The DeSantis Policy Is Woke Rollback, Not Woke Containment

By Rich Lowry

Monday, March 13, 2023

 

Two words and two thinkers roughly captured the divide over strategy during the Cold War: “containment” and “rollback,” and George Kennan and James Burnham.

 

Kennan, the legendary State Department official whose so-called Long Telegram and subsequent “X” article in Foreign Affairs did so much to catalyze thinking at the outset of the Cold War, is, of course, associated with containment.

 

Burnham, the former Trotskyite and National Review editor and columnist, championed rollback as the only strategy commensurate with the nature of the Soviet threat.

 

This debate is relevant in today’s domestic politics because in the culture war, especially on campus, Florida governor Ron DeSantis is an advocate of rollback. That has helped make him such an object of interest for Republican voters around the country, and such a lightning rod for the Left and the media.

 

For the longest time, Republicans asked themselves, more or less: “How do we stop the insanity?” The question DeSantis is asking is different: “How do we root out the insanity and replace it with something better?”

 

Those two questions track with the Kennan–Burnham clash.

 

“The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies,” Kennan wrote in the “X” article. “Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.”

 

Burnham vociferously objected. “Containment is a variant of the defensive,” he insisted, “and a defensive policy . . . can never win.” It drew a line behind which “every communist, like a Brunhilde behind a wall of fire that even Siegfried has sworn to respect, can sleep secure.” It is a “bureaucratic verbalization of a policy of drift.”

 

Instead, Burnham wanted to go on offense, or wage what he called “offensive political-subversive warfare.” Through “ideological, subversive, guerrilla” tactics, we could deny the Communists safe spaces. We needed to use “every economic and diplomatic device to encourage the breakup of the satellite system.” The goal was to destroy communism “from within, rather than by a war from the outside.”

 

In practice, containment wasn’t based merely on waiting out the Soviets, but Ronald Reagan picked up a version of Burnham’s more forward-leaning approach.

 

“It is now clear,” writes Francis Sempa in the Claremont Review of Books, “that the Soviet Empire mellowed and broke up in the late 1980s because of the West’s sustained pressure — economic, political, geopolitical, military — during that decade. Kennan’s passive containment was superseded by Burnham’s offensive policy of liberation.”

 

Conservatives didn’t have much of a strategy one way or the other for how to handle woke higher education until recently. The posture wasn’t even containment. Rather, it was alarmed passivity — an awareness of the dire consequences of academia’s continued descent into radicalism combined with a sense of powerlessness in doing anything fundamental about it.

 

DeSantis is trying to show that not only can this momentous problem be addressed, but that rollback is an option.

 

To wit, he’s not seeking to limit the damage that DEI programs have on campus. He wants to extricate them entirely.

 

He’s not waiting for university trustees to veto fashionable and biased general-education requirements at specific public universities, an entirely defensive action and one that basically never happens anyway. Instead, the state legislature is going to act to affirmatively shape those requirements.

 

He’s not merely blocking ideas for further watering down and distorting curricula; he’s insisting on general-education courses that “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization.”

 

He’s not hoping that faculty committees can be persuaded to be a little more open-minded in their hiring decisions; he’s trying to goose university presidents and trustees to take a larger hand in the process.

 

He’s not content to hope that the progressive leadership of a place like the New College of Florida finds it within itself to go along with his reforms; he has overturned the leadership at the college in a bid to make the college an exemplar of a more balanced and worthy kind of education.

 

In sum, he’s aiming with all of this to vanquish the stultifyingly uniform and intolerant campus culture in Florida, and force an inflection point in the debate over higher education in the nation.

 

That doesn’t mean, as Stanley Kurtz has noted, that everything DeSantis is proposing is a good idea or even defensible in the courts. There are vulnerabilities that need to be addressed (especially regarding the free-speech implications of a few key provisions). The ambition of the effort, and the fierce reaction it is engendering from the other side, means it’s even more important to pursue it with prudence and care.

 

But make no mistake, the game is afoot. On education, an absolutely crucial front in the culture war, DeSantis is not seeking to play defense or lose slowly.

 

In other words, it’s Burnham not Kennan.