THE SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE
A political earthquake occurred this past week in San Francisco. The aftershocks are now being felt across the country.
For those who may have missed it, the habitues of this notorious citadel of countercultural politics kicked to the proverbial curb, in a special recall election, a trio of school board members who had strayed far from the priorities of this uber-progressive constituency.
The three ousted members – Alison Collins, Gabriela López, and Faauuga Moliga –were part of a Board of Education that had dissolved over time into self-parody. Consumed by the pursuit of fashionable leftist ideology and indifferent, to the point of contemptuousness, to their comparably mundane obligation to properly educate children. Unwilling to recognize the limits of public tolerance for those who jeopardize their kids’ social and academic development for the sake of hipster performance art.
Let us stop right here for a moment and think about this. We aren’t talking about a southern rural backwater of MAGA-fueled resistance to 21st-century curricula. Or one of those immaculately watered suburban enclaves in the Sun Belt.
This is San Francisco.
A place where “fashionable leftist ideology” and “hipster performance art” should be emblazoned, perhaps in Latin, on the city’s official crest. The place that gave us the City Lights Bookstore, Allen Ginsberg, Haight-Ashbury, Timothy Leary, and the Summer of Love. To be sure, this of all places – San Francisco, for God’s sake – would be sympathetic to some well-intentioned philosophical adventurism, even if it was an inconvenience and a colossal waste of public resources.
Well. Apparently not. It turns out there was little public appetite for a school system that defiantly refused to re-open its public schools, even in the face of guidance from virologists, pediatricians, psychiatrists, and childhood development experts alike to get the children off Zoom and back in the classroom.
These same frustrated parents were even further aggravated when, even as their children were sleeping through their Zoom classes and losing their one and only chance for homecoming games, senior class plays, and holiday dances, these same school board members focused their attention instead on rebranding schools that had been named for those found to be racist and reactionary.
People like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. The school board that couldn’t find the time to actually open the schools instead found the time to rename them.
There was more. A highly controversial change of school admissions policy for one of the city’s most revered public magnet schools, from one based upon academic achievement to one based upon a random lottery. Gratuitous insults were hurled at those members of the city’s burgeoning Asian-American community who dared to question the priorities of this omniscient body of leaders.
And so it went until Tuesday when the people finally voted to cancel Romper Room by ousting Collins, Lopez, and Moliga by a collective margin of more than 40 points.
So, what does this all mean for Maryland? Why are we spending so much time on a school board election in a city three time zones away?
For this reason – if the people of America’s most celebrated bastion of progressive politics have had enough of performative virtue signaling at the expense of effective and responsive government, then maybe – just maybe – Democrats in Maryland and elsewhere need to be mindful of both the substance and cadence of the message we are taking to the voters.
Perhaps it means the implosion of Terry McAuliffe’s campaign in Virginia last fall wasn’t an aberration but rather a pointed reminder that parents WILL have a say in the way their children are educated and that politicians who disrespect that right shall do at their own peril.
Perhaps the fact that the Republicans have won three of the last five gubernatorial elections in Maryland, this bluest of blue states, is more than just a series of historical quirks, one-time idiosyncrasies, and candidate failures. Maybe, just maybe, it is a quadrennial judgment on the efficacy of campaigns that overemphasize social issues to the point of eye-rolling monotony.
Or dismiss high-worth individuals and successful small businesses solely as inexhaustible Pez dispensers of new and higher tax revenue, if not outright castigating them for the sake of rhetorical class warfare.
Or disincentivize sound fiscal management by defining one’s commitment to a priority solely by how much taxpayer money they are willing to spend on it.
Or willfully disregard that even in the leafy suburbs and rural communities across Maryland, to say nothing of Baltimore City, people feel increasingly unsafe within their own communities and actually desire a sustained, if not greater, police presence on their street corners.
If a moment of reckoning can happen in San Francisco, then it can sure as heck happen here in Maryland. For the sake of ameliorating the damage of what will already be a rout of historic proportions in November, Maryland Democrats must spend less time in the echo chamber of social media and in the rarefied company of their Washington political operatives and take time to sit and actually listen to those who they seek to represent for the next four years.
I bet there are at least three retired school board members in the Bay Area who wish they had done the same.
Read prior Len Foxwell’s ON POLITICS
MARYLAND REPUBLICANS AND THE POLITICS OF SELF-DESTRUCTION
MECHANICS WANTED
