By Rich Lowry
Monday, February 10, 2025
The Right just experienced its best three weeks in
the culture war in 50 years.
A blitz of executive orders issued by President Donald
Trump have taken dead aim at left-wing cultural priorities and pillars of the
Left’s cultural influence.
Fashionable progressive ideas that have long been
ascendant, including DEI and gender ideology, have received hammerblows since
Trump’s inauguration, and there’s more to come.
Never before has control of the executive branch of the
federal government had such potentially momentous cultural significance. The
Trump administration is determined to use every tool at its command — chiefly
federal funding but also the enforcement of civil rights laws — to push back
against decades-long trends that have long felt inexorable.
For quite some time, conservatives have focused on the
notion of a “long march through the institutions” to understand how the Left
came to dominate elite culture. The phrase is attributed to the 1960s-era
left-wing German activist Rudi Dutschke, who wanted, in the words of a progressive analyst, “to create radical change from within
government and society by becoming an integral part of the machinery.”
His ally, the radical German-American philosopher Herbert
Marcuse, explained, “To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke
has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions:
working against the established institutions while working within them, but not
simply by ‘boring from within’, rather by ‘doing the job’, learning (how to
program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use
the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned
obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one’s
own consciousness in working with others.”
Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute briefly and
compellingly explains this strategy in this video.
The Left’s insight was that by taking over the faculty
lounges, Hollywood studios, HR departments, and the like it could bring
revolutionary change in a way that it couldn’t through the ballot box or a
frontal assault on such institutions.
This approach has been brilliantly successful, as we’ve
seen time and again.
The seed of gender ideology, for instance, was conceived
in some women’s studies department five decades ago and steadily widened its
influence until we woke up one morning and practically everyone in America was
putting their pronouns in their emails and males were competing in females’
sports — without anyone having voted for such radical changes.
Now, Trump is bringing to bear a real counter-force via
federal power.
This represents a new way of thinking about cultural
change for the Right, and a strange reversal — to wit, it’s the progressives
who effectively used civil society to their ends, and now conservatives are
attempting to use government to theirs.
Government played a role in the tide of left-wing
cultural change (through various funding streams and government impositions),
but it wasn’t necessarily the dominant one. The takeover of elite culture was
largely driven by private actors: the hiring policies of university
administrators, the funding decisions of large foundations, and the practices
promoted by corporate HR departments, among other things, had an enormous hand
in effecting a de facto cultural revolution.
The Department of Health and Human Services didn’t direct
Disney to inject woke story lines into its programming; the company did it on
its own.
As we witnessed over and over again, the leaders of elite
institutions weren’t even necessarily in charge. They bent to the woke
fixations and moral bullying of their youthful underlings who expected “the
man” to cater to their whims.
The atmosphere of fear and the element of coercion that
characterized the advance of woke culture constituted one part of civil society
feasting on another — the ideological cadres, and the opportunists and cowards,
enforcing an orthodoxy on everyone else.
It wasn’t government that was responsible for all the
cancellations.
Trump’s new factor in this equation is an executive
branch willing to exercise its discretion over federal funds to attempt to
counter the woke cultural tide.
The most recent example was the executive order late last
week saying that federal funding would be withdrawn from educational
institutions that permit males to compete in females’ sports. The NCAA
instantly changed its policy to say that only
athletes who were female at birth can compete against females.
The NCAA is a hugely consequential cultural institution
that governs college athletics in the United States, and now, on this issue,
it’s presumably never going back — because of what Trump has done.
His anti-DEI executive order will have similar effects at
least among federal contractors, and perhaps more broadly.
A little straw in the wind was West Point’s disbanding of its identity-based clubs
in response to Trump’s orders. This, again, is a culture change — such groups
are part of the cultural ecosystem on college campuses and encourage, at the
margins, students to think of themselves as members of separate and distinct
groups.
And Trump really hasn’t gotten started on the
universities.
The antecedent here is Governor Ron DeSantis’s approach
to Disney and the state’s public universities, where he used Disney’s
dependence on a government dispensation (its so-called special tax district)
and the status of the universities as actual government institutions to push
back on woke culture.
Everyone knows Andrew Breitbart’s adage that politics is
downstream of culture. This line was a worthy reminder of the absolute
centrality of culture. But culture and politics have a more complicated
relationship. Daniel Patrick Moynihan captured it when he said, “The central
conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the
success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a
culture and save it from itself.”
President Trump is borrowing from the liberal truth in
this moment of cultural insanity.
In part, Trump’s executive actions represent a case of
what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If a progressive president,
namely Barack Obama, could use the threat of a cutoff of federal funds to impose star-chamber procedures on
campuses in sexual assault cases and to force his preferred bathroom policy on
schools, there’s no reason a Republican president can’t use the same tool for
more rational ends.
Moreover, if the Left could fund its favored causes and
interest groups through government, it’s obviously fair that Trump and Elon
Musk cut them off.
Of course, it’d be better overall if federal funding
weren’t so pervasive and indispensable, but conservatives lost that argument
long ago.
Naturally, everything Trump has done will be subject to
litigation, and there will be concerted efforts by liberal institutions to
skirt his executive orders. There is a limit to how much Trump can accomplish
culturally under his own power — will there be any more conservative professors
at Harvard at the end of these four years? — and there may, as happened the
first time around, be a backlash against him that stokes cultural radicalism.
So far, no such reaction is in evidence, though.
Mainstream institutions, like Meta, are treating Trump’s return to power as a
permission slip to escape the chains of their woke captivity. It helps that on
DEI and trans ideology, Trump is offering the recovery of a normality that is
much more popular than the alternative.
However it turns out, the feeling of conservative
impotence in the culture war is, for now, thankfully, a thing of the past.
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