"No future election is going to fix the problem": Trump's war on education is worse than it looks

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"No future election is going to fix the problem": Trump's war on education is worse than it looks
Legal scholar Derek Black: America's schools are being targeted by Trump in a way that fuels autocratic populism

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published March 19, 2025 8:01AM (EDT)


(Salon) Donald Trump is not a traditional conservative. Traditional conservatives respect existing norms, values and institutions. Trump does not. He is America’s first elected autocrat and aspiring dictator. In that role, he views such norms, values and institutions as something to be crushed and rolled over by the MAGA movement’s shock and awe campaign. The rubble of those institutions will be used as fuel and material for Trump and his forces to erect their New MAGA America, which will be a 21st-century version of Jim Crow and a White Christian nationalist herrenvolk fake democracy.

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The campaign to end America’s multiracial pluralistic democracy and to replace it with a form of competitive authoritarianism (or something much worse) will require training and conditioning the thinking, emotions and other behavior of the American people. Through this process, the distinction between private and public will be increasingly erased; MAGA and American neofascism are “whole life systems.” These changes will happen both quickly and over time.

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In an attempt to better understand how America’s educational system is under siege in the Age of Trump, the role of the country’s schools and educational system in the democracy crisis and the historical continuities from the White racial authoritarian regime of Jim Crow (and chattel slavery) against Black Americans to Trumpism, I recently spoke with Derek W. Black. He is the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina and one of the country’s leading experts in education, law and public policy. Derek Black’s essays and other writing have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, The Atlantic and elsewhere. His research has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, NYU Law Review, California Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review and the Vanderbilt Law Review. His new book is “Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy.”

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The classroom and educational system are inherently political spaces. Authoritarians and autocrats know this, which is why they target schools and colleges and universities — and educational systems more broadly.

I think this is the space where a lot of our leaders and regular voters are sleepwalking. A pillar of our democracy, our schools, is being targeted in a way that seeds and reinforces autocratic populism, but many people have convinced themselves that this detonation at the highest level is just normal politics. All the while, the common ground that public education has represented throughout this nation’s history is eroding underneath our feet. ..........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/03/19/no-future-is-going-to-fix-the-problem-on-education-is-worse-than-it-looks/