The Winnable Culture Wars
Trump shouldn’t disarm now
DURING the Cold War, peaceniks proposed unilateral disarmament: Let the Soviets keep their nukes, we’ll get rid of ours.
The Cold War is over, but there’s another war going on, a culture war being fought over whether there’s anything honorable or decent in American and Western history and culture. It’s an extraordinarily important war, because it’s about the country we live in and the country our children will live in 20 years hence.
The anti-American crowd has mostly won the war. Recently, I watched the HBO TV miniseries “Band of Brothers,” a fictionalized portrayal of one infantry regiment during World War II. It was produced just 15 years ago, but something so pro-American probably couldn’t be made today.
You’d think an “America First” Trump administration would have recognized the need to engage in the culture wars. But that’s not what it’s doing. Instead, it’s proposing unilateral disarmament.
In budget negotiations, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, wants to zero out federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
That assumes those agencies can never be relied on to present a positive message about America. That’s silly. There’s no reason the NEA can’t fund pro-American art. Get rid of them, and you’ve unilaterally disarmed to the steady drumbeat of anti-American voices from TV and Hollywood.
The same thing is happening over at the Department of Education. Secretary Betsy DeVos’ energies have been devoted to getting herself confirmed and getting a handle on the education bureaucracy. The Educrat blob, filled with holdovers hostile to her agenda, has largely been left in place.
Partly the problem was the Trump transition team, which left appointments in the hands of people committed to programs like Common Core. And since then, the Trump appointees have largely been low-level campaign staffers. They’ve been regional field directors, campaign data operators and coalition directors — the cronies who always find jobs for each other in a new administration.
Worse still, there’s nothing to indicate that DeVos has much interest in higher education. When questioned at her confirmation hearing, she showed little knowledge about the challenges she’d face, and she didn’t reassure President Trump’s conservative friends in the academy when she announced that she asked Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. to lead a higher-ed task force.
Falwell is going to propose the feds get out of the business of regulating American universities, and indeed the feds have no business telling universities to provide transgender bathrooms.
Under President Barack Obama, the micromanaging became so burdensome that college presidents almost hoped for a Trump victory.
But Liberty is quite unlike the other 4,000 colleges and universities in the country, and we’re permitted to wonder whether a Falwell-led team will bring a great deal of insight into the reality of higher education for America’s 20 million college and university students. DeVos’ Education Department might make things better for Liberty University, but what about the rest of us?
Andrew Brietbart said that politics is downstream from culture. He didn’t tell us what’s upstream from culture, and how it might be changed. If that’s what you aim to do, however, the way to begin is with those 20 million students.
Right now, the campus is often an unsafe space for conservative academics and students, and the answer isn’t to get the feds out of the business of regulating American universities. Just the opposite. If federal moneys, in the form of student loans and government grants, support our colleges and universities, let’s attach some conditions. How about: No money if you don’t respect the academic freedom of your faculties and students?
Some conservatives want to abolish the Education Department. I disagree. That’s unilateral disarmament. Instead, let’s make the left want to abolish it. Let’s make The New York Times come out against academic freedom.
So what’s to be done? Real simple. All future political appointments to the Education Department should be run through the White House. Sure, people there now have 10 other more important things on their mind. Which means they need someone new who’s going to be able to concentrate on higher education and get the right people appointed.