It\u2019s true that DeVos performed poorly in her hearings, but was she really less qualified than Rick Perry or Ben Carson? If the Senate has been assessing competence and qualifications, then you\u2019d have to consider sexism to explain why Senators seem to prefer those two men to DeVos. After all, DeVos has worked on education issues, albeit\u00a0narrowly defined.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not hard to find other explanations for DeVos\u2019 harder path to confirmation. More people care about education than about other issues. Vouchers are unpopular or irrelevant in suburban and rural communities. Also, there is just one cabinet secretary for education, so she attracted all the attention, whereas the nominees concerned with other topics split up the opposition. Here, for example, is a rally against the environmental nominees, but it targets three of them, it’s not very big compared to the\u00a0anti-DeVos events, and it’s in Democratic controlled Newark, NJ.<\/p>\n
Above all, the teachers unions are organized nationally and still have the capacity to prompt grassroots action.<\/p>\n I\u2019m all for that, since I think democracy requires organization. But is it good that mobilization has been most<\/em> effective against DeVos? We’re used to a linear ideological spectrum, with pro-market\/anti-state views on the right and New Deal\/Great Society government activism on the left. In that framework, DeVos stands far to the right. Trump is also some kind of right-wing radical. Therefore,\u00a0DeVos must be like Trump, and blocking her would mean blocking\u00a0Trumpism. Unions are organized for that purpose, since they exist to counter market rule.<\/p>\n I think this framework is obsolete. We should array political leaders on two continua, from pro- to anti-state and from liberal to authoritarian on social issues. Donald Trump does not stand to the right on the spectrum from pro- to anti-state. He is all for using the massive power of the federal government. He just wants to use it for an ethnonationalist, reactionary program.<\/p>\n This is the taxonomy I have in mind for the issue of education:<\/p>\n I code Ted Kennedy as pro-state and socially-liberal, although he was a major architect of No Child Left Behind, which introduced market mechanisms. I still think he was more pro- than anti-state, because NCLB also dramatically increased federal spending on education and introduced some new command-and-control regulations. I code Cory Booker as socially liberal and pro-market on education, because he (and not he alone among Democrats) has strongly advocated school choice. I put DeVos just a touch to Booker’s right on the pro\/anti-state axis, but also well to his south on the authoritarian scale, because she clearly wants to use education policy to change the whole culture in conservative directions. Still, she chooses to do that by reducing<\/em> the power of the state, not by expanding it, which makes her\u00a0not very authoritarian. Finally, Donald Trump stands down there in the bottom-left quadrant, eager\u00a0to use the state to enforce reactionary norms.<\/p>\n I’m left-of-center on this diagram, but I’m willing to have an ongoing debate with market advocates in which the size of government rises and falls and voters make judgments\u00a0based on results. It’s the\u00a0bottom-left that frightens me.<\/p>\n If pro-state authoritarianism is\u00a0the greatest threat to democracy today, then we must rally all its opponents. They will include pro-government liberals who detest the content of Trump’s\u00a0policies along with anti-government libertarians who fear the expansion of the state. I would not advocate trying to enlist Betsy DeVos herself in the movement against Trump, although she did oppose him explicitly on ideological grounds in March, saying<\/a>, “I don’t think Donald Trump represents the Republican Party. I continue to be very optimistic that as we get further along into the process, the more voters know about him, and the more informed they are, the more they’re going to continue to break away.” But even if you don’t want to share a movement with DeVos herself, we need people from\u00a0her general camp.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/nyoobserver.files.wordpress.com\/2017\/01\/screen-shot-2017-01-09-at-2-38-45-pm.png?w=635&h=480\")
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