R&I – FS
Glenn youngkin’s victory over Terry McAuliffe for the governorship of Virginia should make Democrats—and anyone else who fears that a Republican Party still beholden to Donald Trump poses a serious threat to American democracy—very worried about what is to come.
Republicans are now favored to recapture Congress in 2022. Betting markets indicate that Trump is the most likely victor of the 2024 presidential election. Difficult though it is to draw lessons from any one election, the task is crucial if Democrats are to change the political trajectory on which the country finds itself.
That makes it all the more worrying that one line of interpretation seems to dominate the Democratic ecosystem. If cable-news analysts and newspaper columnists are to be believed, Youngkin, an extremist posing in the garb of a suburban dad, was able to incite “white backlash” by exploiting “fake” and “imaginary” fears about the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools.
The idea that critical race theory is an academic concept that is taught only at colleges or law schools might be technically accurate, but the reality on the ground is a good deal more complicated. Few middle or high schoolers are poring over academic articles written by Richard Delgado or Kimberlé Crenshaw. But across the nation, many teachers have, over the past years, begun to adopt a pedagogical program that owes its inspiration to ideas that are very fashionable on the academic left, and that go well beyond telling students about America’s copious historical sins.
In some elementary and middle schools, students are now being asked to place themselves on a scale of privilege based on such attributes as their skin color. History lessons in some high schools teach that racism is not just a persistent reality but the defining feature of America. And some school systems have even embraced ideas that spread pernicious prejudices about nonwhite people, as when a presentation to principals of New York City public schools denounced virtues such as “perfectionism” or the “worship of the written word” as elements of “white-supremacy culture.”
Effective opponents of these developments, such as Youngkin, explicitly acknowledge the importance of teaching students about the history of slavery and even the injustices that many minority groups continue to face today. They do not pretend that grade schoolers are reading academic articles. Instead, they focus the ire of many parents on curricular content that can fairly be described as popularized, less sophisticated cousins of critical race theory.
Regardless of the choice Democrats make, they should, at the same time, denounce Republican plans to prohibit teachers from discussing ideas that might make their students uncomfortable as illiberal assaults on free speech that will lead to unacceptable forms of overreach. In the coming years, the introduction of such laws—which Youngkin favors—is likely to lead to a significant number of teachers who are unfairly punished for doing their job. If Democrats manage to decry such injustices while simultaneously distancing themselves from the most unpopular content now being taught at schools, public opinion will probably be on their side.
But the one option that is both intellectually dishonest and electorally disastrous is to insist on a verbal trick unworthy of a middle-school debate team: to keep claiming that widespread concern over these ideas is misguided because the term by which they have publicly come to be known technically applies to an academic research program rather than the lessons that real children are being taught in real schools. And yet, this is precisely what McAuliffe and so many others attempted to do—with disastrous results—over the closing months of his campaign.
For anybody who cares about making sure that Donald Trump does not become the 47th president of the United States, it is crucial that Democrats avoid repeating the mistakes that just put a Republican in Virginia’s governor’s mansion. It is impossible to win elections by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary. If Democrats keep doing so, they will keep losing.
Gellieman
Article URL : https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/virginia-election-wakeup-call-democrats/620595/