First of all, let’s all agree; the Virginia, New Jersey and other various off-year elections were conducted freely, fairly and with no rigging or irregularities. The essence of the American “by,” “for” and and “of”of the people experiment in democracy is that, at the end of the day, we have to trust voters and juries.
But there are more “results’ than just the vote counts that showed a bad pattern for Democrat candidates and far-left causes like “defund the police”, and even efforts to provide easier mail-in voting and same-day voter registration in New York State, of all places. The results also include various policies that the winning candidates seem to have endorsed and promise to execute: including some that would have profoundly inequitable effects.
For example: Virginia’s governor-elect clearly advertised (24/7) that he disagreed with the notion expressed by his competitor that parents should not be '‘telling schools what to teach” — exit polls tracking his win found that a solid majority of voters believe that parents should play a strong role in terms of school curricula.
Does the election result really mean that parents must now be the ‘deciders’ of K-12 curricular content? What a world that would be! Which parents? — parents might ask. The ones that shouted and harangued school boards the loudest or made the boldest death threats against school principals in and teachers? Or the parents who actually physically and violently attacked teachers and school administrators for requiring masks during an airborne pandemic? Are we to now going to limit voting rights in school board elections to only parents of K-12 students, and thus eliminate the voting voice of everyone else who might have a stake in educational outcomes like folks who engage in businesses and social organizations and colleges and trade schools and - well, grandparents? And who decides which particular parents get to tell the schools what to teach, as the governor elect seems to favor? The state legislators in party-line voted? Virginia could then have GOP curricula for 4 years, and then 4 years of the Democrats’ reading lists. New “turnstile teachers” every four years … if you can hire them. Bounty-hunting, open-carry “class watchers” to make sure the state curriculum of the moment is followed scrupulously.
Nobody, including the losing gubernatorial candidate in Virginia and Attorney General Merrick Garland — both of whom the governor-elect alleged without evidence (sound like Trump, doesn’t it) of trying to “silence” parents voices at school board meetings in that state and elsewhere — in fact suggested cutting off debate of educational issues among parents at school board meetings. In fact, the Justice Department only vowed to protect the right of parents to express their views before their boards and not be silenced by violent mobs. nobody is suggesting that parents whould not have input. But it seem that the governor-elect wants to deputize another set of “K-12” parent-vigilantes that would ride Texas-like herd on K-12 reading lists and English classes (see his final days TV commercial about “Beloved’)— and spot any signs of creeping critical race theory or other “socialist” ideas in math class. Maybe “multiplication” is really an insidious attempt to push multiculturalism; or that 2+2=4 is a secret plug for polygamy; or that quadratic equations are a subtle endorsement of the “transgender agenda’). Can’t we all agree that having parents actually tell schools what to teach is, at bottom, just a good bit dangerous as well as downright silly?
Of course, another chief executive already has already decided to tell his state’s college teachers what they cannot say outside the classroom because an expert professor bearing witness in litigation against that state’s public health policies would be “against the interests of the state” — and that was not in Hong Kong or Hungary — it was in Florida. Welcome to the GOP “prior restraint” amendment to the US Constitution.
What the election results and current GOP state level policies portend is a full-out attack on public education itself (the so-called ‘government schools” that the far right attacks at the K-12 level and yet wants to create at the college level). I see no evidence that the Virginia election.provides any sort of mandate to do this under the guise of parent control. Yet the governor-elect just promised to start up 20 more “charter “schools. These are the new public-funded K-12 schools where their charters often allow them to kick any kid out any time for virtually any reason without any consequence to their state funding —even though such arbitrary expulsions can often help produce higher average test scores that a trigger even more funding. Where are the champion of parents rights here— oh wait, the lid licked out have mainly poor Black or hispanic parents anyway. Never mind.
Talk about Democrats renting but not owning the Trump-resistant suburban white mom’s and dad’s constituency! Yup the anti-mandate anti-CRT governor-elect in Virginia did win non-college white women by 39%. But they will like charter schools a lot less when their kid gets expelled for “acting up”— and even less when they find out that there are no more CRT classes in K-12 Virginia than there weapons of mass destruction in Iran, but their kids are getting into trouble back in public school for feeling free to play racist tricks.
These GOP playbook lies generally have less than a year’s use-by date. Let’s watch out for the new winners succumbing to the same genuine weakness that the election results did expose — the case of Democrats overreaching their supposed mandate based on a less-than-1% Congressional “majority” - not counting the filibuster effect, of course. Meanwhile, speaking of mandates, if you don’t like school mandates - get our kids vaccinated if at all possible — or if you want no mask mandates and no vaccines for teens, move to the UK and trust your family with Britain’s 5th Covid surge. Right now, as one columnist observed today, the GOP winners have developed an electorally useful Delta version of Trumpism: easier to spread and harder to see till it bites you, but still the same dangerous disease. And that disease is not Republican or Democrat. It is autocratic, not pro-freedom. - and unAmerican at its core.