How conservatives lost the institutions
Instead of cultivating the professions, the conservative movement has attacked the legitimacy of the nation’s organizational infrastructure.
The 2016 election of Donald Trump was cheered by conservative populists who viewed him as a formidable enemy of an entrenched “establishment” that they held responsible for forcing liberal policies and practices on an alienated and resentful American public. But the Trump presidency illustrated the limitations of the White House as an agent of cultural influence in a complex society with widely distributed sources of power. Trump provoked a furious counterresponse among liberal opponents and others frightened or disgusted by his ascendance, boosting the popularity of progressive cultural values. Conservative complaints about rampant “wokeness” and “cultural Marxism” were even louder after Trump’s four years in office than they had been before his term began.
Many conservative critics have come to recognize the substantial authority maintained by social institutions that are not reliably sensitive to the results of the most recent national election – not only government agencies populated by career civil servants (now characterized by Trump supporters as a sinister “deep state” dedicated to frustrating their objectives) but also schools and universities, media and entertainment companies, nonprofit associations, and large corporations. The late conservative writer and publisher Andrew Breitbart observed that political movements seeking to achieve policy victories needed to concentrate on attaining cultural influence and using this influence to promote their ideas. Breitbart hoped that conservatives would follow the example set by what he called the “institutional left,” identifying “big government,” “big journalism,” and “big Hollywood” as powerful enemies of conservatives’ political objectives.1
Conservatives correctly note that most of these institutions are led and staffed by Democrats and liberals who have become increasingly aggressive in using their perches to promote progressive cultural beliefs. But some critics, such as conservative intellectuals Christopher Rufo and Arthur Milikh, have misunderstood this political alignment as the residue of a “long march through the institutions” conducted via the intentional coordination of generations of leftist activists.2 These figures perceive the existence of an undifferentiated collective enemy – sometimes characterized as “the regime,” “the cathedral,” or “the blob” – that has methodically colonized various influential organizations and now exploits its dominant position to snuff out conservative ambitions. “In terms of political and moral power,” argues Milikh, “the Left currently rules every consequential sector of society, from the nation’s educational institutions (K–12 and higher education), to large parts of the media, corporate America, Big Tech, and the federal administrative apparatus.”3
Well-educated liberals did not engineer a hostile takeover of social institutions. Instead, their leftward lean reflects the prevailing contemporary political values of the white-collar professionals who have long managed, funded, and patronized them.
In truth, the leftward lean of major institutions primarily reflects the prevailing contemporary political values of the white-collar professionals who have long managed, funded, and patronized them. These actors are sensitive to cultural trends and transformations, but also defend the traditional purposes of their organizations and view themselves as neutral, scientifically informed modernizers rather than radical instigators and infiltrators. Well-educated liberals did not engineer a hostile takeover of social institutions. Instead, they have struggled to balance their need to preserve the cultural and intellectual status of their organizational positions with their desire to invoke this authority on behalf of progressive causes like racial equality, LGBT tolerance, and environmental protection. Rather than a march of steady conquest from outside, it is more accurate to summarize the historical record as a “long slog of the institutions” led from within through the minefields of cultural conflict and controversy.
Conservatives have often expressed perceptions of declining institutional representation. British commentator John O’Sullivan articulated a maxim that “All organizations that are not explicitly right-wing will over time become left-wing.”4 Historian Robert Conquest was also credited with the elaboration that “any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.”5 Although O’Sullivan’s law is not uniformly true, it does seem that any organization that is not expressly right-wing will be increasingly identified as left-wing over time. As institutions take on the increasingly distinct political character of their well-educated leadership, their cultural alignment will become increasingly liberal and these conservative perceptions will grow more accurate. Libertarian economist Tyler Cowen has pointed out that educational polarization has made O’Sullivan’s law more applicable in the contemporary era, as degree-holding liberals have increasingly promoted their beliefs within mainstream institutions and lost touch with more conservative populations of citizens with less social prominence.6
The Republican Party and conservative movement have not responded to their deficit of institutional representation by accelerating their attempts to win over the white-collar professionals who manage the nation’s organizational infrastructure. Instead, Republicans and conservatives use their existing sources of influence in elective offices and the right-of-center media universe to attack the legitimacy of these institutions and the kinds of people who work in them. Republican politicians increasingly ignore or disparage mainstream media platforms, cut the budgets and take control of the governing boards of state university systems, and prohibit the teaching of disfavored ideas in public schools. Conservative media sources portray teachers, professors, scientists, journalists, and civil servants as ideological enemies to be punished or ignored.
The assault from the right on knowledge-producing institutions and professionals rarely attempts to engage with their substantive output on its own terms.
We have labeled this approach “power without credibility.” The assault from the right on knowledge-producing institutions and professionals rarely attempts to engage with their substantive output on its own terms – employing the tools of scientific inquiry to contradict research on climate change, for example, or shaming the New York Times by building a more accurate and serious conservative journalistic operation. It more often takes a populist form that stresses emotional and identity-based aversions, repeatedly arguing to conservative audiences that the elitists who run these institutions are liberals who look down on people like you, so there is no reason to believe what they say. This message can be extremely effective in fueling populist resentments, but it unsurprisingly demonstrates little persuasive success among the targets of its condemnation. Populist politicians can enact policy reforms that undermine liberal-leaning institutions and attempt to stop government from actively helping to advance leftward social change, but they have demonstrated less success at preventing this change from occurring in the first place.
The populist suspicion of institutions has grown strong enough in recent years that even organizations long respected by conservatives have drawn sustained Republican attacks. The FBI’s investigations of Donald Trump and some of his allies have provoked repeated denunciations from Trump, who abruptly fired FBI director James Comey in May 2017 after Comey refused to pledge Trump his personal loyalty. The FBI also led the August 2022 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida that preceded his federal indictment the following year for mishandling classified documents. By July 2023, just 17 percent of Republicans held a positive view of the FBI, according to a poll by NBC News, compared to 58 percent of Democrats.7
The CIA, another agency traditionally defended by Republicans, has attracted criticism in the conservative media for producing “woke” recruitment videos that featured an openly gay staff member praising the agency’s tolerant climate and a Latina employee who described herself as an “intersectional” refutation of “misguided patriarchal ideas.”8 Even the US military has been accused of excessive wokeness for maintaining internal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training programs and for permitting women to serve in combat roles.9 “We have overwhelming evidence of indoctrination taking place within our ranks and at our military academies,” claimed Republican congressman Mike Waltz of Florida, himself an ex-Army Green Beret, in 2023. “Insane DEI programs are being forced on our troops that [are] infecting the merit based system.”10 Congressional Republicans have attempted to prevent the military from teaching critical race theory and funding servicemembers’ gender transition treatments or travel to procure abortion procedures.
Read the whole issue: The election, the elite, and the roots of our dysfunction.
One explanation for these developments is that even our nation’s most accomplished soldiers, agents, and spies have become infected with the “woke mind virus.” Alternatively, large modern organizations dominated by professionals with college degrees may now feel the need to make allowances for the perspectives and values that prevail within that population in order to successfully recruit and retain well-qualified employees. If public appeals to the distinct cultural values of degree-holding young adults invites conservative attacks and risks a declining reputation among Republican politicians and voters, however, the institution will find itself caught in political crossfire that is not easy to escape – as the Walt Disney Company and Bud Light beer can both attest.
Many populists subscribe to the ideal of rugged individualism. They are attracted to the hypothetical emergence of a charismatic political figure whose exceptional personal strength and ability holds the promise of achieving a triumphant victory over their enemies. American conservatives are hardly the only people who entertain such a fantasy. Audiences around the globe flock to Hollywood movies depicting lone superheroes who use their unique talents to save the entire world.
But back in reality, such an idea seems quaint. Even within the conservative movement itself, power today is mostly exercised collectively and institutionally. It is held by well-educated people with knowledge, management, and communication skills who spend their days working with others in large, complex organizations. The difficulty that populists have experienced in accepting and adjusting to this new state of affairs – to the point of distrusting even the military, intelligence, and law enforcement institutions that once inspired conservative admiration – has kept the fantasy of a single hero alive, even though the example of the Trump presidency illustrates how easily objectives can be thwarted by a weak command of administrative workways and an inability to persuade other key actors. Populist insurgents thus face a dilemma: do they develop the expertise and adopt the institutional culture required to master the modern levers of power, or do they content themselves with wielding influence that is more symbolic than substantive?
This is an excerpt from Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. Used by permission of Cambridge University Press.
Matt Grossmann (@MattGrossmann) is Director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research and Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. A Niskanen Center Senior Fellow, he hosts the center’s Science of Politics podcast. David Hopkins (@DaveAHopkins) is Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston College. They previously co-authored Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (Oxford University Press).
James Rainey, “Breitbart.com Sets Sights on Ruling the Conservative Conversation,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 2012.
Christopher F. Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (New York: Broadside Books, 2023); Arthur Milikh (ed.), Up from Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right after a Generation of Decay (New York: Encounter Books, 2023). For a more extensive critique from a center-left perspective, see Jonathan Chait, “Conservatives Have a New Master Theory of American Politics,” New York, July 26, 2023.
Arthur Milikh, “Introduction,” in Milikh (ed.), Up from Conservatism, p. 1.
John O’Sullivan, “O’Sullivan’s First Law,” National Review, October 27, 1989.
John Derbyshire, “Conquest’s Laws,” National Review Online, June 25, 2003.
Tyler Cowen, “America Is Not as Woke as It Appears,” Bloomberg, June 22, 2021.
Alexandra Marquez, “Americans Sour on the FBI and DOJ Amid Trump Investigations,” NBC News, July 3, 2023.
Yael Halon, “Another ‘Woke’ CIA Recruitment Ad Makes Waves: ‘I Noticed a Rainbow’ on Brennan’s Lanyard,” Fox News, May 10, 2021.
Rich Lowry, “America’s Woke Military Is Leaving Us Dangerously Unprepared,” New York Post, July 18, 2023; Thomas Spoehr, “The Rise of Wokeness in the Military,” Heritage Foundation, September 30, 2022.
Mike Waltz, X post, September 21, 2023, https://twitter.com/michaelgwaltz/ status/1704977377342726146?s=20.
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