Democracy at Stake? Culture wars and the Project to Dismantle Public Education

• In Event: Positive Peace, Global Transformations, and U.S. Contestations: Decolonial, Ecological, Economic, and Democratic Pathways in Education (Part 2)

Proposal

With the November 2024 election of Donald Trump, a Republican trifecta, an ultra conservative Supreme Court, and the potential dismantling of public education through the Project 2025 agenda, the stakes for American public schools and universities have never been higher. Yet Trump’s cult-like popularity and the general feelings of anger, frustration and overall suffering experienced by the majority of American citizens did not have its beginning in Trumpism or in 2016 when he last was in office.

The current “red wave” or anti-democratic backlash sweeping America must be understood as a symptom of the failure of “a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power” (Hedges, 2020) and a system that has funneled wealth and power into the hands of a few; while endless conflict and wars, attacks on labor, women’s rights, civil rights, along with increasing inflation and austerity measures have decimated the public sectors serving the majority of Americans.

Reducing America’s social, economic and political crises to Trumpism fails to acknowledge the increasing role that corporate actors, the religious right and populist culture warriors have played over the last several decades in securing a conservative modernist form of neoliberal capitalism whose attacks on the public sphere, and particularly public education, have been responsible for our failed democracy. By naming and confronting the people and ideas that led us to this moment, in this brief we hope to explain how this happened, why it matters for education specifically, and what is needed to protect and rebuild our failing democracy and public education.

We set out to highlight and analyze the long march of neoliberalism, its influence and impact, not only on politics and education specifically, but understanding it as the current bizarre alliance of corporate elites, the intellectual trends of contemporary conservatism, together with the rise of the Christian right into mainstream politics. Rightist beliefs and proposals, as articulated in Project 2025, lay out a vast social and ideological project - at its center are attacks on public institutions, (which are broader than education, yet education institutions have been a focal point of rightist criticism), bringing the entire public sphere into question.

By examining the historical evolution and contemporary mechanisms of these anti-democratic strategies, the paper demonstrates how such policies undermine conditions necessary for positive peace, including equitable access, civic participation, and social cohesion. While recognizing from the outset that the right has many dimensions and is not a unitary movement, we illustrate the range of complex education policy issues as they relate to this ideological project, and understand them as a confluence of interests that began in the 1970’s with the Powell memo and culminated today, that offers a way of examining how this has evolved over time, and why it has been so successful – it can also tell us how to oppose or counter it.

Authors

• Carol Anne Spreen, New York Univesity

• Frank Adamson, California State University, Sacramento

• Anthony Lewis Wagner, New York University