How the Right is Finally Learning to Take Over Institutions
The right is moving beyond defensive strategies to deploy aggressive takeovers of existing institutions
In newsletter #24 I talked about different ways to respond to failing institutions.
I covered the most famous framework for this, Albert O. Hirschman’s “voice” and “exit” model. Voice is to agitate within the system - say by calling your Congressman or staging a protest - to attempt to promote institutional reform.
Exit involves leaving the institution to switch to a new one, such as by taking your kids out of public schools and sending them to a private school, or moving from California to Texas, or even just switching from Coke to Pepsi.
Hirschman notes that exit occupies a privileged position in American culture, perhaps because we are a nation of people who exited someplace else to come here.
In most cases, Hirschman’s voice and exit options are examples of what I call defensive strategies, designed to protect yourself against institutional decline, or to petition the management for change. At best you can vote for someone new for public office.
Treating voice as a form of investment in an institution and exit as a form of disinvestment, I extended Hirschman’s model into a second dimension of attack vs. defend.
This leads to four models for responding to institutional decline.
Reform - To work within the system for improvement (such as via voice). Example: Holding a protest at City Hall.
Withdraw and Restart - Leave and join or start another institution (exit). Example: Bari Weiss leaving the New York Times to start the Free Press.
Capture or Replace - Attempt to take over the institution, replace the management, and fix it or change it to your liking. Example: the left’s “long march through the institutions.”
Destroy or Delegitimize - Attempt to undermine or eliminate the institution you don’t like. Example: The “Resistance” to Donald Trump.
If you look at these, conservatives overwhelmingly have chosen the defensive Withdraw and Restart. Mainstream media too liberal? Start Fox News. City run by progressive crazies? Move to the suburbs. Teaching woke nonsense in your public schools? Home school. Taxes too high in California? Move to Tennessee.
By contrast, the left has typically engaged in attacking strategies. They’ve done an incredible job of taking over key institutions and reshaping them. And when they fail at this, their frequent go to move is to attempt to paint whoever does control them as simply illegitimate. Their treatment of Trump here is paradigmatic.
No wonder the left has in general been much more successful than the right in advancing its priorities institutionally.
But Ron DeSantis, Elon Musk, and the second Trump administration are showing a new model of right wing institutional attack strategies.
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