Right-wingers in America don't just want to dominate politics -- they'd prefer it if their opponents didn't exist. They haven't started putting us in camps, but I think many of them want to.
The madness of our current Trump/Heritage Society dictatorship largely derives from the belief that all dissent can and should be neutralized, that no law passed by a previous Congress and signed into law by a previous president should remain in effect if it contradicts what Trump and Heritage want, and that no institution that displeases Trump and/or Heritage should remain intact. Among the institutions that should be eliminated from American life is elite academia, of which the most acclaimed institution is Harvard. Trump isn't attacking Harvard in order to change it. He's attacking it in order to destroy it. I'm not sure he knows that, but the leaders of the Heritage Foundation who have steered him in this direction certainly do.
The foreword to Project 2025's 900-page manifesto, Mandate for Leadership, makes this clear. It was written by Heritage's president, Kevin Roberts. He writes:
Today, nearly every top-tier U.S. university president or Wall Street hedge fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high school football game in Waco, Texas. Many elites’ entire identity, it seems, is wrapped up in their sense of superiority over those people. But under our Constitution, they are the mere equals of the workers who shower after work instead of before.The educated elite betray the morally pure Volk at those high school football games in Waco by subjecting them to globalism and (of course) "wokeness."
They enthusiastically support supranational organizations like the United Nations and European Union, which are run and staffed almost entirely by people who share their values and are mostly insulated from the influence of national elections. That’s why they are eager for America to sign international treaties on everything from pharmaceutical patents to climate change to “the rights of the child”—and why those treaties invariably endorse policies that could never pass through the U.S. Congress. Like the progressive Woodrow Wilson a century ago, the woke Left today seeks a world, bound by global treaties they write, in which they exercise dictatorial powers over all nations without being subject to democratic accountability.And while I agree that we need people without elite degrees in government, Roberts says that education is literally useless if you're in government.
Intellectual sophistication, advanced degrees, financial success, and all other markers of elite status have no bearing on a person’s knowledge of the one thing most necessary for governance: what it means to live well. That knowledge is available to each of us, no matter how humble our backgrounds or how unpretentious our attainments. It is open to us to read in the book of human nature, to which we are all offered the key just by merit of our shared humanity.Also, universities are entangled with the Great Satan: China.
Through the CCP's Confucius Institutes, Beijing has been just as successful at compromising and coopting our higher education system as they have at compromising and coopting corporate America....So what is the solution to these problems?
But these really are not many issues, but two: (1) that China is a totalitarian enemy of the United States, not a strategic partner or fair competitor, and (2) that America’s elites have betrayed the American people. The solution to all of the above problems is not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat.
We solve them not by trimming and reshaping the leaves but by ripping out the trees—root and branch.Roberts appears to want all elite institutions removed from America, "root and branch."
The rest of the Manual for Leadership has much more targeted, if terrible, ideas about education, primarily an assault on diversity programs. But this is the real vision.
The madness of modern conservatism stems from the belief that right-wingers can simply do away with anything that annoys them and there'll be no negative consequences, at least for them or anyone they care about. Thus, George W. Bush chose not to regulate segments of the economy that almost dragged us into a second Great Depression. Conservatives refuse to fight climate change, on the assumption that no one they know will suffer great losses in floods or heat waves. Gun control? There haven't been any shootings at their kids' schools.
Now the right believes we can do without vaccines and without National Weather Service monitoring of natural disasters. The right believes we can live without adequate Medicaid funding (including funding of eldercare) and without an adequate air traffic control system (even though high-level right-wingers fly a lot).
In their madness, they've concluded that we don't need scientific research -- we don't need grants to universities, and it would be fine if the best-known universities ceased to exist altogether.
The people who are thinking this way have comfortable lives and apparently can't imagine any kind of setback in life that would make them dependent on programs and institutions they despise. They're also massively selfish -- many of them actually learned much of what they know about politics from the author of The Virtue of Selfishness -- and they don't care about anyone who benefits from whatever they're eliminating.
They think they'll be fine if elite universities simply cease to exist. And maybe they will be. But the rest of us will miss the universities when they're gone.
