The Social Order
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on April 5, 2022, during a two-week teaching residency there as a Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism.
The lesson I’ve drawn from reporting on institutions that promote ideologies such as critical race theory and radical gender theory is that they have been captured at the structural level and can’t be reformed from within. So the solution is not a long counter-march through the institutions. You can’t replace bad directors of diversity, equity, and inclusion with good ones. The ideology is baked in. That’s why I call for a siege strategy.
This means, first, that you must be aggressive. You must fight on terms that you define. In responding to opponents of the Florida bill, for instance, don’t argue against “teaching diversity and inclusion,” but against sexualizing young children. And don’t pull your punches. We will never win if we play by the rules set by the elites who are undermining our country. We can be polite and lose every battle, or we can be impolite and deliver results for the great majority of Americans who are fighting for their small businesses, fighting for their jobs, fighting for their families.
Second, you must mobilize popular support. This requires ripping the veil off what our institutions are doing through real investigation and reporting so that Americans can make informed choices. We live in an information society, and if we don’t get the truth out, we will never gain traction against the narratives being constantly refashioned and pushed by the Left.
Less than two years ago, an infinitesimal number of Americans knew about critical race theory. Through investigation and reporting, we’ve brought that number up to 75 percent. The public now opposes critical race theory by a two-to-one margin, and it is being hounded out of schools and other places. This kind of action is a model for dealing with every ideology and institution that is undermining the public good and America’s future.
Remember that institutions don’t choose these ideologies democratically—they don’t ask people or employees to vote for them. They impose them by fiat, through bureaucratic, not democratic rule. So it isn’t surprising that the institutions lose big when we force their agendas into the political arena. What politician or campaign manager in their right mind would ignore an issue that is supported by a two-to-one margin? So-called conservative politicians who do ignore such issues—or who oppose bringing them up out of a false sense of decorum—aren’t on the people’s and the country’s side.
With public institutions like K-12 education, another crucial step is to decentralize them. It is centralization and bureaucratization that makes it possible for a minority of activists to take control and impose their ideologies. Decentralizing means reducing federal and state controls in favor of local control—and it ultimately means something like universal school choice, placing power in parents’ hands. Too many parents today have no escape mechanism from substandard schools controlled by leftist ideologues. Universal school choice—meaning that public education funding goes directly to parents rather than schools—would fix that.
Conservatives have for too long been resistant to attacking the credibility of our institutions. Trust in institutions is a natural conservative tendency. But conservatives need to stop focusing on abstract concepts and open their eyes. Our institutions are dragging our country in a disastrous direction, actively undermining all that makes America great.
To some extent, the institutions are now destroying their own credibility. Look at the public-health bureaucracy and teachers’ unions, which acted in concert to shut down schools and keep children needlessly masked—and for far too long. As a result, there has been an explosion in homeschooling, as well as in the number of alternative K-12 schools such as the ones Hillsdale College is helping to launch around the country. What is needed is to build alternative or parallel institutions and businesses in all areas. There is no reason, for example, why plenty of high-production-value children’s entertainment can’t be produced outside the ideological confines of the Walt Disney Company.
In conclusion, we make a mistake in thinking about politics simply in terms of a Left-versus-Right dynamic. That dynamic is significant, but where the opportunity really lies today is in focusing on a top-versus-bottom dynamic. An elite class, representing a small number of people with influence in the knowledge-based institutions, are acting in their own interest and against the interest of the vast majority of the American people—those who are still attached to the idea that America is a force for good and who think, to take just one example, that young children should be protected from the imposition of radical gender ideology.
In terms of the top-versus-bottom dynamic, the choice today is between the American Revolution of 1776 and the leftist revolution of the 1960s. The first offers a continued unfolding of America’s founding principles of freedom and equality. The second ends up in nihilism and demoralization, just as the Weather Underground ended up in a bombed-out basement in Greenwich Village in the 1970s.
Even those of us who are temperamentally predisposed to defense must recognize that offense—laying siege to the institutions—is what is now demanded.
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