By Richard Hanania
Tuesday, November
12, 2024
Election pundits like to argue that the issues they care
about most are also at the front of voters’ minds. However, it is difficult to
dispute that wokeness harms the Democratic Party in national elections. Polls
show overwhelming
opposition to letting transwomen participate in women’s sports. In 2020,
California voted by over
fourteen points to continue the prohibition of affirmative action. At a
more superficial but still politically
meaningful level, Hispanics are more likely to say that they find the term
“Latinx” offensive than they are to use it.
Some commentators on the Left maintain that opponents of
wokeness largely got what they wanted from Kamala Harris’s presidential
campaign. Don Moynihan, for example, argues
that Harris kept talk about identity to a minimum. She also endorsed a
tough border bill, and walked back her previous support for government
providing gender-confirmation surgery to imprisoned illegal immigrants.
This is all true, and when the Harris campaign published
its policy proposals, I noted how remarkably
free of identity issues they were. Nevertheless, voters are not wrong to
connect Democratic governance with radical views on issues related to race and
sex. Each political faction is considered responsible for what members of its
coalition do. This is rational because governing is not only about the policies
leaders implement, it is also about sins of omission that allow policy to move
in undesirable directions.
In California, governor Gavin Newsom and every other
elected statewide official is a Democrat, as are large majorities in both state
houses. Schools throughout the University of California system require DEI
statements for aspiring faculty. At places like Berkeley and Santa Cruz,
commitment to diversity isn’t simply one criterion among many—it serves as a
threshold test for deciding which applications are even considered. Conor
Friedersdorf calls
this “a revolutionary change in how to evaluate professors.” The University
of California system has
also banned the consideration of standardised tests in admissions, removing
the only objective measure schools have to select students according to merit.
Newsom did not run on diversity statements or banning
standardised tests, and he never signed a law mandating these things. The
problem is that regimes like these can only flourish in states under full
Democratic control. State universities rely on legislatures for funding, and in
most states, boards of regents are appointed by the governor. It is therefore
reasonable to worry about politicians interfering with academic freedom, but
it’s difficult to argue that states have no right to step in when public education
has gone as far off the rails as the University of California system has. In
places like Texas
and Florida, state governments have acted to rein in left-wing excesses in
the universities.
Even if no Democratic politician comes out for
eliminating gifted classes in schools, diversity statements, racial
preferences, pronouns in bios, biological males playing in female sports, or
various other initiatives that fall under the banner of “wokeness,” voters
correctly understand that Democratic rule is likely to result in all of these
things, and probably much else that currently isn’t even part of the
discussion. Voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio know that their university systems
could easily be as woke as that of California if Republicans did not enjoy
substantial representation in government.
What’s true about colleges also applies to primary and
secondary education. Matt Yglesias notes
that the Biden administration has had no principled objection to involving
itself in local education issues. It has used its bully pulpit to attack the
removal of LGBT-themed books from school libraries but said nothing about the
elimination of gifted programs in the name of equity.
Wokeness has rarely been directly imposed by elected
officials. Rather, it is what you get when ideologues seize the reins in
schools, universities, corporations, and government bureaucracies. Reasonable
people can differ about how much authority the federal and state governments
have to intervene under different circumstances. But in cases where the
government itself engages in undesirable behaviour, like imposing soft racial
quotas or turning state universities into left-wing monocultures, we need politicians
who are going to chart a different course.
If Democrats are to reassure voters, they must start
picking fights with woke activists. On the cultural level, there must be
greater tolerance for internal dissent instead of treating reasonable and
widely held positions as if they are beyond the pale. Congressman Seth Moulton took
a step in the right direction by speaking up about transwomen in sports,
but the backlash revealed why more Democrats don’t register their disagreements
with the far-left—one of Moulton’s staffers resigned and others who have
previously worked for him began circulating a critical letter. Where Democrats
hold power, they should work to check woke excesses in areas where the use of
policy levers is appropriate, and at least use their political platform to
loudly disagree with leftists within their coalition when it is not.
One might argue that it doesn’t matter what Democratic
office-holders do, because Fox and right-wing Twitter will always tar them with
the Left’s most unpopular policies and rhetoric. But this is too pessimistic
about the ability of politicians to shape the narrative. The media is so unused
to Democrats pushing back on identity politics that a leader beginning to do so
forcibly would get the attention of a man-bites-dog story. Outrage from former
staffers and interns will only help to publicise the efforts of those adopting
such positions. Until now, Democrats have shown themselves to be somewhere on
the spectrum between enthusiastically backing identity politics and simply
ignoring it. Only by actively opposing left-wing dogma can they begin to win
back trust among their fellow Americans.
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