"Parents' Rights": The GOP's New Culture War Weapon

As a piece in Vanity Fair notes, after Glenn Youngkin's disingenuous - often outright untruthful - campaign in Virginia turned the meme of "parental rights" into a successful weapon, Republicans across the nation are jumping on the band wagon.  In GOP circles, "parental rights" actually translates into banning accurate American history and erasing blacks, other racial minorities and LGBT indiviuals from the history books and and school libraries.   Here are excerpts:

After a strong showing last week, Republicans believe the party’s focus on parents and schools in recent months is what will help them win in 2022. The campaign platform of Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin has been especially influential in this messaging push, as the candidate attacked his Democratic opponent over so-called critical race theory curriculum and his stance on the pandemic-era safety measures––including mask mandates––instituted in Virginia schools.

In a letter to GOP colleagues that called for a “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy asserted that the results of the Virginia election prove that “parents are demanding more control and accountability in the classroom.” On Sunday, McCarthy appeared on Mark Levin’s Fox News program to repeat this message. “This is America waking up and taking back what they understand that they have lost before,” he said. “It’s Republicans respecting the rights of parents, from Loudoun County across the nation. I see something much bigger than Democrats realize.”

Conservative figures including Jim Jordan, Tom Cotton, Mercedes Schlapp, and Steve Cortes have likewise taken up the call.

Voters, too, are perpetuating the message. In a recent CNN segment, a group of four suburban Virginia mothers––three of whom voted for Joe Biden in the presidential election, and all of whom voted for Youngkin over Democratic rival Terry McAuliffe––spoke about Youngkin’s appeal. “Our kids are in crisis,” said Shawnna Yashar. “The learning loss is real. We’re in a situation where our kids are really far behind and they need a lot of help.” She added that COVID-19 school safety “mandates and CRT did not influence my decision at all.” Another mother said that Youngkin “listened to us” and “spent a lot of one-on-one time with parents,” unlike McAuliffe.

Democrats need towake up and devise an integrated campaign against this sanitized version of racism and homophobia, part of which will need to focus on the excesses and book banning agenda of the Republicans and their white Christofascist base which is powering the movement.  The second piece is getting far right progeressives and liberals to get their heads out of their asses to realize that their approaches that put everything in racial terms are just as off turning as those on the extreme right and among right wing hate  groups.  In some ways, the latter will perhaps the more difficult labor.  A column in the Washington Post by a former Republican suggests a path forward for Democrats.  Here are highlights: 

Democrats, beware: Glenn Youngkin’s successful campaign for governor of Virginia will serve as a template for Republican candidates eager to exploit fears of critical race theory by demanding “parental control” of education. Democrats must do a better job of responding than Youngkin’s hapless opponent, Terry McAuliffe, did.

The absolute worst thing you can say is what McAuliffe said: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” At some level, he was right; there would be chaos if every teacher had to run every lesson plan by the parents of every student. But his comment came across as tone-deaf after parents had spent 18 months supervising their kids’ education at home — and stewing about shuttered classrooms. McAuliffe paid the price for not feeling parents’ pain.

It’s also not productive to argue, as many on the left have, that critical race theory, or CRT, isn’t being taught and that raising the issue is nothing but a dog whistle to racists. It’s true that “parental control” has become the new “states’ rights” — a deceptively anodyne slogan for tapping racist fears. It’s also true that even those who are most hysterical about CRT have trouble defining it. Fox News host Tucker Carlson just admitted: “I’ve never figured out what ‘critical race theory’ is, to be totally honest, after a year of talking about it.”

But as a practical, political issue, none of that matters. CRT might have started off as an esoteric academic theory about structural racism. But it has now become a generic term for widely publicized excesses in diversity education, such as disparaging “individualism” and “objectivity” as examples of “white supremacy culture” or teaching first-graders about microaggressions and structural racism. You don’t have to be a Republican to be put off by the incessant attention on race in so many classrooms.

George Packer wrote in the Atlantic in October 2019 that he knew “several mixed-race families” that transferred their kids out of a New York City school that “had taken to dividing their students by race into consciousness-raising ‘affinity groups.’” . . . . . As an example, he cited Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) saying, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”

This is the kind of “stupid wokeness” that Democratic strategist James Carville blamed for his party’s setbacks in Virginia and New Jersey — and it is something that Democrats need to disavow if they want to win outside of deep-blue enclaves. Democrats should admit that, even as racism remains a pervasive problem, some efforts to combat it backfire if they exacerbate racial divisions or stigmatize White students.

But while acknowledging some conservative concerns as legitimate, Democrats also need to call out the GOP’s cynical and destructive use of the CRT issue. Just as an earlier generation of liberals protested all the lives Joseph McCarthy was destroying in the name of anti-communism, liberals today need to focus on the collateral damage that Republicans inflict in the name of fighting CRT: They are trying to ban books and fire educators. In short, they are practicing the very “cancel culture” they decry.