The Radical Right's Plan for Public Education

Context

In the last year or so, I've started using the labels such as 'radical right' or 'radical libertarian right' to describe the ideology of what GOP conservative ideology has morphed into in recent years. The change has been ongoing at least since a 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, that made public school segregation illegal and required desegregation in an attempt to equalize the quality of public education across the entire nation. 

That Supreme Court decision enraged some conservatives who strongly opposed civil liberties and federal government mandated federal or state spending on domestic issues, including public education. That ideology envisioned strong state governments and a weak central government focused on the military and not much else, including civil rights and voting rights.[1] Over the decades since then, that ideology has come to displace the existing conservative ideology. Various events, such as Barry Goldwater's 1964 crushing loss to Lyndon Johnson, spurred the movement and kept it alive. The radical right slowly built influence and power in the GOP over the decades. The final push for power in the GOP was crystallized by the election of Barak Obama in in November of 2008. 

I first became aware of this historical narrative from historian Nancy MacLean's 2017 book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History Of The Radical Right's Stealth Plan For America (discussed here), and Jane Mayer's 2017 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (discussed here).[2] MacLean described the origins of the radical right movement based on a trove of forgotten papers on a university campus in Virginia. She was given access to those papers without people understanding their content. Mayer's book includes a detailed discussion of how Obama's 2008 election, once again drove the radical right into a rage and finally crystallized GOP radical right resistance to Obama and more generally the democratic party. Among some other very bad things, that uncompromising opposition remains the basis of (i) America's broken gridlocked state of federal governance today, and (ii) America's state of extreme polarization, and its distrust of government, the mainstream media and political opposition.

The public education plan

A long article at Wall Street on Parade, Charles Koch Should Be on the Presidential Debate Stage Tonight, Not Donald Trump, describes the radical right plan like this:

"Koch Industries and Charles Koch have used nonprofit front groups to further their agenda for at least four decades.

And finally, there is billionaire Betsy DeVos who heads the U.S. Department of Education. Sourcewatch reports that the DeVos family fortune, which comes from Amway household and beauty products, funds school privatization projects, anti-union and pro-school voucher groups. ....

One of the seminal books on the Koch agenda is the 700-page tome by Christopher Leonard: “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.” Leonard was interviewed about the Koch’s view of public education on the Podcast, “Have You Heard.” (We highly recommend listening to it.) Leonard explained the Koch view as follows:

"Know what the blueprint is. Koch’s influence machine is multi-faceted and complex and I am just telling you, in a very honest way, there is a huge difference between the marketing materials produced by Americans for Prosperity and the actual behind-the-scenes political philosophy. There’ a huge difference. And here’s the actual political philosophy:

Government is bad. Public education must be destroyed for the good of all American citizens in this view.

So, the ultimate goal is to dismantle the public education system entirely and replace it with a privately run education system, which the operatives in this group believe, in a sincere way, is better for everybody. Now, whether you agree with that or not is the big question, but we cannot have any doubt, there’s going to be a lot of glossy marketing materials about opportunity, innovation, efficiency. At its core though, the network seeks to dismantle the public education system because they see it as destructive. So that is what’s the actual aim of this group. And don’t let them tell you anything different."

Thus, if the president gets re-elected, it is quite possible that he will try to set in motion a plan to dismantle public education and replace it with private schools. That is not to say that the president buys into the radical right agenda. But, being a transactional "what's in it for me" kind of guy, he can be conned and manipulated or bribed into going along with it. Trump does not care about education. Trump only cares about Trump.

Footnotes:

1. My read of the situation is that the radical right wants power shifted from the federal government to state governments because it is easier to subvert, corrupt, and then capture state governments than it is to do that with a federal government. Some states strongly oppose the radical right agenda and those states cannot be so easily bought and captured by this kind of radicalism. In essence, the elites in the radical right movement are multi-millionaires and billionaires. They want to re-establish authoritarian autocratic power in the states they can control. They want to be the aristocrats who control the states just like elites who controlled the states and public education before the 1954 Brown v. Board decision.

2. Conservatives have heavily criticized the books that MacLean and Mayer wrote. The reasons are self-evident. Also, there are some principled, non-political criticisms, but they do not mostly negate the basic story that MacLean and Mayer tell in their books.