Yascha Mounk, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the founder of Persuasion, clearly doesn’t like Donald Trump, clearly wants Democrats to win, but he is also clear headed about why Democrats lost so badly in Tuesday’s elections.
But the one option that is both intellectually dishonest and electorally disastrous is to insist on a verbal trick unworthy of a middle-school debate team: to keep claiming that widespread concern over these ideas is misguided because the term by which they have publicly come to be known technically applies to an academic research program rather than the lessons that real children are being taught in real schools. And yet, this is precisely what McAuliffe and so many others attempted to do—with disastrous results—over the closing months of his campaign.
For anybody who cares about making sure that Donald Trump does not become the 47th president of the United States, it is crucial that Democrats avoid repeating the mistakes that just put a Republican in Virginia’s governor’s mansion. It is impossible to win elections by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary. If Democrats keep doing so, they will keep losing.
Dr Mounk spent a fair amount of bandwidth telling us how ‘Critical Race Theory” is an academic concept taught only at the collegiate level, a defense made by many on the left, but he’s smart enough to note that some of its concepts and conclusions have filtered down to the teachers educated at those universities, and some of them have come up with lessons which stress some of CRT’s ideas.
(A)cross the nation, many teachers have, over the past years, begun to adopt a pedagogical program that owes its inspiration to ideas that are very fashionable on the academic left, and that go well beyond telling students about America’s copious historical sins.
In some elementary and middle schools, students are now being asked to place themselves on a scale of privilege based on such attributes as their skin color. History lessons in some high schools teach that racism is not just a persistent reality but the defining feature of America. And some school systems have even embraced ideas that spread pernicious prejudices about nonwhite people, as when a presentation to principals of New York City public schools denounced virtues such as “perfectionism” or the “worship of the written word” as elements of “white-supremacy culture.”.
There’s a lot at his original, which you can read for yourself by following the link.
As I write this, #whitewomen is trending on Twitter, and it’s filled with all sorts of leftist hate for the white women in Virginia. Those voters helped Joe Biden to carry the Old Dominion in 2020, but, just a year later, they broke heavily for Glenn Youngkin over Terry McAuliffe, 57% to 43%. Tweets like this, this, and this show the foaming at the mouth anger of the left, but it demonstrates the wholly limited political view of the left. In creating every sort of demographic as a special interest group, and then setting themselves up as arbiters of what beliefs are acceptable for those groups, the left can’t see much beyond their noses. White women are supposed to vote for Democrats to support abortion, don’t you know, but the left can’t quite seem to grasp that white women are very often white mothers, and mothers have different interests. If elements of CRT have trickled down into secondary and even primary education, white mothers of white children are going to be worried about whether the far-left positions on race are going to have negative effects on their own children.
Amanda Marcotte, who is childless by choice, and thus has no first-hand experience in worrying about what the future will hold for her children, wrote:
Republicans are reliably easy to rile up with two main weapons: bigotry and resentment of liberals. The performative freakout over trans rights and “critical race theory” in public schools was built on easily debunked lies, and will be dropped the second it’s no longer electorally useful. But none of that matters, because Republicans live in a cloistered media ecosystem where kids reading “Beloved” in high school and imaginary rapists-in-dresses jumping strangers in the bathroom are treated like far more pressing threats to society than climate change or wealth inequality.
Dr Mounk debunked, with examples, her claim that CRT has no influence in the public schools, and her first link, in “trans rights” leads to her own article in which she claimed that transgenderism had nothing to do with the bathroom rape stories out of Loudoun County, Virginia, a claim which has been debunked by the (alleged) assailant’s own mother. No matter how many times the left try to tell us that there are no heterosexual boys who will exploit ‘transgender’ policies to get into the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, it doesn’t take many incidents like this to blow that argument out of the water. That it became public just a couple of weeks before the election surely didn’t help the Democrats.
Those white women in Virginia, the ones who gave a majority of their votes to Mr Biden? A lot of them might have a great deal of sympathy for the transgendered, in an abstract sense, but when their daughters are the ones put at risk by some of these policies, guess which side wins.
Mr McAuliffe made a huge gaffe in a debate, saying, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Uhhh, that’s saying that the state, not parents, ought to guide children’s development, and perhaps, just perhaps, a lot of parents disagree.
Then, just two days before the election, he said:
I promise you we’ve gotta diversify our teacher base here in Virginia. Fifty percent of the students in Virginia schools K-12 — 50% are students of color and yet 80% of the teachers are white.
In saying that, Mr McAuliffe raised the obvious question: why, in a state in which 67.63% of the population are white, are only 50% of the public school students white? How bad must the Commonwealth’s public schools be if so many white parents choose to put their children in private or parochial schools? Just as an example, at St Mary Star of the Sea School in Hampton, Virginia, where my daughters went to elementary school, tuition for two children, of parishioners, is $10,450 for the ten-month academic year, or $1,045 every month. For non-parishioners, it’s $12,620. That’s not just chump change, but, for a private school, that’s actually kind of low.
In the aftermath of the death in custody of drug addled convicted felon George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the #BlackLivesMatter riots that lasted much of the summer of 2020, the hard left thought that they could dramatically reduce or even eliminate police departments across the country. In the city that started it all, the voters rejected, by a wide measure, a ballot measure to amend the city charter to replace the police with a department of public safety.
It was all too, too much. Voters in Minneapolis may have had some qualms about the actions and tactics of their police department, but they realized that one is needed. The fact that the city is on a near-record pace in murders might just have influenced them.
I actually supported the Minneapolis measure; I wanted the idiots there to serve as a test case.
The left, emboldened by victories in the 2018 and 2020 elections, thought that they had carte blanche to ruin impose their agenda on America, and, were it not for Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) doing something really radical like representing the people who elected him, rather than the ‘progressives’ of the districts of the Squadristi, they might have succeeded.
But the voters, most of whom are actually normal people, want a normal life. They may have some sympathetic support for those afflicted with gender dysphoria, but they don’t want their kids put in greater danger. They might accept that #BlackLivesMatter, on an abstract scale, but in seeing the greatly increased murder rates in our cities, both the large majority of victims and perpetrators of which are black, the idea of defunding or eliminating the police departments was something which would have exposed their children and themselves to greater danger. They might accept the idea that black Americans were still impacted by historical discrimination, but that didn’t mean they wanted a society in which being white, and their children being white, would be legally pushed into a discriminated against situation. They wanted a calmer, safer lifestyle, and that was exactly the opposite of the radical societal reforms that the left were promising. And that was how they voted!
Now we know why Kim Jong-un has lost weight!
