something more than our politicians are giving us. And that something more is not better ideas, but, sadly, something that can be considered an idea at all.