The Most Successful Republican Issue

AMAC Exclusive – By Harold Boas

The Republicans’ most successful grass roots issue, both in 2021 and 2022, was parental rights in K-12 education in public schools.

It not only brought the GOP an upset win in the Virginia gubernatorial election, and a new national political star, Glenn Youngkin, last year, it also provided conservatives with numerous 2022 wins across the country in local school board elections. An example of how potentially significant this was took place in Minnesota. While liberal Democrats won every statewide office, more than 50 conservatives won school board seats previously held by liberals across the state.

The political implications of this are that there are now new conservative elected officials at the local level who in most cases will run for re-election, and likely increase the base of conservative voters in subsequent elections — an expanded base that will also likely permeate up-ballot to municipal, legislative and statewide races.

This turns the usual political “wisdom” of candidates for major offices helping candidates down-ballot on its head, and further expands the ongoing grassroots transformation of the Republican Party into a more populist and non-elitist blue collar and middle class political party — a phenomenon evolving since 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter for president.

Parental rights in public school education is a cultural issue, and a key part of the struggle against the current wave of woke/politically correct cancel culture and indoctrination now raging in American public life. Although the two sides of this issue cannot be neatly defined by those who support the two major parties, the impetus for promoting woke ideology in schools has come from the radical left, and is now part of much of Democratic Party public policy. Opposition to it came primarily from the right, and is now part of Republican Party public policy — although as the issue became more extreme, its opponents now include many independents and even Democratic parents who find school policies contrary to their values.

American public secondary school education is now in a heightened crisis mode, as many parents have taken their children out of the public schools and have either enrolled them in secular or religious private schools or are homeschooling them.

The ideological indoctrination has taken many forms, including rewriting textbooks, promoting critical race theory (CRT), imposing radical gender theory on students, encouraging teacher political bias, and institutional disregard for parental concerns and input.

Rewriting textbooks and promoting teacher ideological bias is a consequence of political correctness and the so-called “cancel” culture in the modern American adult environment. These phenomena are an attempt to impose an excessive corrective to legitimately identified historical failures and shortcomings in U.S. social and political life.

One of the most common examples of this has been to “cancel” significant U.S. historical figures who one or two centuries ago were part of slaveholding families. The failure to eliminate slavery was one of the failures of colonial and pre-Civil War American life, and should be condemned. But cancel cultists say that being a slaveholder alone disqualifies most of the founders of the Republic (including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson — in fact, ten of the first twelve presidents) as well as most of the significant pre-Civil War leaders. The Democratic Party has gone so far as to ‘’cancel” the two men who founded their own party — Jefferson and Jackson.

This ludicrous overreach has been expanded into widespread denigration of the fundamental socio-economic system of democratic (small “d”) capitalism by leftists and radical commentators who appear to be advocating various forms of totalitarian socialist models as preferable to what has arguably been the most successful form of government over the past few centuries.

Most Americans, it seems clear, do not agree with this radical put-down of U.S. history and democratic capitalism, and when it takes the form of the indoctrination of a whole generation of U.S. children, and is justified by many Democrats, including President Biden (who has dismissed legitimate parental involvement in public school curricula), mothers and fathers across the nation are now increasingly using their votes to say “Enough!”