Claremont Provocations Monograph

Over the past decade, several American cities have been rocked by race riots. With each passing year, a new racial agenda emerges-from police defunding to education reform to reparations-inciting more and more division and radicalization along racial lines. What started all of this? The roots of this pathology run much deeper than the recent symptoms suggest. The civil rights revolution unleashed an assault on the US Constitution, and the sacralization of that revolution, marked by the canonization of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), has transformed our constitutional order. A system once rooted in local self-governance and natural rights now operates along new moral axes, entirely foreign to the American way of life. The choice is increasingly obvious: Either the traditional American order or the new civil rights regime will prevail.

There is a crisis facing America's men. They have fallen behind women in school, they are often overlooked in career opportunities, and they are scolded for their unique educational needs. No solutions have been found because our reigning civil rights regime prevents us from even acknowledging the problem or from coming to grips with it. Instead, our laws keep insisting on "gender neutral" remedies like improving test scores or graduation rates-ignoring the natural differences between the sexes. The assault on single-sex institutions-from military schools to the boy scouts-accelerated with the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Virginia (1996). In Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg majority opinion, she argued that natural differences between men and women were artifacts of prejudice and could not be used to justify single-sex education. She predicted that Virginia Military Institute (VMI) would not have to change much to admit women. Over twenty years later, evidence to the contrary is compounding. With new physical standards, alternative forms of discipline, new dress codes and grooming standards, and a new honor code which disregards the courage and sacrifice of men, one could only image what else could be changed. To seriously consider the unique educational needs for men, we must be free to consider the unique natural differences between men and women. Therefore, the states should seek to overturn United States v. Virginia (1996) and be allowed to consider the unique needs of men once again in education and allow manly honor as a legitimate goal for public schools.

The military is often perceived by well-meaning Americans as the last stronghold against the progressive march through America's institutions. But this is no longer simply the case. Our Armed Forces were once the envy of the world, in large part because we selected based on merit, and instilled in our fighting men an unshakeable military ethos. Both the ethos and the selection, however, have been in steady decline as the Department of Defense succumbs to a dangerous ideology: selection and promotion based on racial and gender identity. This has already led to major problems and may well lead us down the path of disaster. Will Thibeau is the Director of the American Military Project at The Claremont Institute's Center for the American Way of Life. He lives in Virginia with his wife, Michelle, and four children. Will is a veteran of the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment, and has written extensively and testified before Congress on technology and defense policy

"Much alarm has been raised among Establishment media and politicians about President Trump's efforts to cut the federal bureaucracy and to force its top officials to be more loyal to him and to those who voted for him. How did we come to find ourselves in a situation where our top national administrators – who exercise immense governing power in our country – think of themselves as independent of the elected president? Why does it create alarm among our elites when the president expects those running the administrative state to carry out his political program? The roots of this entitled attitude go back many decades, and are part of the original Progressive project to comprehensively reshape American government. We are now in the midst of the first serious effort since the 1930s to restore some measure of democratic accountability to national administration. In this Provocation, Ronald J. Pestritto explains how we got to this moment, and what the prospects are for the current effort to turn things around."