Beyond DEI and the culture war: Liberal technocracy, MAGA authoritarianism, and the rentier order in U.S. schooling

This article argues that the dominant conflict over schooling in the United States, often framed as a struggle between liberal inclusion and MAGA exclusion, conceals a deeper convergence. Liberal technocracy and MAGA authoritarianism appear opposed, yet both depoliticize education by displacing democratic struggle over power, property, and social reproduction. The article contends that liberal defenses of public schooling, DEI, expertise, and the Department of Education are inadequate when they preserve a technocratic order that has translated structural inequality into metrics, bias training, and administrative process. Situating these developments within rentier capitalism, the article argues that schooling has increasingly been reorganized as an extractive infrastructure tied to property regimes, privatized platforms, and digital enclosure. Digital educational privatization, including platform-based instruction, data extraction, and AI-driven schooling, intensifies this transformation by converting students and teachers into immediate sources of value while insulating educational governance from democratic oversight. Against both liberal technocracy and MAGA hierarchy, the article calls for a democratic alternative that links redistribution to reconstruction through the decommodification of educational infrastructure, the reclamation of data and platforms as public goods, and the severing of school finance from racialized property markets.