Politics & Power Quote by Alan K. Simpson

"Liberal" is doing double duty here: it names a political tribe in America, but Simpson drags it back to its older meaning - liberating. That pivot is the trick. By redefining the term as what "nourishes the mind and spirit", he tries to rescue it from the culture-war mud fight and place it in the safer, almost civic-religious register of education as human formation. The line is a quiet act of rhetorical laundering: take a contested label, scrub off the partisan residue, and reattach it to virtues most people hesitate to reject.

The subtext is a warning about a society that confuses competence with wisdom. "Merely practical or professional" sounds polite, but it's a pointed demotion of job training, credentialing, and the instrumental logic that treats education as workforce pipeline. Simpson isn't anti-skill; he's anti-reduction. When the only metric is employability, the citizen shrinks into the employee, and the imagination becomes a luxury item. His third category - "trivialities" - is the real jab: not just utilitarian schooling, but the distraction economy creeping into curricula and campus life, the sort of busywork and entertainment masquerading as learning.

Context matters: a politician making this claim is also defending a version of public life. Liberal education, in this framing, isn't a boutique indulgence; it's a democratic technology for producing people who can reason, judge, and resist manipulation. The sentence works because it flatters the reader's better self while indicting the system that keeps that self underfed.