Conference Program

In contemporary American conservatism, education has moved from a secondary policy domain to a strategic terrain of ideological struggle. Within the political constellation associated with Donald Trump and the broader MAGA movement (Field 2025), schools and universities are increasingly portrayed as key sites of cultural conflict and ideological reproduction (Apple 2006; Hartman 2015). Educational institutions are framed as environments captured by progressive elites, bureaucratic structures, and intellectual agendas perceived as hostile to the values of the national community.

This paper examines how education has been repositioned at the center of the contemporary conservative ideological project. The analysis focuses primarily on Mandate for Leadership 2025 (Heritage Foundation, 2023), the policy blueprint designed to guide a new conservative governing cycle, and situates it within a longitudinal comparison with Mandate for Leadership II (1984), which accompanied the consolidation of Reagan-era conservatism.

The comparison reveals a significant transformation in the ideological architecture of American conservatism. In the Reagan-era Mandate, education occupied a relatively marginal position within an agenda overwhelmingly structured around political economy and institutional reform. In the contemporary document, by contrast, education emerges as a strategic field through which broader cultural and political conflicts are articulated. Schools and universities are increasingly represented as institutional spaces that must be reclaimed, restructured, and rebuilt on new normative foundations.

Our interest is not to assess these policy proposals from a normative perspective but to analyze the ideological and discursive reconfiguration that underpins them. By combining the comparative analysis of the two Heritage Mandates with an examination of the educational policies and executive initiatives aligned with the Trump political project, the paper shows how the cultural centrality attributed to education has translated into a coherent strategy of governance.

Within this framework, education functions simultaneously as a battlefield of the American culture wars and as a strategic lever through which contemporary conservatism seeks to construct an alternative cultural hegemony challenging the liberal-progressive paradigm and contributing to the emergence of a post-liberal political order.