Steve Bannon, former Donald Trump adviser, he of “flood the zone with shit,” wanted to tear down the postwar international order and international organizations in favor of an all-embracing nationalism, to deconstruct the administrative state. What post-Bannon conservatives want is to flood the zone with distrust.
Christopher Rufo, he of critical race theory hysteria, has now set his eyes on dismantling public education. He spoke this week at Hillsdale College in Michigan, a small conservative school with an outsized presence in conservative cricles.
Rufo hopes, in his words, to “bait the Left into opposing [curriculum] ‘transparency,” Kathryn Joyce writes at Salon, “in order to trigger conservative suspicions that public schools have something to hide.” The key is to create distrust:
“For example,” he said, “to get universal school choice you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”
“To get universal school choice,” Rufo told listeners, “you need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”
That admission is remarkably similar to the diagnosis that progressive public education advocates have made. Last month, former Nashville school board member Amy Frogge told Salon that she saw “all the controversy about critical race theory” as a deliberate strategy to alienate communities from their local schools. The education privatization movement, she said, “is a billionaire’s movement,” and the only way it can “gain ground is to create controversy and distrust of the public school system. That’s what all of this is about.”
Like Bannon, Rufo and his allies want to deconstruct, to destroy, not to build. Public uninversities are on the menu as well.
“We need to have the courage and the intelligence and the tenacity to say, ‘What the public giveth, the public can taketh away,” said Rufo. “So we go in there and we defund things we don’t like, we fund things we do like.”
In terms of the latter, he suggested that conservative legislators use public funding to establish new, independently-governed “conservative centers” within flagship public universities, which could serve as “magnets” for right-wing professors, create a new track of conservative-minded classes and generally establish “a separate patronage system” for conservative thinkers and activists.
That is, expand the right-wing billionaire-funded wingnut welfare system to publicly funded institutions.
In a conversation with other New York Times writers on how the fringe has overtaken the Republican Party, Lulu Garcia-Navarro sees the spread of “Don’t Say Gay” laws beyond Florida as an attempt to apply “the attention economy” to legislation.
Jamelle Bouie agrees:
I largely agree that this is an attempt to do something like what Trump did: capture attention, generate energy amongst one’s most fervent supporters. Sort of draw the opposition into an argument and hope that you’re able to frame the argument in your direction, and capture the attention of people who may just be marginally paying attention to the whole thing.
Republicans’ decades-long attempt to sow distrust about elections employed “integrity” as a dog whistle for brown people voting. In due course, the program sparked a violent insurrection. Republicans claim their voter suppression laws mean to restore trust in a system they’ve spent decades undermining.
Can these people build anything?
The problem Democrats face in saving democracy and public institutions from schools to elections to having an educated electorate is to overcome the distrust economy directly opposed to the foundations of American governance.
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