If Trump Loses - What Comes Next?
No matter what happens, the Right must be prepared.
Via American Mind
We reject the prevailing opinion in Washington, D.C. that President Trump is going to lose the election next week. But it is worth considering what is at stake if the Harris-Biden administration wins. What would happen to the judiciary, the educational system, the American family, and the threat posed by Big Tech? How must the Right respond to the present crisis, regardless of who wins, at the state and local level? Has better red state political leadership ever been more vital to the survival of the American Right?
Whatever happens next week and over the course of the next few months, Americans face a choice between two opposing regimes—two opposing kinds of government. Choose wisely or risk a tyranny perpetual and universal. The Editors of The American Mind.
Biden’s Bipartisan Plan: Destroy American Education
Stanley Kurtz - Replying to The American Mind Editors, "What Comes Next"
Over the next four years, conservatives risk well and truly losing the culture wars.
The campus free-speech crisis, kicked into high gear by the election of President Trump in 2016, has metastasized into the woke revolution of 2020, transforming American attitudes toward education in the process. A decade of educational culture wars running from Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in 1987 through Nathan Glazer’s We Are All Multiculturalists Now in 1997 gave way to roughly two decades of popular conservative apathy toward the schools. Indecipherable postmodern jargon was dismissed in those days as irrelevant. “How can something no-one even understands endanger the republic?” “They’ll settle down once they graduate and start paying taxes,” we were assured.
No more. Now websites chronicling daily campus outrages proliferate. Public esteem for higher education has plummeted. Campus-style accusation, intimidation, cancelation, and disruption have spilled into social media, workplaces, and above all, into our looted, burned-out, and riot-torn city streets. As a domino line of statue-toppling reaches the founders, grown-up campus cry-babies at the New York Times censor senators, defenestrate editors, and mangle American history into a Johnny one-note tale of white supremacy.
The Woke Platform
The answer to the latter question is blindingly obvious. On the one hand, President Trump has determinedly pushed back against “woke” educational trends, the more so as matters have deteriorated. His popular 2019 Executive Order on Campus Free Speech has been followed in 2020 by an Executive Order banning the use of Critical Race Theory, not only in federal training sessions but for federal contractors and grant recipients—very much including colleges and universities. This order has potentially profound implications for higher education that are only beginning to be recognized and explored.
The recent White House Conference on American History introduced a new strategy for restoring American history education that also has only barely begun to be appreciated and understood....
Sleeping on the Job The conservative education establishment is backed up by generous funding from businesses that would rather placate the woke than fight them—businesses that care more about opening up national markets than about protecting federalism and local control. Some funding for the conservative education establishment even comes from downright left-leaning sources like the Gates Foundation and the College Board.
For decades, this conservative education establishment has attempted to forge a center-Right/center-Left coalition for “education reform.” To make that alliance work, conservatives downplayed educational content in culturally critical areas like history and literature, concentrating instead on basic skills like reading and math, with tests keyed to national standards and designed to hold schools and teachers accountable for success or failure.
This bipartisan centrist movement gave birth to the Common Core. Yet as Common Core emerged, our cultural polarization increased. The “bipartisan” K-12 reform coalition increasingly took direction from the Left, which had long since consolidated control through its takeover of university schools of education, and of higher education ...
Shrink Higher Ed
What, however, has been driving the woke revolution? The mere absence of conservative pushback does not explain that revolution’s success. The key to the woke revolution is the decline of the traditional family and the local, national, religious, and civilizational communities that families once knit together. In a world of atomized individuals, crusades around our moral bottom lines of opposition to racism and genocide are all that remain of collective meaning and purpose.....
Socialist College
American Enterprise Institute Fellow Jason Delisle is the foremost conservative critic of the Biden-Sanders free college plan, and his approach reflects both the strengths and weaknesses of the conservative education establishment. Delisle cannily shows that the Biden-Sanders plan represents a vast and unnecessary government expense, sure to increase federal meddling and likely to undercut its own intent. While the cost of college has rapidly expanded, Delisle establishes that most students from families with incomes under $125,000 a year already receive sufficient relief from various government and private programs that college for them is surprisingly affordable. Yet these are the students who would attend college for free under the Biden-Sanders plan.
No Parent Left Alone
For the rest, Biden’s higher education proposals are sure to set off a series of culture war battles. Biden promises to restore Obama-era guidance on Title IX, stripping male students of their due process rights and subjecting them to expulsion after hearings before campus kangaroo courts. If Democrats manage to pass the Equality Act, transgender students will win dorm assignments and compete in college sports based on their chosen gender identity rather than their biological sex. Privacy and basic fairness for female students will be a thing of the past. Faith-based institutions will be thrown back on the courts for protection. That protection will surely fail should Democrats pack the Court.
The Real End Game
What about Biden’s unpublished education plan? The disastrous and discredited Common Core stealthily forced on the nation by the Obama-Biden administration now seeks resurrection in the form of a de facto national civics Common Core. The plan is about to be rolled out by the very same bipartisan education reform movement that created Common Core for math and reading. We got a preview of this in 2018, when some of the prime movers behind the current reform civics effort replaced history standards in Massachusetts. . . . Read More
Judicial Carnage
Josh Hammer - Replying to The American Mind Editors, "What Comes Next"
This most unusual of years has featured no shortage of unprecedented chaos—no shortage, that is, of petty looting, urban conflagration, anarchic savagery, and outright insurrection alike. This most unusual of years, blighted as it has been by the Democratic Party riots, has seen the reification of the very “American carnage” that President Trump famously inveighed against in his 2017 Inaugural Address. But in a Joe Biden…er, Kamala Harris presidential administration, we would see an “awokening” of the federal judiciary so systemic in its all-encompassing breadth, and so grotesque in its ideological perversion, as to make that particular variety of carnage look positively tame by comparison. Read More
Surviving the Next Four Years of Tech
James Poulos - Replying to The American Mind Editors, "What Comes Next"
In the event that President Trump is re-elected, the discourse around Big Tech—and the policies that flow from it—will ratchet into a higher gear. From the standpoint of people “across the ideological spectrum” who oppose the runaway consolidation of public consciousness into a virtual world managed by today’s tech ruling class, that will be a major benefit of a second Trump term.
[If Trump Loses] - Read More
The Harris-Biden Revolution
Scott Yenor - Replying to The American Mind Editors, "What Comes Next"
...Neither Kamala Harris nor Joe Biden leads the Rolling Revolution. But their presidency, should it occur and such as it will be, will doubtless empower the Revolution’s fiercest advocates. If you want a good guide to the Harris-Biden Presidency on matters relating to sex and family, find something that the Sexual Revolution has yet to accomplish and then think through what is necessary to accomplish it.
Biden endorses (publicly-subsidized?) transgender transitioning, not excluding surgeries, for 8-year-olds. Kamala Harris affects to be the truest of true believers in all “transgender rights.” The Justice Department under Attorney General Keith Ellison will force civil society to bend before the sacred claims of transgender rights. (Pause to think: Imagine the fanatics who will staff the Harris-Biden administration!) Read More
Think Locally, Act Locally
Erick Erickson - Replying to The American Mind Editors, "What Comes Next"
Washington matters more in our heads than in our reality. Whether or not Biden wins, the American Right must focus on state and local government. Conservatives would do best to engage more at the local level than on the hill. The real truth of our times is that Washington is hopelessly gridlocked to the effect that one president can erase his predecessor by rolling back executive orders and regulations. Barack Obama managed to get a healthcare reform package passed that Republicans have campaigned on repealing and never repealed, in large part because most of them are actually okay with that. They just cannot be honest with their voters.
Donald Trump passed a tax reform package that actually benefits most Americans and, while progressives hate it, a lot of Democrats in Congress privately concede it spurred economic growth they do not want to reverse. Beyond those major initiatives, not a whole lot in Washington has changed that cannot swing back and forth between executive orders. ...
What is left untouched and ignored by too many is local government. The farm team for future presidents and congresses is assembling right now in local school boards, city councils, county commissions, and state legislatures. Americans, however, are so fixated on Washington that they ignore both their local elected officials and their local issues. . . . Read More