The Left’s Culture-War Mission Creep

By Judson Berger

Friday, February 18, 2022

 

Somewhere in the jungles of San Francisco or Montgomery County, Md., or . . . pick any place in Virginia, a platoon of progressive culture warriors must be hacking through the bush wondering how their objectives changed so drastically over the years.

 

They enlisted to fight for gay marriage, abortion rights, and the strict separation of church and state. So what’s this business about racist math, wrong pronouns, mismatched swim meets, and the erasure of George Washington’s name from buildings?

 

This drift — that is, the swinging shift in priorities that has placed the progressive Left so out of step with the non-politically-obsessed American middle — helps explain the popular rebukes we’re seeing in polls and polling places. San Francisco provided a potent example this week as overwhelming majorities in a not-very-Republican city voted to recall three progressive school-board members, a campaign initiated amid complaints the board was pursuing divisive social-justice fights instead of working to reopen schools and deal with pressing financial problems.

 

Ryan Mills gives the backstory here:

 

Instead of focusing its efforts on developing a reopening plan, the board has been preoccupied with woke culture war issues, expending energy on changing the admissions process at the highly-selective Lowell High School to boost the number of black and Hispanic students and reduce the number of white and Asian students; rechristening 44 schools named after prominent Americans, including presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington; and a proposal to spend close to $1 million to paint over a historic, 80-year-old mural at a local school that depicts the life of Washington, but also includes outdated stereotypes.

 

The board became the focus of national ridicule last February after a two-hour debate over whether a gay white dad was diverse enough to join an all-female volunteer parent committee. All the while, the district’s budget deficit ballooned to about $125 million last year, leading California education officials to threaten a state takeover.

 

Of course, some local leaders aren’t learning any lessons, blaming a cabal of “closet Republicans” (who knew there were so many in San Francisco?) for the defeats. But as National Review’s editorial states, the verdict from voters is clear that “far-left progressivism has not worked and is not working.”

 

For her part, Democratic mayor London Breed cheered the result and called it “a clear message that the school board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run school system above all else.” Breed seems to recognize the danger of pursuits that please only zealots. She has previously warned about what the collapse in law enforcement is doing to her city; this week, Seattle’s mayor had a similar awakening.

 

Other elected Dems are starting to notice that the opinions of overactive blue-checks do not reflect the opinions of a majority, as seen in the wave of decisions to lift mask mandates and other coronavirus restrictions. Perhaps quietly, they are coming to realize that Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia was not driven by Charlottesville tiki-torchers, but by the normal people whose bemusement at the causes of the Left is turning to annoyance and ultimately sound rejection. Add in the inflation that the Biden administration insists is unrelated to the nation’s historic levels of spending, and the polls start to make sense.

 

And boy, oh boy, those polls. Charles C. W. Cooke flags one outfit, whose surveys tend to favor Democrats, showing President Biden short of 50 percent approval in every state, and underwater in all but four. A separate Morning Consult/Politico poll should be sending Ron Klain in search of scuba gear. Rich Lowry highlights this report from Politico:

 

Democrats’ own research shows that some battleground voters think the party is “preachy,” “judgmental” and “focused on culture wars,” according to documents obtained by POLITICO.

 

Unclear is whether the response will be to change course — or to simply accuse Republicans of something worse, like pouncing. But the culture-war mission creep is undeniable, as is the insurgency rising up against it.

 

Peggy Noonan recently had some characteristically sage advice, noting that in this time of excess on the left, it is the job of the Republican Party “to be sane,” to be “the party of the big center, to stand for normal, regular people in all their human variety — all races, ethnicities, faiths — against the forces of ideology currently assailing them.”

 

If you’ve had a chance to catch a showing lately of the Republican Party, you know this will be harder than it sounds. But the opportunity is there, bigly.

 

In a semi-related bit of news, the cancel-culture wars are no less heated these days. The voices calling for a more thoughtful approach, though, do appear to be getting louder. Nate Hochman reported exclusively on a federal judge who surprised a Georgetown Law audience with a speech defending Ilya Shapiro, the legal scholar who was sidelined from the school’s Center for the Constitution over, in essence, a bad tweet. Judge James Ho’s remarks are filled with wisdom and common sense, so consider yourself warned.