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![Harvard Yard]()
‘Liberal political Twitter is as Ivy League as the virtual world gets without hanging out in Harvard Yard’ © Bloomberg
A couple of years ago a study showed that Democratic campaigns were dominated by elite university graduates.
A fifth of all staff were from Harvard, Stanford, New York University,
University of California-Berkeley, Georgetown, Columbia and Yale, which
meant those schools took up a far higher share of the more senior
campaign roles. No shock there, you might think. What struck me most,
however, was that the top three alma maters for Republican campaigns
were all state universities — the University of Texas-Austin, Ohio State
University and the University of Madison-Wisconsin. I remembered this
as I watched the Democratic party’s disastrous showing in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere on Tuesday night.
If
you get sucked into political Twitter’s vortex, as I occasionally do,
the level of outrage about Terry McAuliffe’s defeat to Glenn Youngkin in
the Virginia governor’s race was memorable. Political Twitter, and
particularly liberal political Twitter, is as Ivy League as the virtual
world gets without hanging out in Harvard Yard. The consensus was that
racism had won the election for Youngkin. Republicans had brought out
suburban parents’ innate prejudice with a pincer attack of campaign
dog-whistles and Fox anchor bullhorns about critical race theory.
Moreover, voters were so brainwashed, dumb or racist they did not even
realise that critical race theory is not taught in Virginia’s schools.
In short, it was a victory of dark propaganda over the wisdom of crowds.
There
is a very different way of looking at what happened on Tuesday.
Suburban Virginians, who a year ago voted for Joe Biden and
statistically are likely to have voted twice for Barack Obama, have lost
their patience with educational bureaucracy — and being culturally
shamed. Schooling from home during the pandemic was rigidly followed in
Virginia, as it was in New Jersey, where the Democratic incumbent, Phil
Murphy, was very nearly ejected (which would have been an even larger
shock). On top of this, schools have for a while been incorporating what
Yascha Mounk, in this coruscating Atlantic essay, describes as “popularised, less sophisticated cousins of critical race theory”.
If you doubt Mounk, check out
what the Virginia education department is reading. On a pedantic level,
liberal Twitter was right: CRT is a college-level discipline that
originated with legal scholars (in a nutshell, enforcing equality of
rights is not enough in a society suffering from the structural legacy
of slavery — a point with which I strongly agree). CRT is not taught in
most schools. Politically-speaking, liberal Twitter was epically wrong.
Most parents do not know, or care about, the technical definition of
CRT. They do know that what their children are being taught sounds a lot
like it.
Here
is the thing, CRT in the classroom is a leftwing critique of liberal
education. As I have written in a recent Swamp Notes, there is nothing
liberal about telling children their race is their most important
characteristic. This gives Republican critics of CRT the space to “bash
the left and earn cred by merely sounding like . . . Obama ’08”, as Nate Cohn from The New York Times put it.
As a fan of teaching children the skills of critical thinking, I found
it hard to disagree with Youngkin’s comments on the campaign trail: “We
will teach all history, the good and the bad . . . We have an amazing
history, but we also have some dark and abhorrent chapters. We must
teach them all. We can’t know where we’re going unless we know where we
come from.”
Which
leads me to two conclusions. First, highly educated Democrats,
especially the opinion-makers, need to get out more and talk to people.
It’s not that hard. In the so-called “revenge of the pissed off suburban Mom”,
there was a 13-point shift towards Republicans compared to last year
among white women in Virginia’s northern suburbs — which is just a
20-minute drive from Washington. Everyone is aware that there are plenty
of racists in the Republican party — and Youngkin was clearly winking
at them. But to describe anyone who voted for him as a dupe, or a closet
racist, is political lunacy. You could end up driving them away for
good.
My
second, and related point, is that America is neither Twitter nor a
university campus, where you can hunt down heretics and shame them. Both
Biden and Obama understand this. They need to make their point much
more forcefully. Faculty-lounge politics is the Democratic party’s road
to oblivion. This week’s election results ought to be a teachable moment
for the Democrats. It is worth stressing that Virginia this week also
elected its first-ever black female lieutenant-governor, and its first
Hispanic attorney-general. Both are Republican. The party is savvier
than liberals think.
Donald
Trump is an excrescence and America could cease to be a liberal
democracy if he becomes president again. How might that happen? Trump’s
ideal comeback movie could would be scripted by highly educated liberals
who keep telling everyone else how uneducated they are. They are
Trump’s best friends. |