In April, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo flew from his home, near Seattle, to Miami, to meet with Florida’s Governor, Ron DeSantis, and to take part in the public signing of the Stop WOKE Act. A former documentary filmmaker and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Rufo was the lead protagonist of last year’s furor over the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools and helped advise the Governor on the Florida law, which aimed to limit discussion of racial history and identity in schools and workplaces. Rufo was especially taken with how personally invested DeSantis seemed in the policy. “He shows up to the tarmac at 6:30 A.M. with a Red Bull energy drink, ready to roll through the policy papers,” Rufo said. The bill had not come from the Governor’s advisers or the grass roots: “It’s driven by him.”
Rufo also came to think that the issue he helped spark—the national conservative outcry over progressive teaching and training on race and gender—was reaching a new, more potent phase. The same legislative session had produced the Parental Rights in Education bill, denounced by its Democratic opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, which prohibits schools from teaching anything about sexual orientation and gender identity to students below third grade, demands that any such instruction at any age follow requirements to be set out by the state’s board of education, makes parental permission a prerequisite for a range of mental-health counselling and interventions, and gives parent groups broad latitude to sue school districts if they believe teachers or administrators are not complying. On Fox News, the story of Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, was airing non-stop; for members of the conservative education movement, such as Rufo, the pivot from issues of race to those of gender—which combine the rhetoric of parental control with an old-fashioned sex panic—seemed to offer immense political promise.
The parental-rights movement took root before the Supreme Court’s decision last week to overturn Roe v. Wade. But the same pattern within social conservatism that has shaped fights about educational control—namely, a willingness to push ahead with deliberately confrontational legislation, even if poll numbers oppose it—is likely to reappear in the post-Roe battles over abortion. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said that Florida’s bill “is going to be the calling card for conservative reform efforts in education” and described Rufo as “the icon of this movement.” A spokesman for Heritage Action for America, the political-advocacy-action arm of Roberts’s think tank, told Reuters that, among the base, this issue had generated the “highest energy (among Republicans) since the Tea Party.”
After the Supreme Court affirmed marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges, in 2015, the general political wisdom was that issues around gay rights were more or less settled. Even Donald Trump largely avoided the topic. Religious adherence is steadily falling in the United States, the portion of the country that is both white and Christian is plummeting, and there is no organization like the Christian Coalition of yore. In other words, this pattern is a little different: the politics of social conservatism are surging, without a discernible cultural movement toward traditionalism.
Writing in the Times recently, Nate Hochman of National Review argued that figures like DeSantis, Rufo, and Tucker Carlson were building a new brand of social conservatism, one that has risen from the ashes of, and materially departed from, the religious themes of a generation ago. “Instead of an explicitly biblical focus on issues like school prayer, no-fault divorce and homosexuality, the new coalition is focused on questions of national identity, social integrity and political alienation,” Hochman wrote. “We are just beginning to see its impact. The anti-critical-race-theory laws, anti-transgender laws and parental rights bills that have swept the country in recent years are the movement’s opening shots.”
In American politics, ideology is often a smoke screen for individual ambition. We have movements, but really we have movers. The situation is especially pronounced in the right wing of the Republican Party, where the post-Trump chaos has left few permanent factions, and allegiances are being constantly remade. Even the most basic questions were foggy in Florida, including whether this sort of campaign against indoctrination struck most voters as necessary. One nonpartisan poll conducted by the University of Florida found forty per cent of voters in favor and forty-nine per cent opposed. But another, by the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies, found a wildly different result: sixty-one per cent in favor and twenty-nine per cent opposed.
In such a situation, the particular steps that DeSantis took were important. One was obvious from afar: he and his allies described their political opponents not just as leftists, but as “groomers”—a watchword deployed to suggest that the Democratic Party is somehow complicit in pedophilia. On March 4th, while debates were still under way, DeSantis’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, tweeted, “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.” In an official statement, DeSantis celebrated the bill’s signing by saying, in part, that parents “should be protected from schools using classroom instruction to sexualize their kids as young as 5 years old.” (The rhetoric has since spread: Rep. Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking member of the Republican leadership team in the House of Representatives, tweeted that the “usual pedo grifters” had failed to respond to the infant-formula shortage.)
Since there is no evidence to support claims of a widespread surge in sexual abuse in the schools, and since DeSantis and his allies described the problem in such general terms, there wasn’t really anything specific for Democrats to refute. To even argue that claims of grooming were baseless seemed in some ways to raise their profile. Some Democrats saw only a collection of familiar interest groups: as the progressive Florida Rep. Anna Eskamani told me, “The school-choice movement is, like, a hundred per cent invested in this kind of stuff, because they benefit from public education being attacked as extreme or inappropriate, because that leads parents to take their children away.”
As a result, the statements from Democrats tended to be very general, too: calling DeSantis’s program one of “authoritarianism and censorship”; suggesting that it was the program of a “homophobe”; or that the campaign against grooming in schools amounted to “gaslighting.” Meanwhile, the specific rhetoric of grooming was growing louder. Referring to a new conservative grassroots group involved in the fights over schools, Carlos Guillermo Smith, a progressive legislator from the Orlando area, told a reporter, early in April, “Every single day, I am bombarded by baseless accusations of pedophilia by Moms for Liberty-type advocates that say I need to stay away from children. It’s unhinged.”
A familiar way to view the allegations of widespread grooming is that they operate as signals to adherents of the QAnon conspiracy, which alleges a broad, secretive pedophilia network organized by leaders of the Democratic Party. Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist affiliated with the Never Trump movement, told me that the grooming claims solved a more mundane political problem for Republicans, too. “There’s a very important psychological aspect to how one defends Donald Trump if you’re a Republican, and that means the Democrats have to be worse.” Trump’s attempted coup against the government on January 6th, Longwell said, had raised the stakes. “You have to believe the Democrats are worse than trying to overthrow the government, and, if they’re worse than that, it means they want men to play women’s sports and that they are grooming little kids.”
DeSantis made a second significant move during the debate over the bill, one that Rufo in particular emphasized: the Governor escalated. The C.E.O. of the Walt Disney Company, Bob Chapek, told shareholders during an annual meeting early in March that he opposed the bill and had called DeSantis to say so; DeSantis retaliated with a new bill that stripped Disney (Central Florida’s largest taxpayer) of certain special legislative benefits that it had enjoyed since its establishment, a half century ago. “At the time, I remember some conversation, ‘Oh, DeSantis will never be able to vanquish Disney, Disney’s too powerful, too beloved,’ and at the time Disney had a seventy-seven per cent favorability rating with the public,” Rufo told me. He credited the Florida Governor with two insights: “A, that the bill is popular, and B, that though Disney is an economic and cultural power, it is really a novice political power, and, as many people are saying lean out of it, he leans into the fight, I think, brilliantly.”
Rufo himself was a central player in the fight with Disney. A few days after the bill passed, Rufo published a “shocking new report on Disney’s child-predator problem,” as he termed it—a re-airing of a 2014 CNN report that had found thirty-five Disney employees with histories of sexually abusing children. He also published clips from a leaked webinar that Disney had conducted for its staff, in which an executive producer at Disney Television Animation mentioned her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” and executives pledged to introduce more L.G.B.T. characters and to greet visitors without describing them as “boys” and “girls” but with less gender specific terms, such as “friends.” These were distinct things: one, an investigative report from years ago about actual sexual abuse; the other, a pro-forma corporate-diversity campaign. But on social media they bled together. “These videos did billions of impressions over three weeks,” Rufo told me. “We got ‘Disney’ trending, ‘Disney groomer’ trending, all these popular hashtags for about three weeks straight.”
By the end of this campaign, Rufo said, Disney’s favorability ratings had dwindled to about thirty-three per cent. Its stock price is down nearly fifty per cent from a year ago. On Twitter, Rufo celebrated DeSantis’ shock-and-awe strategy: “The way to win the culture war is to demonstrate strength, blast through fake taboos, and play for keeps.”
When I asked Republican activists and operatives about the rise of the school issues, they told a very similar story, one that began with the pandemic, during which many parents came to believe that their interests (in keeping their kids in school) diverged with those of the teachers and administrators. As Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, put it to me, parents who were in many cases apolitical “became concerned about these overwrought lockdowns, and then when they asked question after question, there was no transparency about them, which led them to pay more attention when their kids were on Zoom. They overheard things being taught. They asked questions about curricula. They were just stonewalled every step of the way.” The battles regarding the COVID lockdowns, Roberts told me, opened the way for everything that came after. “This is the key thing,” he said. “It started with questions about masking and other aspects of the lockdowns.”
Both parties right now are trying to answer the question of how fundamentally COVID has changed politics. “From 2008 to 2020, elections were decided on the question of fairness—Obama ’08, Obama ’12, and Trump ’16 were all premised on the idea that someone else was getting too much, and you were getting too little, and it was unfair,” Danny Franklin, a partner at the Democratic strategy firm Bully Pulpit Interactive and a pollster for both Obama campaigns, told me. But the pandemic and the crises that followed (war, inflation, energy pressures) were not really about fairness but an amorphous sense of chaos. “People are looking for some control over their lives—in focus groups, in polls, once you start looking for that you see it everywhere,” Franklin said.
Both parties had shifted, in his view. Biden had sought to reassure Americans that the government, guided by experts, could reassert its control over events, from the pandemic to the crisis in energy supply. Republicans, meanwhile, had focussed on assuring voters that they would deliver control over a personal sphere of influence: schools that would teach what you wanted them to teach, a government that would make it easier, not harder, to get your hands on a gun. A moral panic about gender identity might seem anachronistic, but it served a very current political need. Franklin said, “It’s a way for Republicans to tell people that they can have back control of their lives.”
At first, these curricular concerns centered around race, and the teaching of critical race theory became a defining issue in the Virginia gubernatorial election, won last November by the Republican Glenn Youngkin. Rufo had been a central figure in that fight, but as he watched the conflicts in local districts unfold he came to think that, for the conservative base, the pull of racial issues paled in comparison to those that invoked gender. “Put yourself in the shoes of an average parent,” Rufo told me. “You’re looking at critical race theory and thinking, The maximum damage that can be done is that my child will be taught that America is a racist country. Perhaps if it’s a white family, our skin color will be called into question as some sort of marker of oppression. But really it’s limited to an intellectual plane. There’s a ceiling on it.” With gender, he went on, there was “essentially no ceiling”—the emotional reaction was “much more visceral and deep-seated.”
Rufo recounted a story that he said he’d heard from a mother on the Upper East Side, who told him that her daughter was transitioning, with the help of an online community, and felt that this community “had essentially taken her away from me.” The mother, he said, told him that she knew half a dozen other Upper East Side parents with similar stories. “It’s not just that we’re going to teach your child that the country is evil,” he went on. “It’s really the fear—and I think the legitimate fear—that my child will essentially be recruited into a new identity.”
People who identify as trans are growing in number and visibility: in 2019, the C.D.C. found that nearly two per cent of high-school students identified as transgender. The political debates over whether trans high-school athletes should compete according to the sex they were assigned at birth or according to their gender identity arise naturally from that increased visibility, and conservative media has aggressively amplified those cases. But the law in Florida and the rhetoric accompanying it make more ambitious claims: that school staff are at least partly responsible for these changes and that trans people have—as Rufo put it—been “recruited into a new identity.” (This is an especially insidious allegation to make, in that it implies that trans people’s gender identity should not necessarily be understood as reflective of their own volition.) The idea that school counsellors are responsible for that recruitment is what connects the increase in trans visibility to the preëxisting conservative campaign for control of schools. I found a few cases in which parents alleged in lawsuits that school staff had held conversations with their children about transitioning without informing them—but nothing at all widespread. I asked Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, about whether there was reason to believe that such “recruitment” was happening. “I think you ask the right question, the prevalence question,” Roberts said, adding that he would disagree with me “with a smile.” He went on, “It’s not on the verge of being undocumented from the perception of eighty per cent of Americans, even if they haven’t seen it firsthand at their own child’s swim meet.”
Of course, we were talking about somewhat different things. I had expressed doubt that teen-agers were really “recruited” into a new gender identity, and Roberts was talking about the conservative political reaction to activism on behalf of trans youth. Parents’ perceptions, Roberts went on, are shaped by events such as those in last fall’s session of the Texas legislature, when pro-trans-rights groups organized protests and testimony in opposition to a bill requiring student athletes to compete in alignment with the gender on their birth certificate. “In Texas of all places, this agenda—and I’m putting this as delicately as I can—of advocating for gender ideology, of allowing young men to compete in women’s sports has been pushed by the other side, by several dozen—if not a few hundred—activists who have showed up to testify in the Texas legislature.”
Really, political power in Texas is on the side of the Governor, not those few hundred activists. Despite the trans-rights groups’ fervent objections, Texas’s Governor, Greg Abbott, signed the bill. In Florida, DeSantis has moved to exclude certain medical treatments for transitioning people from Medicaid. Despite this momentum, there isn’t much evidence that anti-trans politics broadly are popular. Shortly after Roberts and I spoke, a new poll, funded by the Wall Street Journal, appeared: sixty-five per cent of Americans had said that being transgender should be accepted by society while just thirty-two per cent discouraged it.
But those numbers suggest a reckoning for conservatives that may never come. One of the costs of President Biden’s low standing in the eyes of American voters is that Republicans can campaign on some unpopular ideas without much risk of losing votes in the midterms. David Shor, the Democratic strategist and election analyst, compared the Republicans’ current position to where Democrats were in 2018, when President Trump was viewed with similar disdain by the public, and progressive candidates pushed transformative approaches to immigration, such as decriminalizing border crossing, without much fear of reprisal. “The reality is people are really mad about inflation and the economy and crime and all these other things,” Shor said. “The issues that people care the most about are the issues that people don’t trust Democrats on right now. And the only issues that people do trust Democrats on right now are issues that people don’t care about.”
In other words, Americans haven’t suddenly become traditionalists; DeSantis has simply seized a political opportunity. The school issues have solidified his standing with socially conservative voters, and elevated him as the main alternative to Trump. Longwell, the strategist, told me, “One of the things I marvel at is that, in focus groups with Trump voters all over the country, I ask, ‘Who would you want to run in 2024?’ Usually about half the group says Trump, and the other half says, ‘Eh, I don’t know. He’s a little old. Maybe some new blood—Ron DeSantis!’ And the idea that a guy in Texas or Alabama actually knows who the Governor of Florida is is stunning.” As I write this article, the betting market PredictIt puts the chances that Trump wins the Presidency at twenty-six per cent and DeSantis at thirty-two per cent. (Biden’s odds are at twenty-two per cent.) The more extreme parts of the parental-rights campaign—the talk about groomers, the singling out of educators—are being pursued not because they are popular, but because they don’t need to be. ♦
