THE CULTURE WAR OVER AMERICAN EDUCATION: TAKING THE BATTLE ONLINE

Since the early 1980s education has been a polarizing political issue in the US context, not least thanks to the efforts of the Republican party. Starting with its party platforms of 1976 and 1980, the Republicans were able to establish a link between education and “family values” as a means to promote a new conservative agenda that put the ‘traditional’ family at the centre of the party’s ideological universe. For the past four decades, favourite conservative talking points on the topic of education have included, among others, more school choice, marketplace competition, the dangers of (leftist) ideological indoctrination, as well as the goal of eliminating the Federal Department of Education (DoE), a Cabinet-level agency created by President Carter in 1979. When, on March 20, 2025, President Trump signed the Executive Order No. 14242 entitled “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities”, it appeared that the long-awaited goal of abolishing DoE was achieved. This two-stage investigation aims to shed light on the use of disinformation strategies in the debate about the past, present, and future of education in the contemporary United States. I analyse two sets of texts that have made a significant contribution to this debate in a bid to identify the main constitutive elements of the popular conservative Narrative about American education. This is done by applying an intertextual lens to isolate and trace the circulation of key conservative ideas across time, genres and the boundaries of the offline and online environments.