Academics love abstractions. If asked about the present political situation, many professors would wax pedantic, holding forth on the ideas and trends they perceive to be at play, and offering up jargon-laden perceptions that are incomprehensible to most ordinary people and, frankly, even to me. When it comes to politics, I have always been a bit suspicious of hifalutin theories, if only because most people—including, of course, the occupants of the “basket of deplorables” to which Hilary Clinton called our attention—don’t think that way when they step into the voting booth. 

Accordingly, I remain convinced that the key issues that now confront and should concern us are relatively down-to-earth and straightforward. As a basket-of-deplorables denizen who feels a far stronger affinity for my fellow occupants than for my fellow academics, I will try to offer my own personal perspective from the right.

What would I like to see happen in America after the 2024 election? Three priorities are top of mind. First, a concerted effort to improve infrastructure and quality of life in our main cities, and especially the cities in blue states that have suffered such a prolonged decline under Democratic rule. 

As a resident of Philadelphia and its suburbs, I can attest that littering, vandalism, vagrancy, turnstile-jumping, the menacing occupation of public spaces, brazen shoplifting, open drug-dealing, violent, wanton assault, rape, gun violence, and murder are now commonplace and seldom punished. With the exception of a few expensive enclaves, my city has become a menacing, threatening, squalid place, full of empty, decrepit buildings, defunct businesses, and street corners occupied by screaming lunatics and beggars. 

Of course, Philadelphia, like most blue cities, has its upscale suburbs and neighborhoods, those “whitopias” and un-diverse shrines to the white flight that remains commonplace among even the most bien pensant Caucasian upper classes (as sociologist Eric Kaufmann has documented), but dares not speak its name. These are places and spaces (like my suburban neighborhood) where it is still possible to walk safely alone at 3 a.m. Perhaps the fact that only the wealthiest Americans have access to safe neighborhoods within big cities is one of the factors that is making the deplorables so “resentful.”

Apart from those few and far between neighborhoods, Philadelphia looks and feels downright dark, decrepit, and dangerous. At least that is what I perceive. Call it, as Steve Sailer aptly does, the crime of “noticing.”

Although this situation has many and complex causes, a shocking and deliberate leniency towards anti-social and criminal behavior, motivated by exaggerated, misguided, and mostly phantom concerns about racism, “root causes,” and law enforcement abuses, has undeniably accelerated these trends.

What does this have to do with the upcoming presidential election?  Unfortunately, not much, or maybe not enough. Policing and prosecuting law-breaking are mostly local ventures, because most crime and elements of public order are defined by state law and regulated at the state level. The feds have relatively little direct authority in this area. Rather, progressive prosecutors have taken over, ignoring too much of the crime around them and expressing more sympathy for the perpetrators than for the hapless urbanites who must endure their depredations. 

The politics of law and order are local: It is the people most directly concerned who have allowed this to happen, and the people who must reverse the situation. But the president, his party, and his administration—including the attorney general and Department of Justice, who weigh in on local criminal matters—do have a role to play and can set the tone and the priorities. The phrase “law and order” has gone out of fashion with right-thinking people, by which we mean Democrats and lefties. Its use immediately invites that most exasperating of all appellations: the “dog whistle.” Any frank talk about the problem of crime, in other words, is supposedly a stalking horse for racism.

The president and the people who serve and support him must resist intimidation by this rhetoric. He must use his moral leadership and bully pulpit to repudiate those accusations in no uncertain terms. His job is to make the idea of “law and order” respectable again, and without apology. Good luck!

Which brings me to my second wish: the banishment of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in all its myriad forms. Go back to the colorblind meritocracy in all government dealings and also in the private economy—certainly in anything having to do with education, research, science, production, and labor markets. Abolish DEI initiatives and offices of every and any kind. 

The immediate effect of the death of DEI will be to free up the money, energy, and attention that are now lavished obsessively on that triumvirate of leftist ideals. Those resources could be used to crack down on criminal conduct in our society, and also for investing in repair and renewal of our city infrastructure, which has long been neglected and is crumbling before our eyes.

I believe that scrapping DEI is essential in the current climate, because it diverts attention away from promoting the orderly and safe society that only a few now enjoy. This is something the Feds can go a long way to accomplish, because almost all the measures that promote DEI are, frankly, against the law. The Supreme Court’s 2023 Harvard affirmative action case (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College) made that clear. That holding does not just apply to education; its logic extends to many other spheres, both public and private. The job of the next administration is to make that extension a concrete reality. 

It must take on the tough task of piercing the veil of the schools, companies, non-profits, and entities that outwardly profess to comply, but behind closed doors scheme to defy. There’s lots of work to do here, and it will once again require ignoring the accusations of racism and dog whistles that cause people across the political spectrum to cower, quake, retreat, and run for cover. We must be brave and bold and defy received opinion.

Third and finally, we need a revolution in education. It is well-nigh universally acknowledged on the right that, with few exceptions, the universities are rotten to the core. One step, which is far from a complete solution, but would help alleviate the situation, would be to add a mandate to the Civil Rights Act requiring schools that receive federal money (which is almost all of them) to honor the First Amendment’s robust protections for free speech. This would give university students and professors the right to sue for generous remedies, including punitive damages, for violations.

Additionally, what is not yet fully appreciated is that education’s troubles begin in primary school. Gender-bending ideology and sexually explicit materials are now standard features of the curriculum from kindergarten through high school. Western and American civilization are relentlessly depicted as evil, rapacious, and destructive. Any teacher who attempts to proudly present the signal, outsized, and unique achievements of our heritage and way of life is labeled as an enabler of “white supremacy.” All of that has to change.

Once again, what can the president and the Feds do about this? The main function of our massive federal Department of Education is to enforce DEI mandates and hand out goodies. What is taught and how it is taught is controlled at the local level and dominated by far-left teachers unions, which are in turn wedded to the pernicious ideas pushed in university education departments.

Thus, reforming curricula requires proceeding school district by school district, a venture that, as Oscar Wilde said of democracy, takes too many evenings, and one that is bound to meet staunch and vicious resistance. But there is no higher priority for turning our country around, because the schools determine what young people know and think.

What curricula changes do we need? The list goes on and on. First, anything to do with sex and gender, save perhaps the most basic facts such as were cautiously taught to me in the early 1960s, should effectively be banished. Back then, my teachers and principals believed that the topic of sex belongs to parents and private life. Government, through schools, has no business teaching it, discussing, or addressing it. We need to bring back that attitude.

These understandings should extend to school libraries. To call the curation of their contents “censorship” is a ridiculous misnomer, because parents have wide access to all kinds of explicit materials, to which they are free to expose their own children—but not other people’s!

On the hot-button issues of American history, race, Native Americans, slavery, immigration, and so on, there must be drastically more balance. As commentators like Eric Kaufmann and Wilfred Reilly have suggested, slavery must be taught as a worldwide phenomenon, not a unique sin of the U.S., European colonialism, or Western societies—societies that were the first to ban it! Violence, exploitation, and depredation must be depicted as equal opportunity constants, perennial features of the human condition. Indian tribes, for instance, were as awful to one another as we were to them, although perhaps less effectively due to their technical backwardness and simplicity.

What can a president do to bring about these reforms? Once again, presidential and federal leadership carry great weight. Perhaps the next president can start with praise for Moms for Liberty, an organization pushing back against left-wing school curricula. The mainstream media now treats Moms for Liberty as sinister, fascistic, threatening and—to borrow the words that newly appointed Democratic vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, applies to the Republican candidates—“weird.” They are anything but. They only want to return education to where it was 50 years ago (which happens to be when I was in elementary and high school, so I know whereof I speak).

In that bygone era, the schools knew their place, taught the basics, and deferred abjectly to parental, civic, religious, and private authority. That’s deplorable talk, of course. My kind of talk. Hurray for that!

—Amy Wax