The Trouncing of the San Francisco School Board

National Review Online

Thursday, February 17, 2022

 

Writing about politics in Great Britain in his day, Edmund Burke compared the radicals to “half a dozen grasshoppers” and cautioned his readers, “Pray do not imagine, that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”

 

This week in San Francisco, the voters demonstrated that the grasshoppers are far from the only inhabitants of the field.

 

Voters in the City by the Bay, the mecca of modern American progressivism, threw out three members of the San Francisco school board in recall elections on Tuesday. And the results weren’t close: 75 percent voted to recall board president Gabriela López, 73 percent voted to recall vice president Faauuga Moliga, and 79 percent voted to recall board member Alison Collins.

 

Their reason for doing so: Progressivism run amok. Ryan Mills reported on the two parents who led the recall effort, Siva Raj and Autumn Looijen, last March. Raj was frustrated his children’s schools were not opened, so he attended a school-board meeting. There he found members arguing about identity politics instead of working to reopen schools. Reopening was at the bottom of the agenda, and discussion of it didn’t begin until almost midnight.

 

The school board seemed to be more interested in renaming schools than reopening them. While they were still closed, it pursued plans to rename 44 schools in the name of social justice. The supposedly offending names included Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Paul Revere.

 

Collins became particularly unpopular for a series of tweets from 2016 in which she likened Asian Americans to “house n*****s” and said that they use “white supremacist thinking” to “get ahead.” Between those comments and the board’s efforts to end merit-based admission to magnet schools, “many Asian American residents were motivated to vote for the first time in a municipal election,” according to CBS News.

 

Eventually, both the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle endorsed removing the school-board members, and Democratic mayor London Breed supported the effort as well. The pro-recall side raised $1.9 million, compared with only $86,000 by opponents of the recall. Raj and Looijen’s movement welcomed all comers who thought school boards should be about education first, not hyper-progressive identity politics.

 

Of course, it’s still San Francisco, and the replacements won’t be conservatives. One of the reasons Breed supported the recall is probably that she gets to appoint interim board members to serve until the next general elections are held in November. We have little confidence in her judgment in selecting new members, and Democrats will still run the city.

 

That doesn’t mean this defeat for progressives isn’t significant, however. The entire card-carrying membership of the Republican Party of San Francisco could probably fit in one of the city’s trolleys. Neither Raj nor Looijen is on the right ideologically. Yet Tuesday’s result proves Burke’s point: Ordinary people aren’t interested in radicalism. In fact, when they see its results, they are repelled by it.

 

“America is fundamentally a Conservative nation,” wrote Barry Goldwater in The Conscience of a Conservative. “The preponderant judgment of the American people . . . is that the radical, or Liberal, approach has not worked and is not working.” Filtered through a biased media, woke corporations, and a progressive-run university system, that truth can often be hard to see.

 

But even Americans in overwhelmingly Democratic cities are concluding that far-left progressivism has not worked and is not working. The radical approach to policing was resoundingly rejected by the voters of Minneapolis in November. Now, the radical approach to education has been resoundingly rejected by the voters of San Francisco. If progressives can’t win there, they certainly can’t win nationwide.

 

Police departments should be for law enforcement, and school boards should be for education. If voters see those as conservative positions now, Democrats’ electoral troubles are only beginning.