As was the case with most people who avoid the noxious and so had no idea who Charlie Kirk was until his assassination, so it was with the Heritage Foundation’s “Phoenix” program, a Kirkianist manifesto targeting education. The Florida Board of Education was first among neoconfederates to adopt it as an encyclical last month.
The CIA had a “Phoenix program” in Vietnam for a few years, a counterinsurgency campaign that quickly devolved into torture and extra-judicial murders of heretics opposed to the American Way. Heritage must’ve called its campaign a “Declaration” rather than a “program” to avoid association by Google. But the aims are similar. Heritage’s campaign against heresy imposes a purist, Christian nationalist interpretation of American history and education. Dissent will not be tolerated. It is more accurate to call it the Phoenix Doctrine.
The Doctrine opens with a line intended to echo the mythological phoenix’s self-immolation: “In this time of moral and political crises, when too many schools have lost their way…” It is a disingenuous run-on, equating “moral and political crises” with “too many schools that have lost their way.” Disingenuous, because while it’s hard to argue that we’re not in a bog of moral and political crises, let’s not pretend we don’t know who and what got us here.
Heritage, a think tank, was established in 1973 as the executive branch of National Review’s war on the New Deal. Reagan was elected in 1980 as their Messiah. “The unmaking of America” in Kurt Andersen’s words, followed. They denigrated government, vilified taxes, ridiculed how the other half lived, neutered voting and civil rights, salivated over public education dollars and found ways to embezzle them by slandering public education’s achievements while masking theft as “choice.” They wrecked FDR’s principles of equality and the freedom from want and fear. These masters of the self-fulfilling prophecy wrecked LBJ’s Great Society safety net then called it a failure.
Schools, colleges and universities–a Big Three far more important to America’s success than Detroit’s–haven’t been spared, starting with Allan Bloom’s reactionary Closing of the American Mind in 1987, the maga carta of the war on wokism as Trump was still adding the finishing lies to The Art of the Deal. But it wasn’t until the pandemic (for public schools) and Israel’s genocide in Gaza (for colleges and universities) that the wrecking of those institutions triumphed.
Charters and vouchers, themselves financed on the public dime no different from welfare for the unaccountable, intentionally starved school districts of resources, making a direct assault on inclusive curriculums easier. Academic freedom and the right to protest in colleges and universities were demolished by different means. State legislatures amplified by reactionary media codified the principle that a Jewish life matters but an Arab life does not, that criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic and Hamas-sympathizing but dehumanizing and mass-murdering Palestinians is patriotic. DEI was delegitimized, minority histories re-marginalized, non-heterosexuals were relegated to the pre-Stonewall age.
Bush-and-Cheney-like conservatives who see betrayal in Trump’s fascism are as artful as those who’d put daylight between Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes. There is a direct line from Reagan to Trump and Fuentes–between Reagan’s don’t-tread-on-me conservatism and the Jan. 6 assault on democracy, succored by the right-wing Leninism of National Review and Heritage.
If Heritage feels triumphant, it’s because it is. The unmaking has largely been successful. So successful that now, like the fentanyl dealer weeping before mass graves, Heritage is preaching to us about “moral and political crises” and handing down commandments from its cyber Sinai.
The doctrine might not have too much of an impact in Florida because it’s already in effect. But its official adoption clears the way for a more systematic eradication of liberal education and formerly American values founded in the Enlightenment such as rigor, skepticism, secularism, empiricism, and more recently, inclusivity, diversity, and above all, child-centered education. In Florida, the child’s rights are no longer first. Parents, that totem of infallibility, are.
The Phoenix doctrine never mentions children’s rights. Its leading tenet calls for “parental choice and responsibility.” It calls for parental omnipotence, “with public education funding following the child,” newspeak for school vouchers, or private education at public expense. Parents ideally want their children to be smarter and better off than they were. The doctrine ensures that parents’ ignorance will follow and smother the child. Teachers and professors, representing a limitless collective of knowledge, are reduced to servants of parental insularity.
Just as the algorithmic fragmentation of the media universe narrows our horizons exclusively to points of view that reinforce our biases, so must education be enslaved to the parents’ biases, not the child’s thirst for knowledge and vistas unimagined–or feared–at the child’s home. It’s that submission to parental omnipotence that the Supreme Court endorsed when it allowed parents to opt their children out of whatever class segment or curriculum doesn’t align with their purism. The tribalization demolishes the purpose of public schools especially. It is anti-democratic. That’s what the Heritage doctrine champions. John Winthrop would approve.
The rest of the Phoenix doctrine is variations on the same theme, some of them admirable–seek academic excellence, build the child’s character, respect the rule of law. But the whole doctrine is wrapped in a presumption of America-first chauvinism founded in “Judeo-Christian traditions,” that anti-Semitism-proof dog whistle of Christian supremacy. The mythological histories of Parson Mason Weems, who gave us the lie of George Washington’s cherry tree, are in. The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, the first account of what it was like to be enslaved by the likes of Washington, is out.
No one will argue that multiculturalism has its excesses, that political correctness, these days known as wokeness, can be absurd, hypocritical, oppressive, poisonously utopian. And none of it is new. The late historian Arthur Schlesinger devoted a whole book to the subject 30 years ago. But he was no fool to the end game for those looking to throw multiculturalism/wokism’s baby out with the bathwater. “The monoculturalists,” as Schlesinger called them, “are hyperpatriots, fundamentalists, evangelicals, laissez-faire doctrinaires, homophobes, anti-abortionists, pro-assault-gun people, and other zealots. They inveigh against ideas and books they deem blasphemous, atheistic, socialistic, secular humanistic, pornographic, and/or un-American and seek to impose on the hapless young their own pinched, angry, monistic concept of America.”
That’s the Phoenix doctrine’s America. The document itself ends with the phoenix rising from the ashes, proclaiming with a straight face right out of the Five O’Clock Follies in Saigon that “America is a great source of good in the world and that we have a tradition that is worth passing on.” Our contemporary heritage suggests otherwise.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
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