It's a given in any human endeavor that it's much easier to pull something apart than it is to build something up. There's a long history of right-wing critique of the left that runs along these lines. One of the most recent, and significant examples of that was the right's reaction to defund the police. 

The obvious problem with defund the police as a political movement was that while it was relatively easy to convince left-wing mayors and city councils to give it a try, the next steps were always pretty vague. The ideologues seemed to believe that fewer police would instantly create fewer problems but that experiment turned out to be a national failure. In fact, fewer police often just meant more crime. In a few extreme cases, no police resulted in complete chaos.

Rufo: If you remember the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone during the 2020 riots, the mayor of Seattle instructs the Police Department in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, famously the most left-wing neighborhood, to abandon their department building and then cede multiple blocks of territory to the left-wing radicals. And then it all goes into an immediate and calamitous decomposition.

All kinds of academic theories were put into this little miniature model of governance, and what happens? Vandalism, crime, destruction, chaos and then people start getting killed. You have this autonomous zone in the name of Black liberation, and who ends up getting murdered? Young Black kids, including a young boy whose father I interviewed as part of the reporting I was doing.

It was this poetic miniature, accelerated timeline of what happens when you give governing power to these ideas. It ends in heartbreak, disaster and destruction.

Rufo is absolutely right. Defund the police was a failure everywhere it was tried and no one, even the most left-wing mayors in the country are eager to try again anytime soon.

But with the election of Trump and his moves to take down DEI and some departments of the government, the shoe is now on the other foot. It's now the right that is in a position to take down things it doesn't like and this leads to the obvious question of what will replace them. In fact, Douthat questions whether the Department of Education really needs to be taken down at all. (Note that I'm condensing this a bit.)

Douthat: First of all, it’s not even clear that you can legally abolish the Department of Education without congressional action. And why would you even want to? Why wouldn’t you just say we’re going to have a Department of Education and it’s going to do the things that you yourself have described? The biggest financial portion of what it does, from special education to student loans and so on. We’re going to continue to do educational research of various kinds, longitudinal research — I personally know more than a handful of center-right wonks who are very happy to do educational research that is not woke or progressive or ideological — and maybe we’re just going to purge the ideological programs that you describe or substitute some other set of right-leaning programs.

Why wouldn’t you want to just run the actual bureaucracy?...

So what is the gain to conservatism of doing away with this major tool for federal influence over education policy?...

Rufo: Here’s the problem, though: It’s very easy to cut external contracts. It’s very difficult to change the culture of an institution and the permanent bureaucracy of that institution. I know for a fact that at the Department of Education, replacing the management within the building does not really replace the broader culture.

A cabinet secretary in the first Trump administration told me an interesting story. They had a meeting with some of the career staffers, the permanent staff in this agency — this wasn’t with the Department of Education — and the career staff was not complying with what this person was trying to do. They were running circles around him. He couldn’t get anything done, and eventually he said: ”Just tell me what the deal is. Just level with me.”

And the career staffer said: “We know that we’re going to be here in four years or eight years or 12 years or 16 years. And we know that you’re going to be gone in two years or six years, whatever it might be.”...

Other agencies can be perhaps reformed. But the Department of Education in my view is beyond reform. You have to spin off, liquidate, terminate and abolish to the furthest extent you can by law.

Douthat continues to question why the Trump administration can't just fire the left-wing ideologues and replace them with people who are more moderate or right-leaning. Are there enough people like that to staff a Department of Education that would not be culturally captured by the left? Rufo admits there probably are not enough people like that which is why shutting it down is the best option in his view.

But Douthat counters that even if you succeed in shutting down DOE, you still have all of the culturally captured colleges and universities which are just as monolithically left-wing as ever. You obviously can't shut all of them down so what can you do to bring about change? 

Rufo's answer is less government funding and more competition.

Rufo: I actually think that the corrective that is required is not to say we’re going to shut down all the universities, because that’s not possible. But, by spinning off, privatizing and then reforming the student loan programs, I think that you could put the university sector as a whole into a significant recession. And I think that would be a very salutary thing.

I think that putting the universities into contraction, into a recession, into declining budgets, into a greater competitive market pressure, would discipline them in a way that you could not get through administrative oversight with 150 extra Department of Ed bureaucrats.

A medium- or long-term goal of mine is to figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror and have them say, Unless we change what we’re doing, we’re not going to be able to meet our budget for the year. We’re going to have to wind certain things down and then make the universities make those hard decisions.

Douhat takes it to the next level by asking what is there to replace the actual left-wing curriculums currently running these institutions? In other words, what is the conservative alternative on offer to the CRT/woke lens on every issue? What do you teach instead?

Douthat: There is a conservative patriotic education that you and I both encountered which has a certain kind of sterility to it. It teaches that the founders are awesome and Lincoln perfects it. And then you needed Martin Luther King to finish things off.

And America is a big, complicated and messy society. And I feel like certain versions of that conservative patriotic education don’t feel as deep and rich as America deserves.

So a macro question is: Can conservatism become less superficial? And to pick up some of the points that your critics tend to make: If you are setting out to eliminate C.R.T. as an ideological influence on education, what does that mean for the professor at New College who wants to assign Ta-Nehisi Coates or assign figures who are associated with radicalism and wokeness as part of the American story?

Rufo's response is that this is something conservatives need to develop.

Rufo: We actually did this at New College. We had the satirist Andrew Doyle, the artist behind the Titania McGrath satire handle on Twitter, teach a course this past winter looking at the war surrounding woke ideology. And I think his approach was the right one.

He paired Ta-Nehisi Coates with my book, “America’s Cultural Revolution.” And he paired Ibram Kendi with Eric Kaufman, the conservative social scientist. They grappled with this phenomenon of the last 10 years based on the best arguments from both of the major sides or traditions. Then, they related them to these enduring human questions: Does this get us closer to justice? Does this interpretation of American history get us closer to the truth? The kind of questions where you’re not just having a narrow ideological debate but you’re trying to guide people through to the right answer. And so, I think that is a really good way to do it if you wanted to answer those questions.

Your other critique is important. Look, the patriotic education from a lot of these conservative organizations is sterile, one-dimensional and jingoistic. Conservatives need a more arresting, sophisticated, complex story that we tell about the country that still captures the essence of the goodness, genius, talent and virtue of the people of this country. And I think that is a story that is absolutely possible to be told, especially if you reorganize the institutions around that fundamental narrative. Gender studies is out. D.E.I. is out. And, a more complex history is in.

I think Douthat's point is well made. Ultimately, success in overcoming wokeness can't stop with taking down left-wing institutions. Some of these institutions, like universities, simply aren't going away. You can exert pressure on them in various ways and you can effectively defund your opponents by cutting off an endless stream of government funding from unaccountable bureaucrats and NGOs. That's a good start, but ultimately you need to offer an alternative curriculum that is as compelling as the one you are supplanting. In other words, there's no shortcut in the marketplace of ideas. Winning the political battle gives you a chance to level the playing field and create a fair fight, but you still have to compete and win on that newly leveled field.