As conservatives survey the American cultural landscape, they see themselves besieged on all sides, their values and beliefs attacked everywhere they look — even, at times, by their own children. But while they may feel culturally powerless, they have political power, and they’re going to use it.

Which gives the current incarnation of our eternal culture war a particular shape. It’s a conflict in which liberal ideas make progress by coursing through popular culture, social and online interactions, and large and diffuse institutions like higher education. Then conservatives strike back using levers of concentrated political power.

As is so often the case, race is at the center of this battle, and conservatives are waging what amounts to a new version of the Lost Cause, the post-Civil War effort to rewrite the story of that war into one where noble Southerners fought only for their homes and the principle of states’ rights, and besides, slavery wasn’t so bad anyway. It was stunningly successful, but things have changed — and for some it requires a renewal.

Consider a few dispatches from the front:

  • Multiple Republican state legislatures have moved to banthe teaching of “critical race theory” in schools; a notion heretofore only understood by a relatively small number of academics has become a right-wing buzzword meaning little more than “anything that makes white people feel bad about racism.”
  • In a highly unusual move, members of the board of trustees of the University of North Carolina intervened apparently to prevent the university’s journalism school from granting a tenured position to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the prizewinning reporter behind the New York Times’ 1619 Project.
  • Republicans in multiple states have introduced billsspecifically banning schools from using materials from the 1619 Project, which focuses on slavery as a central component of American history.
  • In Texas, GOP legislators have introduced a raft of bills to all but wipe slavery and racism from the state’s official memory. As the New York Times reports, the bills would ban the use of the 1619 Project and limit how teachers “can discuss the ways in which racism influenced the legal system in the state.” One would “block exhibits at San Antonio’s Alamo complex from explaining that major figures in the Texas Revolution were slave owners.”
  • Republicans have introduced bills to mandate by law that the national anthem be played at any sporting event held in a facility paid for with public funds (in Wisconsin) and at any school sporting event (in Arkansas).

Everywhere conservatives look, their view of America’s racial story is being challenged. Protests break out across the country against police mistreatment — and occasionally, cops are prosecuted for killing Black people. Confederate statues are coming down. TV and movies are showing more stories about racism than ever — and showing more stories by and about people of color.

Over and over, conservatives confront “wokeness” — another term repurposed by the right into a symbol of their oppression at the hands of censorious liberals. For all their talk about government “tyranny,” it’s the feeling of being surrounded that irks them the most, that any store clerk or pop song or even someone in their own household might challenge their view of society’s appropriate hierarchy and their place in it.

So they’ll use what power they have to strike back. Consider the Hannah-Jones case, which is actually a representation of something much larger. That story — a university largely run by liberals but overseen by conservatives — is being repeated across the country, since many state university systems are under the ultimate control of a board appointed by the legislature.

In the 2010 election, Republicans took control of the North Carolina state legislature. By 2015, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, the state’s higher-education board “was essentially purged of Democrats, who had been replaced with Republican megadonors, current and former lobbyists, an ex-lawmaker, and a couple of super-PAC organizers.” Its current chair is a boat company owner who lacks a college degree.

As historian Nicole Hemmer notes, the conservative movement has long been “obsessed with universities as hives of liberal power — power they sought both to expose and diminish.” In recent years, through control of trustee boards and state law, they’ve sought to cut university budgets, undermine tenure, and dictate what is taught in the classroom. Meanwhile, Fox News and conservative talk radio regularly feature horror stories of some terrible thing a radical leftist professor said, or a conservative speaker “silenced” by students crying racism.

So more and more conservatives have decided that the American system of higher education is essentially their enemy. A 2015 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 37 percent of Republicans said “colleges and universities have a negative effect" on our country; only 19 percent of Democrats agreed. By 2019 the number among Republicans had shot up to 59 percent.

These battles will continue to play out in schools and universities, where knowledge is passed on and history is debated. It’s why so much of the Lost Cause focused on schools, making sure textbookstold the revisionist view of the Civil War.

If the right has their way, a new Lost Cause will prevail, one that puts racism safely in the past, a problem that has been resolved and we need seldom speak of again. They know they can’t make that happen through the power of persuasion. But they think they might be able to do it with the exercise of power.