The Left wanted big, coercive government...

...and got Donald Trump.

Since I became a Goldwater conservative in the 1960’s (high school), there have been three major themes of conservative thinking: law-and-order; a strong and ready military; and smaller, less intrusive and less controlling government.

In the decades since then, crime has gone up and down, as has our ability and willingness to use force abroad. But the one most consistent failure of conservatism has been the sustained and, in recent years, mindlessly explosive growth of government and its tentacles.

By this I don’t just mean our unhinged, gargantuan borrowing, taxing and spending. I mean the little stuff the government does to make your life annoying. Haven’t buckled your seat belt? Beep beep beep BEEP BEEP BEEP……….. Want to get out of your neighborhood without getting bounced around by speed bumps? Fine — walk. You’ll get there in an hour or three. Want to take a shower where you can feel rather than remember water pressure? I think they still have them in Romania.

Liberals did this to us to fulfill their lust for control for our safety. Yes, our safety, as if even as a pretext that was any of their business or they had any actual interest in it.

Now, however, they’re squawking big time — not because they’ve wised up, but because Donald Trump’s government has shown itself wonderfully willing to use their cudgel against them where it hurts, to wit, their ownership of academia, and particularly the Ruling Class of academia such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford. See, e.g., today’s article in the WSJ about academia’s panic and its plan to strike back.

Still, let me step down from the soapbox to show you in detail how the Left brought us to this moment. The story is told by my very bright friend, Prof. John O. McGinnis of Northwestern Law School.

It seems remarkable that seemingly antisemitic protests by undergraduates, such as those at my own university of Northwestern, could threaten the biomedical research funding of its medical school. But the structure of civil rights laws as applied to universities has long allowed the federal government to cut off funding to the entire university based on the wrongful actions of particular units or departments.

Ironically, the left, now alarmed by the federal government’s intrusive reach, bears direct responsibility for crafting the very legal weapons wielded against the universities it dominates. Almost four decades ago, progressive legislators demanded sweeping amendments to civil rights law, expanding federal oversight over higher education. The sequence of events reveals a cautionary tale of political hubris: progressive confidence that state power would reliably serve their ends overlooked the reality that governmental authority, once unleashed, recognizes no ideological master. Today’s circumstances starkly illustrate how expansive federal control over civil society, originally celebrated by progressives, returns to haunt its architects. The left’s outrage ought to focus not on this particular administration but on its own reckless empowerment of the state.

That second paragraph is worth copying and hanging on whatever wall you look at across from your office desk.

The story begins with Grove City College, a small Christian institution in southeastern Pennsylvania. Grove City sought independence from the federal government and its proliferating regulations to preserve a distinctive faith-based education. To that end, it refused all direct government funding. Some of its students, however, received federal Basic Educational Opportunity Grants (Pell Grants) to pay tuition. The Department of Education argued that because the college benefited indirectly from those grants, it must certify compliance with Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination. Grove City refused, insisting that accepting students who had federal aid did not subject the entire college to federal rules. The dispute reached the Supreme Court in 1983.

The Reagan administration inherited this enforcement proceeding but tried to take a nuanced approach to protect against giving the government power over all the operations of a private university.

Solicitor General Rex Lee, for whom I had the privilege of briefly working, argued that Grove City was indeed subject to Title IX because the college received indirect federal funding through students’ financial aid. Lee, however, also focused on a limitation contained in the statute, arguing that the restrictions on discrimination only applied to the “program” that received the federal funds—in the case of Grove City, that was the financial aid office—not the entire institution. Thus, Lee’s argument reflected the Reagan administration’s broader policy concern for protecting civil society, including religious institutions, like Grove City, from federal rules that could transform their campus.

By a 6–3 vote, the Court agreed with the Reagan administration’s position.

….whereupon the Left was grateful for having been rescued from its excess and understood that it was wise to leave well enough alone.

OK, sorry, I have to put a joke in here somewhere, because otherwise the Left’s grim march to campus serfdom (Prof. McGinnis titles his piece, “The Road to Campus Serfdom”) is a story too depressing to tell.

But the telling, though not cheerful, is wonderfully revealing (emphasis added):

[T]he left was enraged by the Reagan administration’s position and the Supreme Court’s decision. It pushed Congress to overturn it immediately. And after debates in Congress, in 1987, both the House and Senate passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act, which made all federal funds received by an educational institution subject to being cut off if there was discrimination by any unit. President Reagan vetoed the bill, warning that “would diminish substantially the freedom and independence” of universities.

Have you heard that chord struck recently from anyone in the Ivy League? If I didn’t believe in the Eighth Amendment, I wouldn’t be able to resist the glee at telling them at the next academic conference that they’re quoting Ronald Reagan.

He saw it as a federal overreach—what he pungently labeled a “big government powergrab … cloaked in the mantle of civil rights.” Or, as [George] Liebmann nicely put it in his recent essay, “Such power … allows the federal government to strangle institutions that don’t fall in line with its vision of social order.”

But the Left, too stupid and too arrogant to understand that it wouldn’t rule forever, forged ahead.

[D]espite Reagan’s veto, [a Democrat-dominated] Congress nevertheless passed the bill over his veto. As a result of this change in law, all subsequent presidential administrations have enjoyed enormous leverage over universities. Any violation of Title VI or Title IX anywhere within the institution, as defined by an administration, puts a university at the risk of the loss of all federal funds in all its operations. Modern universities receive substantial federal funds. Virtually every university relies significantly on federal student aid. Research universities like my own receive substantial additional federal funding, particularly in biomedical research and in defense contracting.

Conservatives have been in the wilderness for decades warning that federal money meant federal control. If it takes Donald Trump to drum this obvious truth into their Stalinist heads, one might think it worth at least the entertainment value (worth it, that is, if other, more important values were not present).

Of course, despite the essentially constant deceit about it, it’s not just Trump, far from it:

Democratic administrations made aggressive use of this leverage to change practices at college campuses in heavy-handed ways. The Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague” letter in 2011 effectively mandated that universities overhaul their procedures for sexual abuse and harassment cases or face total loss of federal funding. For instance, the letter asked that guilt be determined by a bare preponderance of the evidence standard, despite the heavy costs to a student from a guilty verdict and expulsion. It also undermined due process by discouraging cross-examination and mandating training in which investigators were encouraged to believe the accusers. The government was deploying its enormous power to dictate processes to universities and regulate their relations with their students and, by extension, students with each other.

And this (how soon the press forgets — when it wants to):

The Obama administration did not limit itself to regulating conduct; it aggressively extended its authority to police campus speech. It argued that speech that listeners thought was of a sexual nature could lead to a finding of a hostile environment actionable under Title VI, even if that conclusion were not based on objective facts, but on subjective feelings. Such interventions encouraged speech codes and chilled debate.

Prof. McGinnis has lots more to say; again, the whole piece is here. Likewise worthwhile is the very acute Jim Copland’s article here, discussing the Trump plan to lift Harvard’s tax exemption.

But here we are. The Left happily created the noose of federal grants, thinking it was a silk scarf, and never imagining that the electorate would put Donald Trump in control of the scaffold.