Are Republicans Really Tiring of the Wokeness War?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, August 07, 2023

 

The latest New York Times/Siena poll of Republican primary voters set out to establish a false binary. Unsurprisingly, that effort produced a spurious consensus.

 

The survey asked Republican voters if they were more likely to support a candidate who “focuses on defeating radical ‘woke’ ideology in our schools, media, and culture” versus a candidate who “focuses on restoring law and order in our streets and at the border.” It’s hardly surprising that Republicans gravitated toward the hypothetical candidate who devoted his energies to ensuring that voters would not be mugged, raped, or killed — the candidate who prioritized keeping America’s social services from becoming overtaxed by non-citizens over the one who emphasized culture-war battles. In the real world, there is no tension between these two imperatives. Every Republican candidate is committed to doing both. The distinctions between the GOP’s candidates are matters of degree and emphasis.

 

The question represents a thinly veiled proxy for the respective appeals of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis’s pitches to Republican voters. It seems designed to produce analysis that indicates Republicans have turned against DeSantis’s issue set merely because they’re marginally more concerned with preserving their personal security than they are with cultural grievances. And that sort of analysis is exactly what we got.

 

“As it turns out, social issues like gender, race and sexuality are politically complicated and may be less dominant than Mr. Trump’s rivals thought,” New York Times correspondent Jonathan Weisman wrote of the conclusions the poll was designed to generate. This assessment is reinforced by the poll’s discovery that the GOP retains a pronounced “libertarian streak” on economic issues. Introducing another fallacious dilemma, the survey found that 51 percent of Republican respondents backed the candidate who promised to protect “individual freedom” over “traditional values.”

 

Again, insofar as so much anti-“woke” Republican activism represents an effort to defend an individual’s liberty to structure their life around traditional values, there is no conflict here. But the temptation to anoint Trump the candidate most attuned to the sentiments of rank-and-file Republicans proved too enticing to turn down. DeSantis, Weisman wrote, “is struggling” and his struggles “show off Mr. Trump’s keen understanding of part of the Republican electorate.”

 

The dichotomy the Times sought to establish is revealed as illusory by the Times’s belated coverage of how one Virginia school district covered up incidences of sexual assault in observance of an abstract political theory. That case and its treatment by the paper of record illustrate how radical ideological commitments to social justice produce threats to individual liberty and safety, mooting the contrast the Time/Sienna poll tried to draw.

 

The New York Times magazine’s August 5 coverage of these spring 2021 allegations of sexual misconduct in the Loudoun County school district set out to make the district into the victim of this story — or, at least, as much of a victim as the young women who were assaulted.

 

The details of the case are truly sickening. One month into the return to in-person education, a teaching assistant filed a complaint against a “gender fluid” student engaged in “reckless behavior” — a memo warning that someone may soon be “hurt” by the disruptive student. Sixteen days later, that biologically male student allegedly assaulted a female classmate in the girls’ bathroom.

 

The school subsequently went to war against the alleged victim’s father, who had the temerity to demand accountability for all involved. The school’s divulgences to the community about this event “neither mentioned nor hinted at the sexual assault that took place in the bathroom, instead focusing on the father of the victim who arrived at the school,” according to the text of a grand-jury report on this and subsequent episodes of violence. Nor were school administrators acting in good faith, as indicated by their efforts to conceal internal communications from investigators.

 

The alleged assailant was arrested and processed in July 2021, but the district responded to that complication by simply transferring him to a different school within the Loudon County system. There, he continued sexually harassing his classmates, but his teachers were not made aware of the threat he posed. Despite his criminal history and disciplinary file, the student’s misconduct resulted only in a “verbal admonishment.”

 

Teachers who continued to complain about this student’s conduct were told to recommend using a “piece of cardboard” or an “apron to prevent” him from grabbing compulsively at crotches in his vicinity. This was sufficient until the assailant assaulted another student, dragging her into a classroom where “he nearly asphyxiated” and “sexually assaulted” her. These events eventually resulted in a criminal complaint against the district and compelled it to dismiss its superintendent.

 

The Times analysis of this episode highlights the degree to which the allegations against the Loudoun County school system were wielded like a “political weapon.” The paper’s sprawling investigation devotes outsize attention to the assailant’s sartorial choices, and in particular to his habit of “wearing a skirt.” It clarifies the distinctions between “pansexuality” and “gender fluidity,” and it implicitly criticizes the district’s parents for failing to understand the differences between “gender identity” and “gender expression” in relation to an individual’s bathroom preference. It appears to suggest that the fact that at least one forced sexual encounter only “turned nonconsensual” at the last fateful moment meaningfully complicates the case. And it focused to a prohibitive degree on the fact that all the wrong people (e.g., conservative commentators) noticed the scandal and declined to ignore it.

 

Times contributor Benjamin Ryan summarized the piece as the story of how “conservatives leveraged a sexual assault committed by a skirt-wearing boy in a girl’s bathroom at a public school in Virginia as fodder for culture war victories, despite the fact that the boy was not trans and the skirt was incidental to the case.” That is a fair summary, but it is not exculpatory. Rather, it substantiates the indictment against the school district and the ideology to which its administrators became hostage.

 

If there is a case for going to war with “wokeness,” this is it. The Loudoun County case illustrates how an ideological commitment to inclusivity even at the risk of tolerating criminal deviancy captures institutions and puts innocent people at risk. It’s hard to imagine the Republican primary voter who wouldn’t regard this as a fight worth having. Instead, it’s the ephemera that so often consumes the right-leaning press — low-stakes engagements over the latest cultural product’s genuflection before the altar of fashionable progressive causes — that Republicans would not prosecute at the expense of issues relating to personal security. The Loudoun case shows, however, that combating wokeness and fighting crime are not as mutually exclusive as the Times polling suggests.

 

When voters think of “wokeness,” it’s important that they associate it not just with Bud Light but with the Loudoun County case and other pedagogical efforts to license violence in the name of a theory. Perhaps DeSantis has allowed the distinctions between these two manifestations of the same phenomenon to blur. He should pick his battles better. But a fight against a belief system that would sacrifice the safety of children in pursuit of its goals is a righteous one.