For starters, I’ll note that I’ve got mixed feelings about all this. I heartily endorse most of the substance of Trump’s executive orders relating to education, but I also agree that governance-by-fiat is a lousy way to run a republic. I think Trump’s first few weeks have been remarkable for their pace and ambition but also a predictable response to Biden’s precedent-setting approach to executive orders. (This is what happens, unfortunately, when Obama’s “pen and phone” presidency becomes the norm.) I’m no fan of the imperial presidency, but I also have trouble crediting complaints about a “constitutional crisis” from those who were untroubled by Biden’s unconstitutional student-loan forgiveness schemes or FBI investigations into frustrated parents.
Critics have insisted that Trump’s orders on DEI, gender identity, and antisemitism are antithetical to small-government conservatism. They have a point. Of course, that kind of Reaganite restraint no longer dominates in Trump’s GOP. (And the Trump critics who espouse this newfound respect for small-government Reaganism tend to be laughably insincere, given that many had great fun during Trump 1.0 denouncing diligent Reaganites like Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, and Betsy DeVos.)
In any event, MAGA populists have concluded that Reaganism is a self-defeating strategy today. They’ve decided that it amounts to a status quo in which Democratic administrations move education to the left and then Republicans just try to dial things back a bit, while struggling to fend off the teacher unions, the higher education lobby, and a hostile bureaucracy. The result is a steady leftward march that’s only slowed by occasional speed bumps. The GOP’s MAGA wing believes that the only way to reverse that dynamic is by unapologetically seizing the levers of government like Democrats do and then using them to pursue other ends—such as, say, race-blind equality rather than race-based equity.
Now, the Reagan-MAGA tension creates a lot of ambiguity when it comes to education in Washington. After all, Trump has promised both to abolish the Department of Education and that Washington will lead when it comes to driving DEI and antisemitism out of schools and colleges. How do you square that? The mainstream media explanation is that it’s just hypocrisy. A more nuanced view posits that the administration’s ultimate goal is to reduce Washington’s sway in schools and colleges but that accomplishing this requires first uprooting the discriminatory practices and destructive dogmas abetted by past federal activity. Indeed, some conservatives versed in deterrence theory argue that only when Republicans harness the Department of Ed like this will Democrats discover the merits of shrinking Washington’s footprint.
