Here's What Conservative Institutional Capture Looks Like

One of the principles I keep highlighting between left and right is asymmetry.

The left and right have different values, operate in different ways, and are in different positions in society.

Hence, if you are on the right, you have to remember that what worked for the left won’t work for you. You need to use different tactics.

Yes, there are some techniques that are available to anyone, but it doesn’t work to simply read Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and think you can make those same rules work for you.

Today I want to highlight that institutional capture works completely differently for the right vs. the left.

The left seems to do well at burrowing into organizations, working their way into positions of authority or leverage, and then using those to transform the institution from the inside out.

People on the left typically don’t care about the actual mission of the organization. In fact, they frequently think the organization has a bad mission, and that it’s their job to change that. Hence, they can devote all of their efforts to institutional capture and transformation. Conservatives are often bad at stopping this because they are more interested in the mission than organizational politics.

This left approach is sometimes called the “long march through the institutions.”

Some people have advocated that conservatives try to do the same thing. However, it’s highly unlikely to work. For one thing, left controlled institutions are not dumb enough to let conservatives in the door, or allow them to do any sort of subversion. And by nature, few conservatives have the interest, conscience, or stomach for successfully capturing institutions from the inside.

However, there’s a right wing version of institutional capture. Rather than attempting a bottom up project of capture and infiltration, the right wing model is a top down restructuring of an institution modeled on a private equity approach.

The way someone on the right captures and restructures a failing institution is to take it over from the top, the way a private equity firm would buy out an underperforming company, and then reform the organization to function well and on mission.

I will highlight some examples of this.

The first is what Ron DeSantis is doing at New College of Florida (NCF). In many states, governors nominally control state universities because they appoint a majority of the board. But most of them stuff those boards full of milquetoast cronies who rubber stamp what the administration wants and even enthusiastically support the administration in empire building endeavors.

DeSantis saw an opportunity with NCF. It would be very politically challenging to try to shake up, say, Florida State. But NCF was a very small, liberal arts type public school without a high profile. Thus it was a good test bed for his approach.

DeSantis appointed a reformist board, which then pushed out the president and started a process to restructure the school into one modeled after Hillsdale. Apparently 40% of the faculty left, which is a feature not a bug of the transformation. The student body will have to be rebuilt as well.

Obviously, there’s been a lot of media shrieking over this. But DeSantis has the legal authority to do what he’s done. And as the top elected official in the state, one who won a recent overwhelming victory, he has a public mandate as well - something the university insiders can’t claim.

NCF is a great example of right wing institutional capture and restructuring, albeit a work in process where the ultimate outcome is uncertain.

Another example is almost literally private equity. It was Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X).

Musk is like a modern day Victor Kiam. After Kiam’s wife bought him a Remington electric razor, he, as he famously said in his TV commercials, liked it so much he bought the company. Remington was a turnaround story. It was bleeding cash when he bought it but he turned it into a highly profitable enterprise that earned him enough money to buy the New England Patriots.

Similarly, Musk loved Twitter but didn’t like the way the company was being run, so he bought it. He then promptly fired almost 80% of the staff, reinstated many banned accounts (including Donald Trump), eased up on censorship, renamed the company X, and reinvigorated product innovation.

Musk’s Twitter has many problems. It’s full of porn spambots, for example. His algorithm changes don’t necessarily promote good content. My Twitter account has started growing again after years of stagnation. But, it no longer sends as much traffic to my site and punishes me for sharing high quality news links. From a personal standpoint, I’d say it’s been a mixed bag. We’ll see if it ultimately works out for Musk.

Nevertheless, Musk personally buying the company enabled him to implement his vision top-down. Neither he nor anyone else succeeded in changing twitter via internal transformation. In fact, Musk originally bought a stake and was going to take a board seat, but quickly realized that wouldn’t actually provide him much leverage for change. So he bought the whole thing.

A third example is the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS), specifically the way that Concordia Seminary St. Louis was restructured. Briefly, back in the 1960s the seminary had been embracing higher criticism and other classically liberal theological positions. A group of conservatives replaced the seminary’s board, replaced the president, and ultimately sacked 95% of the faculty (and lost most of the students) after they attempted a walkout. The seminary was rapidly rebuilt and is reportedly a successful, solid conservative seminary today.

I did an interview with Eric LeFevre that goes in depth on this. To be fair with this one, conservatives did essentially do a successful transformation from the inside of the denomination itself. The main actor in this was originally from another denomination but managed to get himself elected president of the LCMS. So this shows that conservatives can win these types of institutional battles. Nevertheless, the seminary itself was restructured from the top down.

If you are on the political right and want to change institutions, your best bet is to think like a private equity firm: take it over, restructure from the top, and be indifferent to the squawking about the changes.

This isn’t always easy to do, of course. But as the case of state universities show, red state governments actually have the ability to do a lot of things they are not actually doing.

You might not like what DeSantis, Musk, etc. are doing. Fine. Then do something better when you take over. My personal goal would be to see many of these institutions simply reorient back to their core mission, and become highly effective in doing good things for our society again.

The key point is what worked for them won’t work for you. People on the right need to think asymmetrically. When they do, they often find that there are many actions available to them that they didn’t even know they could and should be taking.

Cover image credit: New College of Florida by Wikipedia/Enunnally55,CC BY-SA 4.0