Latest news with #NationalConservatism
New York Times
29-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
How to Make a Mild Guy Really Angry
When I was a baby pundit my mentor, Bill Buckley, told me to write about whatever made me angriest that week. I don't often do that, mostly because I don't get angry that much — it's not how I'm wired. But this week I'm going with Bill's advice. Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren't motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, 'They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.' This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of post-liberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He's a central figure in the National Conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth. In fact, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, JD Vance used his precious time to make a point similar to Deneen's. Vance said, 'People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.' Elite snobbery has a tendency to set me off, and here are two guys with advanced degrees telling us that regular soldiers never fight partly out of some sense of moral purpose, some commitment to a larger cause — the men who froze at Valley Forge, the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy and Guadalcanal. But that's not what really made me angry. It was that these little statements point to the moral rot at the core of Trumpism, which every day disgraces our country, which we are proud of and love. Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
15-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The Vibe Shifts Against the Right
Alex Kaschuta's podcast, 'Subversive,' used to be a node in the network between weird right-wing internet subcultures and mainstream conservatism. She hosted men's rights activists and purveyors of 'scientific' racism, neo-reactionary online personalities with handles like 'Raw Egg Nationalist' and the Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters. Curtis Yarvin, a court philosopher of the MAGA movement who wants to replace democracy with techno-monarchy, appeared on the show twice. In 2022, Kaschuta spoke at the same National Conservatism conference as Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio. Finding progressive conventional wisdom hollow and unfulfilling, Kaschuta was attracted to the contrarian narratives and esoteric ideas of the thinkers and influencers sometimes known as the 'dissident right.' They presented liberal modernity — with its emphasis on racial and gender equality, global cooperation, secularism and orderly democratic processes — as a Matrix-like illusion sustained by ideological coercion, and themselves as the holders of freedom-giving red pills. For Kaschuta, who lives in Romania, the promise of a more authentic, organic society, freed from the hypocrisies of the existing order, was apparently inviting. 'There's always been something tantalizing about the idea that the world is not how it is presented to you,' she wrote on her blog. 'A frontier opens up.' But over the last couple of years, that frontier started seeming to her more like a dead end. Recently, she abandoned the movement. 'The vibe is shifting yet again,' Kaschuta wrote on X last week. 'The cumulative IQ of the right is looking worse than the market.' Kaschuta is not alone; several people who once appeared to find transgressive right-wing ideas scintillating are having second thoughts as they watch Donald Trump's administration put those ideas into practice. The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns 'more than genocide,' and his 2023 book, 'The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,' provided a blueprint for the White House's war on D.E.I. But less than three months into Trump's new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, 'The resistance libs were mostly right about him.' Nathan Cofnas, a right-wing philosophy professor and self-described 'race realist' fixated on group differences in I.Q., wrote on X, 'All over the world, almost everyone with more than half a brain is looking at the disaster of Trump (along with Putin, Yoon Suk Yeol, et al.) and drawing the very reasonable conclusion that right-wing, anti-woke parties are incapable of effective governance.' (Yoon Suk Yeol is South Korea's recently impeached president.) Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
CNN
21-03-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Trump delivers on a generational conservative goal, but it could be risky for Republicans as well as students
CNN — President Donald Trump is claiming generational wins for the Republican Party on the cultural and ideological battlefield of education – which MAGA supporters see as a hostile bastion of liberal power ripe for disruption. In a move he described as '45 years in the making,' Trump, seated among children at desks in a mock classroom set up in the White House, signed an executive order designed to obliterate the Department of Education. 'It sounds strange, doesn't it? Department of Education, we're going to eliminate it,' Trump said, aware that he's unlikely to get Congress to vote to abolish the agency – but that he can suffocate it from the inside anyway. Republicans see the department as a hotbed of liberal activism, a source of 'woke' social policies on diversity and inclusion and an ally of teachers' unions, which are a foundation of the Democratic Party. A sense among GOP voters that the department promotes values antithetical to conservative principles was exacerbated by school closures during the pandemic and by debate about how to treat transgender students. But Trump does not just have K-12 education in his sights as he attempts to use aggressive executive power in his second term. The administration is piling pressure on elite universities over curriculums. It's cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants as part of its purge of the federal government. And it is provoking fear on campuses with its hardline immigration policies that have targeted several academics and activists. The approach has caused fears about government interference in higher education and about the suppression of the constitutional right to free speech – which is only underscored when it protects rhetoric that many Americans view as unacceptable. The crackdown also raised the prospect that an American national jewel – the global power, reach and reputation of scientific research at US college – could be damaged and that there could be a drain of scientific brains and funding to foreign nations. Just last week, for instance, Johns Hopkins University announced that it was cutting 2,000 jobs across 44 countries after it lost $800 million in funding during the effort to dismantle the US Agency for International Development. Trump takes aim at elite universities Elite universities especially are braced for an escalation in the Trump administration's campaign – since they are regarded in the GOP as incubators of liberal protest and mores that the MAGA movement seeks to eradicate. The philosophy was summed up by now-Vice President JD Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School who was at the time a Senate candidate, at a National Conservatism conference in 2021. Vance advocated a campaign against 'very hostile institutions' and added: 'If any of us want to do the things we want to do for our country and the people who live in it – we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.' Such talk concerns historians familiar with the strategy of totalitarian leaders overseas, who target universities and other institutions, such as the press, as part of a broader assault against free speech. One of Russian President Vladimir Putin's earliest acts in his 25-year rule was to drive Western-oriented and liberal democratic influences out of Russian universities as he suppressed academic freedoms. And one of the heroes of Trump's MAGA operatives is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has long battered liberal institutions like universities. This is part of a playbook that also foreshadowed Trump's aggressive attempts to co-opt big business and to push executive power to the limit – and sometimes beyond constitutional limits. The administration's new front in its immigration enforcement operation at universities was highlighted by the detention this month of Columbia graduate and Palestinian green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, who helped lead campus protests last year against Israel's war on Hamas following the October 7, 2023, attacks. The case is only one of several involving students at US universities linked to the Middle East, and Trump has promised a much wider sweep. 'This is the first arrest of many to come,' Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this month in a reference to Khalil. 'We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.' Elise Stefanik, Trump's nominee to serve as US ambassador to the United Nations, meanwhile saw her profile in MAGA world – and nationally – soar after she made alleged antisemitism at Ivy League schools a signature issue. The New York representative's campaign was instrumental in the resignation of President Claudine Gay at Harvard University – Stefanik's alma mater. Why education is such a fertile field for Republicans Political incentives for Republicans to target education have steadily grown over recent decades as the party has transitioned from a haven for elites to a populist force that now speaks for working-class and non-college-educated voters – a process sent into overdrive by Trump in 2016. At the same time, the Democratic Party has moved away from its blue-collar roots and based its most recent presidential election wins on big student turnout, college graduates and more affluent voters. The apparent contempt by some leading progressives for the party's former power base, and the way that universities have become havens for liberal social campaigns that alienate many conservatives, have hardened this new political fault line. In fact, education level has now become one of the defining characteristics of political affiliation – and one of the starkest divides in a nation full of them. In CNN exit polls of the 2024 election, 56% of college graduates voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, while an identical percentage of voters without a college degree voted for Trump. Top Republican politicians have also understood that fanning conservative hostility toward elite educational institutions can be a political winner. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for instance, was a bitter critic of school shutdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic. He's also trying to remake his state's public universities to eradicate diversity, equity and inclusion programs and to seek ideological reforms by using the leverage of state funding in a model for Trump at the federal level. Trump hedges on some aspects of his assault on the Education Department Trump's executive order went a long way to fulfilling a promise made by President Ronald Reagan – whom he has replaced as the ideological guiding light of the modern Republican Party. It instructed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take 'all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the states.' The president justified the move by claiming that the US spends more money on education than many developed nations and yet trails in many educational standards assessments. Like many Republicans, he blamed such failures on the Education Department and argued that returning school policy and funding to states would fix the problem. However, since almost all education policy, hiring of teachers, responsibility for curricula and even the provision of textbooks already lies with the states and local school boards, he may be choosing the wrong target. The Department of Education plays a vital role in managing the critical student loans sector; Pell grants for students from disadvantaged backgrounds; and funding for special education, students with disabilities and those from poorer areas. The White House announced that student loans would remain within the department, as would some other popular programs, while Trump said that Pell grants and funding and resources for children with disabilities and special needs will be 'fully preserved' but may move to other departments and agencies. This switch raises the possibility that while Trump seeks an ideological victory and a new highlight for his perpetual political show, he's worried that he and his fellow Republicans could pay a price for the disruption. This is especially the case since many of the federal funds disbursed for education go to red states that spend less per pupil on education. According to for instance, 8 of the top 10 states in accepting federal funding for K-12 students voted for the president in 2024. Kim Anderson, the executive director of the National Education Association, told CNN International on Thursday that Trump's moves would directly affect conservative-leaning districts from where he draws staunch support. 'They are going to have a lot fewer dollars to spread around to take care of students' needs, class sizes are going to go up, after-school programs are going to go down,' Anderson said. 'There are so many gaps that are going to impact students and what they need to thrive and to live into their full potential.' While Trump claimed his moment of generational triumph on education on Thursday, he's also taking a big risk for students – and for the prospects of the Republican Party, which could now face some of the political downsides of its long quest to close the Department of Education.
CNN
21-03-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Analysis: Trump delivers on a generational conservative goal, but it could be risky for Republicans as well as students
President Donald Trump is claiming generational wins for the Republican Party on the cultural and ideological battlefield of education – which MAGA supporters see as a hostile bastion of liberal power ripe for disruption. In a move he described as '45 years in the making,' Trump, seated among children at desks in a mock classroom set up in the White House, signed an executive order designed to obliterate the Department of Education. 'It sounds strange, doesn't it? Department of Education, we're going to eliminate it,' Trump said, aware that he's unlikely to get Congress to vote to abolish the agency – but that he can suffocate it from the inside anyway. Republicans see the department as a hotbed of liberal activism, a source of 'woke' social policies on diversity and inclusion and an ally of teachers' unions, which are a foundation of the Democratic Party. A sense among GOP voters that the department promotes values antithetical to conservative principles was exacerbated by school closures during the pandemic and by debate about how to treat transgender students. But Trump does not just have K-12 education in his sights as he attempts to use aggressive executive power in his second term. The administration is piling pressure on elite universities over curriculums. It's cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants as part of its purge of the federal government. And it is provoking fear on campuses with its hardline immigration policies that have targeted several academics and activists. The approach has caused fears about government interference in higher education and about the suppression of the constitutional right to free speech – which is only underscored when it protects rhetoric that many Americans view as unacceptable. The crackdown also raised the prospect that an American national jewel – the global power, reach and reputation of scientific research at US college – could be damaged and that there could be a drain of scientific brains and funding to foreign nations. Just last week, for instance, Johns Hopkins University announced that it was cutting 2,000 jobs across 44 countries after it lost $800 million in funding during the effort to dismantle the US Agency for International Development. Elite universities especially are braced for an escalation in the Trump administration's campaign – since they are regarded in the GOP as incubators of liberal protest and mores that the MAGA movement seeks to eradicate. The philosophy was summed up by now-Vice President JD Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School who was at the time a Senate candidate, at a National Conservatism conference in 2021. Vance advocated a campaign against 'very hostile institutions' and added: 'If any of us want to do the things we want to do for our country and the people who live in it – we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.' Such talk concerns historians familiar with the strategy of totalitarian leaders overseas, who target universities and other institutions, such as the press, as part of a broader assault against free speech. One of Russian President Vladimir Putin's earliest acts in his 25-year rule was to drive Western-oriented and liberal democratic influences out of Russian universities as he suppressed academic freedoms. And one of the heroes of Trump's MAGA operatives is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has long battered liberal institutions like universities. This is part of a playbook that also foreshadowed Trump's aggressive attempts to co-opt big business and to push executive power to the limit – and sometimes beyond constitutional limits. The administration's new front in its immigration enforcement operation at universities was highlighted by the detention this month of Columbia graduate and Palestinian green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, who helped lead campus protests last year against Israel's war on Hamas following the October 7, 2023, attacks. The case is only one of several involving students at US universities linked to the Middle East, and Trump has promised a much wider sweep. 'This is the first arrest of many to come,' Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this month in a reference to Khalil. 'We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.' Elise Stefanik, Trump's nominee to serve as US ambassador to the United Nations, meanwhile saw her profile in MAGA world – and nationally – soar after she made alleged antisemitism at Ivy League schools a signature issue. The New York representative's campaign was instrumental in the resignation of President Claudine Gay at Harvard University – Stefanik's alma mater. Political incentives for Republicans to target education have steadily grown over recent decades as the party has transitioned from a haven for elites to a populist force that now speaks for working-class and non-college-educated voters – a process sent into overdrive by Trump in 2016. At the same time, the Democratic Party has moved away from its blue-collar roots and based its most recent presidential election wins on big student turnout, college graduates and more affluent voters. The apparent contempt by some leading progressives for the party's former power base, and the way that universities have become havens for liberal social campaigns that alienate many conservatives, have hardened this new political fault line. In fact, education level has now become one of the defining characteristics of political affiliation – and one of the starkest divides in a nation full of them. In CNN exit polls of the 2024 election, 56% of college graduates voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, while an identical percentage of voters without a college degree voted for Trump. Top Republican politicians have also understood that fanning conservative hostility toward elite educational institutions can be a political winner. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for instance, was a bitter critic of school shutdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic. He's also trying to remake his state's public universities to eradicate diversity, equity and inclusion programs and to seek ideological reforms by using the leverage of state funding in a model for Trump at the federal level. Trump's executive order went a long way to fulfilling a promise made by President Ronald Reagan – whom he has replaced as the ideological guiding light of the modern Republican Party. It instructed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take 'all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the states.' The president justified the move by claiming that the US spends more money on education than many developed nations and yet trails in many educational standards assessments. Like many Republicans, he blamed such failures on the Education Department and argued that returning school policy and funding to states would fix the problem. However, since almost all education policy, hiring of teachers, responsibility for curricula and even the provision of textbooks already lies with the states and local school boards, he may be choosing the wrong target. The Department of Education plays a vital role in managing the critical student loans sector; Pell grants for students from disadvantaged backgrounds; and funding for special education, students with disabilities and those from poorer areas. The White House announced that student loans would remain within the department, as would some other popular programs, while Trump said that Pell grants and funding and resources for children with disabilities and special needs will be 'fully preserved' but may move to other departments and agencies. This switch raises the possibility that while Trump seeks an ideological victory and a new highlight for his perpetual political show, he's worried that he and his fellow Republicans could pay a price for the disruption. This is especially the case since many of the federal funds disbursed for education go to red states that spend less per pupil on education. According to for instance, 8 of the top 10 states in accepting federal funding for K-12 students voted for the president in 2024. Kim Anderson, the executive director of the National Education Association, told CNN International on Thursday that Trump's moves would directly affect conservative-leaning districts from where he draws staunch support. 'They are going to have a lot fewer dollars to spread around to take care of students' needs, class sizes are going to go up, after-school programs are going to go down,' Anderson said. 'There are so many gaps that are going to impact students and what they need to thrive and to live into their full potential.' While Trump claimed his moment of generational triumph on education on Thursday, he's also taking a big risk for students – and for the prospects of the Republican Party, which could now face some of the political downsides of its long quest to close the Department of Education.
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump delivers on a generational conservative goal, but it could be risky for Republicans as well as students
President Donald Trump is claiming generational wins for the Republican Party on the cultural and ideological battlefield of education – which MAGA supporters see as a hostile bastion of liberal power ripe for disruption. In a move he described as '45 years in the making,' Trump, seated among children at desks in a mock classroom set up in the White House, signed an executive order designed to obliterate the Department of Education. 'It sounds strange, doesn't it? Department of Education, we're going to eliminate it,' Trump said, aware that he's unlikely to get Congress to vote to abolish the agency – but that he can suffocate it from the inside anyway. Republicans see the department as a hotbed of liberal activism, a source of 'woke' social policies on diversity and inclusion and an ally of teachers' unions, which are a foundation of the Democratic Party. A sense among GOP voters that the department promotes values antithetical to conservative principles was exacerbated by school closures during the pandemic and by debate about how to treat transgender students. But Trump does not just have K-12 education in his sights as he attempts to use aggressive executive power in his second term. The administration is piling pressure on elite universities over curriculums. It's cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants as part of its purge of the federal government. And it is provoking fear on campuses with its hardline immigration policies that have targeted several academics and activists. The approach has caused fears about government interference in higher education and about the suppression of the constitutional right to free speech – which is only underscored when it protects rhetoric that many Americans view as unacceptable. The crackdown also raised the prospect that an American national jewel – the global power, reach and reputation of scientific research at US college – could be damaged and that there could be a drain of scientific brains and funding to foreign nations. Just last week, for instance, Johns Hopkins University announced that it was cutting 2,000 jobs across 44 countries after it lost $800 million in funding during the effort to dismantle the US Agency for International Development. Elite universities especially are braced for an escalation in the Trump administration's campaign – since they are regarded in the GOP as incubators of liberal protest and mores that the MAGA movement seeks to eradicate. The philosophy was summed up by now-Vice President JD Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School who was at the time a Senate candidate, at a National Conservatism conference in 2021. Vance advocated a campaign against 'very hostile institutions' and added: 'If any of us want to do the things we want to do for our country and the people who live in it – we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.' Such talk concerns historians familiar with the strategy of totalitarian leaders overseas, who target universities and other institutions, such as the press, as part of a broader assault against free speech. One of Russian President Vladimir Putin's earliest acts in his 25-year rule was to drive Western-oriented and liberal democratic influences out of Russian universities as he suppressed academic freedoms. And one of the heroes of Trump's MAGA operatives is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has long battered liberal institutions like universities. This is part of a playbook that also foreshadowed Trump's aggressive attempts to co-opt big business and to push executive power to the limit – and sometimes beyond constitutional limits. The administration's new front in its immigration enforcement operation at universities was highlighted by the detention this month of Columbia graduate and Palestinian green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, who helped lead campus protests last year against Israel's war on Hamas following the October 7, 2023, attacks. The case is only one of several involving students at US universities linked to the Middle East, and Trump has promised a much wider sweep. 'This is the first arrest of many to come,' Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this month in a reference to Khalil. 'We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.' Elise Stefanik, Trump's nominee to serve as US ambassador to the United Nations, meanwhile saw her profile in MAGA world – and nationally – soar after she made alleged antisemitism at Ivy League schools a signature issue. The New York representative's campaign was instrumental in the resignation of President Claudine Gay at Harvard University – Stefanik's alma mater. Political incentives for Republicans to target education have steadily grown over recent decades as the party has transitioned from a haven for elites to a populist force that now speaks for working-class and non-college-educated voters – a process sent into overdrive by Trump in 2016. At the same time, the Democratic Party has moved away from its blue-collar roots and based its most recent presidential election wins on big student turnout, college graduates and more affluent voters. The apparent contempt by some leading progressives for the party's former power base, and the way that universities have become havens for liberal social campaigns that alienate many conservatives, have hardened this new political fault line. In fact, education level has now become one of the defining characteristics of political affiliation – and one of the starkest divides in a nation full of them. In CNN exit polls of the 2024 election, 56% of college graduates voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, while an identical percentage of voters without a college degree voted for Trump. Top Republican politicians have also understood that fanning conservative hostility toward elite educational institutions can be a political winner. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for instance, was a bitter critic of school shutdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic. He's also trying to remake his state's public universities to eradicate diversity, equity and inclusion programs and to seek ideological reforms by using the leverage of state funding in a model for Trump at the federal level. Trump's executive order went a long way to fulfilling a promise made by President Ronald Reagan – whom he has replaced as the ideological guiding light of the modern Republican Party. It instructed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take 'all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the states.' The president justified the move by claiming that the US spends more money on education than many developed nations and yet trails in many educational standards assessments. Like many Republicans, he blamed such failures on the Education Department and argued that returning school policy and funding to states would fix the problem. However, since almost all education policy, hiring of teachers, responsibility for curricula and even the provision of textbooks already lies with the states and local school boards, he may be choosing the wrong target. The Department of Education plays a vital role in managing the critical student loans sector; Pell grants for students from disadvantaged backgrounds; and funding for special education, students with disabilities and those from poorer areas. The White House announced that student loans would remain within the department, as would some other popular programs, while Trump said that Pell grants and funding and resources for children with disabilities and special needs will be 'fully preserved' but may move to other departments and agencies. This switch raises the possibility that while Trump seeks an ideological victory and a new highlight for his perpetual political show, he's worried that he and his fellow Republicans could pay a price for the disruption. This is especially the case since many of the federal funds disbursed for education go to red states that spend less per pupil on education. According to for instance, 8 of the top 10 states in accepting federal funding for K-12 students voted for the president in 2024. Kim Anderson, the executive director of the National Education Association, told CNN International on Thursday that Trump's moves would directly affect conservative-leaning districts from where he draws staunch support. 'They are going to have a lot fewer dollars to spread around to take care of students' needs, class sizes are going to go up, after-school programs are going to go down,' Anderson said. 'There are so many gaps that are going to impact students and what they need to thrive and to live into their full potential.' While Trump claimed his moment of generational triumph on education on Thursday, he's also taking a big risk for students – and for the prospects of the Republican Party, which could now face some of the political downsides of its long quest to close the Department of Education.
