Recreate this content while optimizing it for SEO, enhancing its creativity and uniqueness, improving syntax and tone, increasing perplexity and burstiness, and retaining the HTML tags:
lydia polgreen
Daddy, what did you do during the woke war?
carlos lozada
I wrote sternly worded columns.
michelle cottle
From New York Times Opinion, I’m Michelle Cottle.
ross douthat
I’m Ross Douthat.
carlos lozada
I’m Carlos Lozada.
lydia polgreen
And I’m Lydia Polgreen.
michelle cottle
And this is “Matter of Opinion.”
OK, guys. I’ve got to say, I’m sad the summer is basically over. Are everybody’s kids getting settled back into school?
carlos lozada
Yep. Back-to-school night coming up.
michelle cottle
Back-to-school night. Oh, Ross.
ross douthat
Our three-year-old has entered school for the first time.
lydia polgreen
Ooh, congratulations.
michelle cottle
Oh!
ross douthat
Our 12-year-old is entering middle school for the first time.
michelle cottle
I’m so sorry.
ross douthat
And have nothing to say about either.
lydia polgreen
It’s a real good news, scary news.
ross douthat
It’s a lot of change. And I’m against change as a conservative. So it’s a rough period.
michelle cottle
You’re anti-change? I respect that with children. Mine are old now, so I have reached that point where you just want to shrink them. But anyway, as the kids head back to school this seems like a good time for the question of what they’re learning, whether we’re talking about history, race, gender, sexuality, and how all that has somehow become the battleground for our latest political culture war. That’s right, folks. We are deep, deep in the woke wars.
lydia polgreen
Or are we?
michelle cottle
Or are we? Yes, because there are some signs that the woke wars might not be such a winning political strategy anymore. I mean, it barely came up at the first Republican primary debate. Before we get to that, can we talk first about whether it even makes sense that these issues are being politicized in schools?
lydia polgreen
I mean, I think schools have always been a battleground of fights of how we tell the story of who we are as humans. I mean, there’s this ahistorical way in which every time this comes up it seems like the first time. But the so-called culture wars have played out in numerous episodes in American history. I mean, I remember a few years ago reading the great Rick Perlstein book about Barry Goldwater and American conservatism. And huge swaths of that book are about school board elections in Southern California and things like that.
ross douthat
Yeah.
lydia polgreen
These are issues that come up again and again. And the question of what young people learn, the things that we emphasize in our history, the way in which we talk about who we are, that’s the basic stuff of human experience and building identity. So to me, it’s not surprising at all. It’s just taken on a tenor and a ferocity, and, I think, a great deal of political opportunism that I think catches us by surprise every time.
michelle cottle
I’m old enough to remember the ‘90s when Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition were taking over school boards so that they could build their ground level army.
ross douthat
Whatever happened to that? We’re living in a theocracy now, right? That was what I was told back then.
michelle cottle
They overreached, as these things often do. I mean, I tend to think these things go in cycles. So I’m trying to figure out if people think this looks appreciably different or if it’s just now we’re where you can tweet all this stuff out every 15 seconds, so.
ross douthat
I mean, I think the story here is relatively simple. Somewhere in Barack Obama’s second term, American liberals, who control most of the nation’s education, schools, and are responsible for most of the new ideas that find their way into circulation in the more elite and important reaches of American education, became really, really pessimistic about America and particularly about race relations. And this pessimism was accelerated by the election of Donald Trump. And out of this you had a turn towards a bunch of big, curricular changes that can be distilled into the ideas of figures like Ibram Kendi, who basically made intense arguments about the deep, structural racism of American society.
This then in turn yielded all kinds of exciting new attempts at bringing students deeper in touch with their white privilege or their racial identity and then yielded the backlash that I guess we’re calling the war on wokeness. And that in turn yielded its own set of overreaches and conflicts, and so on. And I do think it’s possible that we’ve passed, for this phase of conflict at least, both peak woke and peak backlash, that the backlash blunted the advance of certain kinds of ideas and in blunting it made the backlash look a bit extreme, thereby blunting the appeal of the backlash. And people started to move on to some other issues. But that’s — if you want a story.
michelle cottle
And Lydia’s laughing.
ross douthat
Yes. Good, good.
lydia polgreen
No, no, no. I think I’m laughing because of the — I lost track of which lash was lashing me and in what direction. I mean, I think the question of how we couch and describe the history of this country is a contested one. And it’s rightly contested. And I think that this question of pessimism, I think, grew out of the fact that so much of the way in which we think about the history of our country has been massaged, and shaped, and molded by forces that don’t really want to reckon with a lot of the hard truths about our history. And is there overreach? Are there places where things have gone too far? Perhaps. And that’s a debate that you can have.
michelle cottle
OK, I want to add a wrinkle to Ross’s position on why this became such an issue. I think these things cycle through. They pop up. They die down. There’s a group on each side that just goes all in on culture war no matter what the topic. They’re just raring for a fight.
But I do think because of the pandemic, you were able to get the attention of legions of middle-of-the-road suburbanites whose kids were out of school, struggling to deal with the pandemic, virtual learning. I can’t tell you how many, just personally, moms I knew whose kids melted down. The stories are tragic.
And the Democrats did not respond properly when people would voice these concerns. I mean, most famously in Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin in the 2021 governor’s race ran on a platform of parents’ rights, which swept in everything from CRT to mask mandates. The Democrats — Terry McAuliffe, who was running against Youngkin — didn’t take that fury nearly seriously enough. And Glenn Youngkin quite rightly shoved it down his throat.
And by having that as a wedge, you could then go in there and pick off people, and get people really fired up about critical race theory, which no one had ever even heard. The idea that this was rampant in the schools in Virginia was absurd. But because of the pandemic, you could expand who you could have this resonate with.
lydia polgreen
Michelle, that was the theory. Show me the results. I feel like we’re fighting the same war over and over again, and we’re overlearning the, quote unquote, “lesson of Virginia.” Has there been another example of a state that has turned on this question?
michelle cottle
What I’m saying is people are back in school.
lydia polgreen
Yes.
michelle cottle
And suburban Republicans, and centrists, and moderates have lost their desire to fight out the critical race theory things and the trans issues. And so you saw a lot of losing in the 2022 primary. It was not the popular issue that they thought it was going to be. And thus going into 2024, everybody thought that the presidential race was going to hinge on this.
And Trump and DeSantis went all in early on. But then by the time we came to the debate the other night, nobody was really talking about the war on wokeness in schools. They were talking about a return to things like smacking teachers’ unions and devolving power to the states. Carlos, is there something that you want to throw into this mix before I drag this into the sewer of big P politics?
Denial of responsibility! Vigour Times is an automatic aggregator of Global media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, and all materials to their authors. For any complaint, please reach us at – [email protected]. We will take necessary action within 24 hours.
