The Long March Went Through Committees. So Does the Way Back.

Commentary.

A school board meeting in a mid-sized district runs about three hours. The first forty minutes are recognitions, the consent agenda and a presentation from a vendor. Almost nobody is in the room for it. The consent agenda is where the curriculum adoption sits, bundled with the bus contract and the roof repair, approved in a single voice vote that takes four seconds.

That's the whole story of the last sixty years, compressed. Not a coup. A consent agenda.

Nobody stormed anything

The phrase people reach for is "the long march through the institutions," coined by the German student radical Rudi Dutschke in the late 1960s and carried into English by Herbert Marcuse. Dutschke's point was tactical. The barricades had failed. The universities, the press, the publishing houses, the professional associations and the civil service were still standing, and they were staffed by people who would eventually retire.

So you don't fight the institution. You join it. You take the seat on the committee nobody wants because it meets at 4:30 on a Thursday. You write the accreditation standard. You sit on the hiring panel. You draft the bylaw revision that gets approved 9-0 because it's eleven o'clock and everyone wants to go home.

Gramsci had described the same logic decades earlier as a war of position rather than a war of maneuver. Grind, don't charge.

It worked because it was boring, and because the people who might have objected were busy running businesses, raising kids and coaching Little League. Which is to say it worked because it was aimed at exactly the people least likely to be free on a Tuesday night.

The receipts, not the vibes

You can date the visible version. By the early 2020s, a job application at most large public universities asked for a diversity statement, scored on a rubric, before anyone read the candidate's research. Corporate HR departments ran mandatory trainings built on frameworks almost no employee had chosen and few could have described accurately under oath. Accreditors folded diversity requirements into the standards that determine whether a school can issue a degree at all.

None of that required a single national vote.

Then, in September 2021, the National School Boards Association sent a letter to the White House asking whether threats against school board members might be handled with federal tools, and it name-checked the PATRIOT Act. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo days later directing the FBI to meet with local law enforcement about the problem. The NSBA's own board apologized for the letter that October. Multiple state associations quit the organization outright.

That was the moment a lot of parents figured out that the boring committee wasn't, in fact, boring.

What the pushback actually looked like

In February 2022, San Francisco voters recalled three school board members. Not a red county. Not a close vote. Roughly three to one on each. The proximate cause was a board that spent the pandemic renaming schools while classrooms stayed shut.

In June 2023, the Supreme Court decided Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and the companion UNC case, ending race-conscious admissions at institutions taking federal money. Texas passed SB 17, effective January 2024, shutting DEI offices at public universities. Florida's SB 266 restricted DEI spending at its public institutions. The UNC System's Board of Governors repealed its own diversity policy in 2024. MIT dropped required diversity statements from faculty hiring the same year. Harvard adopted institutional neutrality, borrowing the logic of the University of Chicago's 1967 Kalven Report, which had said the university's job is to host the argument, not to win it. The University of Michigan, which had built one of the largest DEI bureaucracies in American higher education, closed its central office in 2025.

On the commercial side, Bud Light's 2023 marketing partnership blew a hole in the brand and Modelo Especial took the top spot in American beer sales. Through 2024, Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Lowe's, Ford and Walmart all announced rollbacks of DEI programs, reporting requirements or both.

And parents voted with enrollment. The Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey found the share of households homeschooling rose from 5.4 percent in the spring of 2020 to 11.1 percent that fall. Classical charter networks expanded. Trail Life USA, founded in 2013, kept adding troops.

Where the pushback gets dumb

Now the honest part.

Some of it has been sloppy, and sloppy loses. Book challenge lists circulated by people who hadn't read the books. School board candidates who won on one issue and then couldn't read a budget, which meant the district's actual problems went unmanaged for four years and the next election swung back. Boycotts announced in a group chat on Monday and forgotten by Friday. In January 2025, Costco's shareholders rejected an anti-DEI proposal by a wide margin, and Costco's sales did fine. A boycott is a blunt instrument with a short half-life, and pretending otherwise just teaches companies to wait you out.

The bigger trap is subtler. If your program is to replace one political loyalty test in hiring with a different political loyalty test in hiring, you haven't restored anything. You've just changed who holds the clipboard. The case against a mandatory diversity statement isn't that it's the wrong creed. It's that a public university has no business demanding a creed from a chemist.

Win on the principle or you'll lose it the next time the pendulum swings.

Five things that actually move an institution

• Read the bylaws. Every board has them, they're usually public, and they tell you who can put an item on the agenda, how many signatures force a special meeting, and what the public comment rules really are. Most people arguing at the microphone have never read the document that governs the microphone.
• Get the agenda packet before the meeting. It's typically posted 48 to 72 hours ahead. The consent agenda is in there. So is the line item.
• Run for the unglamorous seat. Library board, planning commission, county party precinct slot, the school district's curriculum review committee. Many of these are appointed and go unfilled. Appointed seats are the cheapest power in America.
• Show up twice. Anyone can be angry once. The board learns your name the third time you're in the room with a specific question, and staff start answering your emails before the meeting rather than after.
• Build the alternative, not just the objection. A co-op, a classical school, a trade apprenticeship, a men's group that meets at six on Saturday. Institutions are rebuilt by people who make a better one, not only by people who complain about the old one.

None of that's thrilling. It's a folding chair, a printed packet and a three-hour meeting where the roof repair takes longer than the curriculum.

The other side figured that out in 1967. It only took us a while.