From How Fascism Works (Jason Stanley, 2020) pp121-4
One of the most significant threats that a class hierarchy can face is a universally accessible and excellent public school system. The political philosophy that feels this threat most acutely-and that unites hostility toward public education with support for class hierarchy — is a certain form of right-wing libertarianism, an ideology that sees free markets as the wellspring of human freedom. These kinds of libertarians oppose government regulation and virtually all forms of public goods, including public education. The political goal of this version of libertarian ideology is to dismantle public goods. The dismantling of public education is backed by oligarchs and business elites alike, who see in democracy a threat to their power, and in the taxes required for public goods a threat to their wealth. Public schools are the foundational democratic public good. It is therefore perfectly logical that those who are opposed to democracy, including fascist and fascist-leaning movements, would join forces with right-wing libertarians in undermining the institution of public education entirely.
One of the pioneers of the wave of attacks against public universities in recent years was former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who made his mark fighting to undermine his state’s renowned public university system. Beginning with his 2010 run for governor and throughout his subsequent political career, which included two terms in that office, as well as a run for US president in 2016, Walker took every opportunity to devalue higher education and make the university system’s work more challenging. As the journalist Karin Fischer explained in a 2022 article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “A Playbook for Knocking Down Higher Ed, this fight is at the heart of Walker’s political ideology:
Scott Walker… was the anti-education governor.
Time and again during his two terms, the Wisconsin Republican made the state’s colleges, and those who work at them, political foils, criticizing them as wasteful and out of touch, challenging what was taught in their classrooms, and questioning their value. By the time he left office, in 2019, Walker had slashed college budgets, stripped tenure protections and university autonomy, and proposed to gut the Wisconsin Idea. enshrined in state law, that stresses higher education’s importance to the state and society.
Walker’s offensive was so successful at the state level, in fact, that it became a model for a national right-wing campaign against higher education, and helped to marshal Republican political power behind that endeavor. As Yale Law School graduate J. D. Vance declared in a speech at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, repeating former president Richard Nixon’s words, “the professors are the enemy.”
For the institutions that help coordinate these attacks, the task of undermining education and the assault on democracy are deeply intertwined. According to a 2021 report from Politico, Jessica Anderson, who was then the executive director of the Heritage Foundation’s advocacy arm, identified critical race theory as “one of the top two issues her group is working on alongside efforts to tighten voting laws.”20 In Project 2025, the blueprint for a potential second Trump administration organized by the Heritage Foundation, a section on the Department of Justice recommends reassigning responsibility for election-related offenses from the Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Division, where they can be more assiduously prosecuted, with potentially far greater consequences to those targeted. The “election related offenses”that the Project 2025 report recommends prosecuting so aggressively are those such as “fraudulent voter registration, including mail-in ballot fraud” (which, it should be noted, has not been documented in any significant numbers anywhere in the country). If enacted, these plans could result in criminal charges being brought against those who do nothing more than participate in a voter registration drive, and could certainly be used to obstruct other programs for expanding access to voting.
The Manhattan Institute, an influential right-wing think tank, has similarly prioritized attacks on public education, sponsoring an initiative on critical race theory led by Christopher Rufo, the strategist who also helped to oust Claudine Gay as the president of Harvard. Rufo developed a doggedly repetitive method of attacking schools and universities by linking them to this frightening-sounding academic theory, whose meaning in their use is completely invented, and using this specious charge to argue that the institutions have abandoned their true purpose of education in favor of a dangerous ideology that threatens the nation.
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