Lessons from Virginia: How the Democrats Got Schooled
The answer lies not just in the failure of the Democrats at the national level to deliver or even the persistent drag of the never-ending pandemic, but also in the darker corners of the American right.
By Jim Miller
The Democrats got “schooled” last week in Virginia’s election and elsewhere, and while mainstream pundits such as MSNBC’s Chuck Todd shared the insipid conventional wisdom about the perils of the Democrats getting “too progressive,” it was hard not to feel like we’ve already seen this movie before far too many times.
I will not bore you, dear reader, with either a tedious round of more bemoaning or a nauseating pep talk about not “giving up.” Things suck. We get it.
It is important to note, however, that the road to the Republican comeback in Virginia came not just as a result of Biden’s and Congressional leaders’ bumbling game of Lucy with the football starring Joe Manchin, but also as part of a calculated strategy.
As many political observers noted, education was at the heart of the right’s victory, as the Republicans successfully stoked lingering anger over school shutdowns and Covid policy along with hysterical fears of a fictional “critical race theory” curriculum being inflicted on innocent youngsters.
As usual, the vast majority of the mainstream coverage reveled in the horse race analysis but never engaged in any deeper examination of how we got to a place where debates around a Toni Morrison novel among other things could swing the balance of power in a key political battleground.
The answer lies not just in the failure of the Democrats at the national level to deliver or even the persistent drag of the never-ending pandemic, but also in the darker corners of the American right.
A few weeks before the November contests, the CT Insider back east published a great piece pondering why school boards there had become sites of ugly conflict:
Clearly, something is afoot. Why is this happening suddenly and simultaneously in so many different places around the state (and indeed the country)? Why is the pattern so similar? Why does it seem peculiar to affluent Connecticut towns? Why do some protests turn disruptive? Why pick on CRT, which schools don’t even teach (it’s a post-secondary pedagogical tool)?
This doesn’t sound like something that just happened to occur to parents at a local bake sale . . . The explanation may lie with Steve Bannon. According to Bannon, “This is the Tea Party to the 10th power,” and “The path to save the nation is very simple. It’s going to go through the school boards.” . . . A picture emerges of a shadowy and labyrinthine network of astroturf groups funded by big money. Funders include the Koch network, Turning Points USA, the DeVos Family Foundation, the Ed Uihlein Foundation, Donors’ Trust, and the Heritage Foundation.
Thus, much like the victory of Scott Walker in Wisconsin and his subsequent successful assault on labor rights in 2011, the rage at the school board is one-part angry white soccer mom and another part Koch brother. While the racial resentment that the school board battles illustrate is as American and ever-present as apple pie, the road to retaking power through educational culture wars is part of a current, well-funded national strategy by some of the usual Dark Money suspects.
Of course, though the effort to protect the minority of the opulent from the tyranny of the majority is fostered by skillfully manipulating the political terrain across the country, the basic structure of our democracy has, since James Madison, always made it hard to get things done that serve the majority of Americans’ interests.
This brings us back to the game of Lucy with the football that the coal baron Senator and a few of his corporate-funded pals have inflicted on our increasingly weary country. As Manchin mockingly tells his angry critics, if you want a better outcome on climate and social infrastructure, “elect more liberals.” But, as the filibuster-loving and entitlement-hating Senator from West Virginia well knows, that game is rigged against us. David Daley outlined precisely why Democrats only have a rare window to achieve any kind of progressive policy in the Guardian:
The trendline for Democrats does not look to be improving. The 2020 census showed that more than half of the 330 million Americans live in just nine states. That means upwards of 50% of us have 18 US senators, while the smaller half has the other 82. (By 2040, according to a University of Virginia forecast, half of the nation could live in only eight states, with just 16 senators.)
Let’s break that down even further. Two-thirds of all Americans – some 219,073,534 of us, to be exact – live in the largest 15 states, according to census data. They’re represented by 30 senators – 22 Democrats and eight Republicans.
The other third? They have 70 senators. These smaller states aren’t only whiter than the nation at large, they tilt decisively to the Republican party, represented by 42 Republicans and 28 Democrats. That’s more than enough to filibuster any legislation that cannot be passed through the reconciliation process – including voting rights – effectively granting veto power over even popular proposals to a tiny minority of voters from the smallest and whitest states. (As the Maine senator Angus King noted on the Senate floor last week, 41 senators representing just 24% of Americans can block legislation with the filibuster.)
Thus Manchin is essentially telling the majority of the country that they can eat cake and kiss his rich posterior. The recent passage of the bi-partisan infrastructure bill will be hailed as a transformative victory. It’s not. While containing some good provisions, it incentivizes far too much privatization and doesn’t come close to addressing our climate needs.
The impact of the rest of the Biden agenda has already been deeply limited as a handful of corporate Democrats have whittled away programs and funding. What we have seen in recent weeks with the gutting of Biden’s social policy agenda and the continued obstruction of any progress for ordinary Americans in Congress combined with the cynical victory of racist fear-mongering brought to you by our faceless masters and their fragile white suburban shock troops was a sick democracy operating precisely how the folks who believe they own the country think it should.
Down this road yet more peril lies.