To Defend Public Schools, the Hard Left Puts On the Tinfoil Hat

By David French

Monday, July 31, 2017

This morning, a New York Times op-ed contributor went full Rousas Rushdoony. Never go full Rushdoony.

One of the more amusing aspects of life as a conservative Christian is reading liberals writing about conservative Christians — especially writing about conservative Christian political causes. There’s a formula. First, you’re told there are “dog whistle” or “hidden” reasons for the use of common terms. Second, these hidden reasons trace back to racists and Christian dominionists. Third, and finally, if you use this common language and advance mainstream conservative Christian ideas, you’re actually advancing racism and theocracy. The plot is revealed. The true agenda is laid bare.

And that brings us back to Rushdoony. It also brings us to Robert Lewis Dabney. And to A. A. Hodge. Never heard of these men? Neither had I — until I started reading liberals who were explaining to me why I really send my kids to private schools and why I really use terms such as “government schools.” Dabney was a Presbyterian minister who apparently opposed public schooling for black kids in the Reconstruction-era South. Hodge didn’t like immigrant Catholics. And Rushdoony? He’s an obscure public-school-hating Calvinist whom liberals love to elevate. Yet none of these men matter to modern Evangelical Christians. And none of them matter to modern libertarians. They don’t even know who they are.

But don’t tell that to Katherine Stewart, author of the subtly titled The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children. The Times gave her prime space today to try to connect the dots between these obscure and historically inconsequential figures and libertarians such as Milton Friedman (yes, Milton Friedman). The common thread? Each of them has critiqued “government schools.” Each of them has advanced home-schooling or private education. Thus, bingo-presto, when you hear libertarians and Christians critique “government schools,” they’re really unlocking a dark and racist past.

Don’t believe me? Here’s Stewart:

But the attacks on “government schools” have a much older, darker heritage. They have their roots in American slavery, Jim Crow–era segregation, anti-Catholic sentiment and a particular form of Christian fundamentalism — and those roots are still visible today.

It would all be hilarious if it weren’t so consequential. There are millions of well-meaning liberal Americans who fall for exactly this kind of “research.” They don’t know Evangelicals. They don’t read Evangelical publications. They don’t know libertarians and certainly don’t read Cato research papers. So their “friends” in liberal journalism fill in the blanks, and they typically fill in the blanks with mysterious names and dark connections. It makes for a compelling story. After all, conspiracy theories rarely lack for intrigue.

But it’s garbage. Why do libertarians and Christians intentionally increasingly use the term “government schools” to describe public education? First, because it’s true. Public schools are government schools. Second, because it’s clarifying. Too many Americans are stuck in a time warp, believing that the local school is somehow “their” school. They don’t understand that public education is increasingly centralized — teaching a uniform curriculum, teaching a particular, secular set of values, and following priorities set in Washington, not by their local school board. The phrase is helpful for breaking through idealism and getting parents to analyze and understand the gritty reality of modern public education. The phrase works.

And so it must be squashed. And there’s no better way to discredit any modern idea than by tying it to a Confederate past. It’s certainly easier than addressing the core of the fundamental idea — that it’s better for America if more parents enjoy the educational choices that wealthy progressives take for granted.

Wealthy Americans have enormous educational advantages. They can afford private-school tuition (and many do just that). They can afford homes in the best school districts. They can employ private tutors and create the most lavish and interactive home-schooling experience. The rest of America? They’re typically reduced to no choice at all. There’s the mediocre public school in the moderately priced neighborhood or the dreadful school in the cheapest district. That’s it. There is nothing else.

Unless, of course, you do what education secretary Betsy DeVos is trying to do — pour resources into vouchers and charter schools. You’d think that progressives would like the egalitarianism of it all. And, in fact, many do. Democratic advocates of school choice rightly see it as a civil-rights issue. Why should disproportionately poor and minority kids be confined to the worst schools when resources exist to increase their options?

But for some progressives, when egalitarianism clashes with control, the will to power wins. Government schools, you see, are largely a progressive enterprise, dominated in many states by progressive teachers’ unions. School choice, by contrast, means parents often choose institutions dominated by conservatives, libertarians, or (gasp) Christians. School choice means competition in the marketplace of ideas. It means fighting again ideological battles that many on the left long thought that they’d won long ago.

Even worse for the government-school loyalist, the fight takes place on unfavorable ground. Public schools are failing large segments of the public. They’ve been failing for decades. So rather than defend public schooling on its meager merits, all too many ideologues fall back on the old insults. “Racist!” they cry. “Theocrat!” they yell. Or they say this:

When these people talk about “government schools,” they want you to think of an alien force, and not an expression of democratic purpose. And when they say “freedom,” they mean freedom from democracy itself.

Yep, that’s reasonable and completely non-hysterical. The school-choice movement is a product of American democracy, not its repudiation. Voters have demanded choice, legislators have responded, and courts have ruled it constitutional. Every branch of government has contributed to the school-reform movement, and they still do. Where does Stewart’s reasoning end? Is government ownership and control the measure of “democracy”? Why not nationalize the airlines, or the energy sector? Is that the “democratic” thing to do?

Our nation is locked in a debate over increasing economic inequality and correspondingly decreased social mobility. The upper middle class seems to be pulling away from everyone else. Spend much time with America’s wealthier families, and it’s not uncommon to see parents with three kids in three different schools. They made choices based on each child’s unique needs. They give their children the best possible chance to succeed.

Why deny these choices to poor kids? Should we punish them for their parents’ economic performance? Faced with the difficult task of defending a failing system and limiting parental choice, all too many defenders of government schools fall back on name-calling, conspiracy theories, and their own anti-Christian bigotries. But they can cite Rushdoony all they want. It doesn’t make him relevant. It doesn’t make public schools better. And it certainly doesn’t invalidate the good and decent effort to use greater competition to improve education for everyone — white and black alike.

Why The Hysterical Left Wants To Keep A White Woman From Painting A Black Man

By David Marcus             

Monday, July 31, 2017

Back in March, protests erupted over a painting displayed at the New York City Whitney Museum’s biennial. Some activists stood in front of the picture, trying to block others from viewing it. Others called for it to be taken down, and some even called for the work to be destroyed. But it wasn’t Jesse Helms, Rudy Giuliani, or any other conservative upset about offensive art. It was progressives who were offended. The offense? Cultural appropriation.

The painting in question was “Open Casket,” a portrait of Emmett Till. Till, an African-American boy, was brutally murdered in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman. His somber legacy still haunts an America struggling to come to terms with racial division. The controversy over the painting was not about its content, however, but its creator. Artist Dana Schutz is a white woman, and for some that makes her a person who should not paint a picture of Till.

This week in Boston, tempers over Schutz’s work flared again as a solo show of hers went up at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA). The painting of Till, her most famous work, was not included in the exhibition, but that didn’t stop progressive activists from protesting the platform given to a woman who had given such grave offense.

As the Daily Beast reported, a group of artists and activists sent a letter to ICA which said, “Please pull the show. This is not about censorship. This is about institutional accountability, as the institutions working with the artist are even now not acknowledging that this nation is not an even playing field… [“Open Casket’s”] absence from the exhibition does not excuse the institution from engaging with the harm caused by the work by holding Dana Schutz accountable.”

Dana Schutz’s Offense Is Being White

While it is easy and correct to call this censorious letter a hodgepodge of dangerous and silly hokum, we must understand why such calls to ban art are increasingly emerging. In this case, the casus belli is the fact that a white woman painted an image of Till. According to Schutz’s detractors, since a white woman’s lies about Till’s actions half a century ago led to his death, no white woman should treat the incident in this way.

It is a struggle to understand how people arrive at these determinations about who is allowed to create art about a given subject. In this case Schutz clearly meant her painting to call attention to the dangers of racism, yet for this is called racist. Importantly, it is not the art that is deemed offensive, but the artist. This is why protesting one painting is not enough; Schutz must be denied any platform.

These protests are attacking the very concepts of empathy and understanding. Till’s murder shook and still shakes the nation precisely because people of all ethnicities shudder at its horror. It is right and just that any artists meditate on Till and share their works he has inspired. If the piece makes one uncomfortable, maybe it should. If it makes people want to ban it, they should think again.

A strong hint that somebody is about to advocate for censorship is when he or she begins a statement by saying, “This is not about censorship.” They will often say that only government can censor art, and when individuals get together to stop art from being displayed it is simply an example of the marketplace of ideas. But this attitude suggests that nothing is real unless the government does it. While it is true that individuals calling for an art ban does not violate the First Amendment, it doesn’t mean they aren’t intolerant and censorious.

Calling on institutions to punish artists by refusing to show their work is in itself an act of censorship. If one has a justification for such censorship, by all means he should say so, but he shouldn’t hide from the true nature of his actions. If you want to censor art, own it and tell us why your beliefs should determine what art other people get to see.

White Women Are The Worst

Perhaps the most amazing thing about these protests is how utterly sexist they are. Central to the claim that Schutz is a racist who needs to be held accountable is the fact that it was a white woman who lied about Till. What shocking misogyny it is to force Schutz, like a modern Eve, to bear the sins of all women on her back. Quite frankly, had a white man painted the very same picture, we would very likely not be having this conversation, at the very least not in the same way.

Schutz is a white woman, a precarious thing these days. White women, we are told, are responsible for electing Donald Trump, notwithstanding the almost 30 percent of the Hispanic vote that he received. White women, it seems, should have known better, because they are women, or something. White women are bad feminists who need to do less talking and more listening to marginalized voices. White women just don’t know their place.

But all of us only live once. We have one stretch of precious time where our minds explore reality. Nobody should pay the slightest bit of heed to calls for limiting our expression based on our race or sex. The idea that Schutz shouldn’t paint an image that is meaningful, respectful, and striking merely because of her skin color is abhorrent.

There are two main concerns to an artist: beauty and truth. As Keats put it:  “‘Beauty is Truth, truth beauty,’- that is all / Ye know on earth, and all you need to know.”

Truth and beauty are often hard to marry. When the truth being explored is the brutal murder of a child, beauty seems quite remote. Yet this is the meaningful struggle of existing in a world that can crush us with its horrors and inhumanities. Artists can’t be like my grandmother, who whispered when she said the word “cancer,” for fear saying it too loudly might make her get it.

Discovering truth and beauty requires delving deeply into our minds and souls, searches that make artists different from those who do not practice art. That exploration cannot be encumbered by the assertion that some phenomena are off limits because of what you look like.

A cynic might say that this controversy is good for Schutz for spreading her fame. Perhaps. But I suspect that is little consolation for her. She has been accused of doing harm to people by painting a picture of Till. Nobody wants her legacy to be, “Was she a racist or not?”

These protests need to stop. Schutz did nothing wrong. Every artist, and indeed all of us, needs to stand firm and tell those who would engage in censorship that we will not have it.

The Great Conservative Rethink Isn’t Going Away

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Monday, July 31, 2017

At first glance, the great rewrite of our politics seems to be off. The new nationalist wave isn’t crashing on the shores, it’s receding. The globalists are winning again. Emmanuel Macron crushed the Front Nationale. Angela Merkel is going to romp to reelection this fall. And it looks like all the people who put their hopes in Brexit or in Donald Trump are smelling the sulfurous odor of reality now. All the native working-class people, all the dissenting right-leaning intellectuals — their hopes have already been dashed.

Teresa May’s post-Brexit election gamble blew up in her face. Now Brexit is slowly being tortured to death. Death by a thousand new doubts. Some opportunist Remainers are part of that effort, but more importantly, it’s being lost by incompetent and convictionless politicians who haven’t prepared to negotiate and are setting their country up to crash out of the European Union.

In America, some of the new nationalist constituency convinced themselves that the very shock of Donald Trump’s election would effect their revolution. Ha. Ha. Enjoy the next three years and change of guessing what Trump is going to tweet about next. Maybe he drops a few more MOABs in wars you thought he was going to end. Now he is telling those left behind by the old economy that there’s no helping them; they should think about moving. If 2016 was your Flight 93 election, make your peace with God now. You got control of the cockpit, but you had no plan for going nose up, the engine is just bursting into flames as you give it more juice on the way to back to Earth. Maybe he causes a few more libs to lose their minds on social media. Maybe they will become as numb to his provocations as you are becoming. Big whoop. Either way, you blew your one chance.

Or did you?

What if sudden-onset political incompetence is just part of the new era that is breaking upon us all? Some of the Tory May-haters, the people who felt accused when she attacked “citizens of the world” as “citizens of nowhere,” have staked their hopes on Ruth Davidson, the leader of Scotland’s Conservative and Unionist party. Here was a young, feisty, creative, and partisan woman — an out lesbian whose sexuality was unimportant. She was comfortable in the world that people under 35 had grown up in, the one where borders and national myths meant less than they ever did. While Teresa May lost the Tories a working majority, Ruth Davidson resurrected her party from the grave. She is as “up and coming” as politicians can be. Here she comes to bury Mayism . . .

Or not at all. Ruth Davidson wrote a big political coming-out essay this week. Capitalism needs a reboot, she says. Yes, she gushes with libertarian abandon when talking about the invention of shipping containers. But at the same time, there are lines of thought in her essay that address the same issue and the same problem that May and Trump and all the dissidents on the right have been speaking about for some time.

Capitalism has to be a moral enterprise she says. It has to reach out to the people who felt left behind, for whom social solidarity has been absent. She cites Adam Smith’s contention that capitalism will provide the means for public services and praises “intervention. Market restraints. Decisions made at a macro-level by governments to ensure basic fairness for the little guy.”

If capitalism is going to survive, it needs to gain the consent of the people, the kids who grow up in a “pit town with no pit, a steel town with no steel or a factory town where the factory closed its doors a decade ago.” She cites the same problems that May and Trump cited, not only the difficulty of finding work, but the helplessness that masses of people feel when they realize that ownership of their own home is an impossible dream. She cites Smith’s claim: “When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.”

In her own way, Davidson is grappling with the same problems and opportunities that conservatives face globally across the industrialized world. Many of the rich have abandoned conservative parties, preferring to be values voters of the center-left. Many of the former working classes that supported the Left in the past are drifting into center-right or right wing parties. The middle-class life that many Americans, English, and French felt was their birthright seems to be slipping away from them. The social supports of family, community, union, and church are disintegrating or irrelevant. The corporate culture is less paternalistic and loyal than ever, at least to the vast bulk of workers. To these people capitalism doesn’t look like an opportunity; it looks like an opportunity to be fleeced.

May and Trump just might fail. But right now it looks like conservative parties and conservative thinkers are likely to continue moving in their direction for a long time to come. We may not have the right answers yet, but the problem set doesn’t look like it is changing any time soon.