There's more to disentangle in the realm of "culture war" issues than ever before.
It's so fraught as to nearly be a third rail of national discourse. As our societal polarization - no, make that fragmentation - continues apace, the at-odds-with-each-other notions of what's acceptable for polite or productive conversation proliferate. It's enough to make one's head swim.
I am a die-hard fan of the Principles First movement, but I sense from some of its most prominent voices that, since such issues are beyond the purview of public-sector solutions, they ought not to get an airing in the movement's conversations. It strikes me as sort of a big-tent appeal, a reluctance to drive away any possible allies.
That's fine, but it seems to me an argument can be made that the field is thereby ceded to the Left.
That's Erick Erickson's position:
We actually live in a constitutional order where the left has seized on the constitutional order of the right to steer culture off a cliff. Conservatives view the constitution as a document on a printed page that sets out the powers of the government and the limits thereof. It restricts the government to the public sector and provides the metes and bounds description of the barrier between the public and private and the intersections of the two.
Progressives view the constitution as a living and breathing document that gives order not just to the structure of government, but also to society at large. They have largely lost the argument because they decided to score their victories in the judiciary, unable to win at the ballot box, and now Clarence Thomas presides over the Supreme Court.
As a result, progressives are playing a long game in the private sector even as conservatives are reversing the judicial fiats of the left. Now progressives have capitalized on a conservative vision of society.
Conservatives think the public sector should be constrained in its regulation of the private sector. Progressives have slowly been hiring progressives into the ranks of the Fortune 500 and are now abandoning the public sector to have the private sector do its bidding.
They would use Disney to bully Florida’s citizens as a major employer in the state. They have shaken down corporations to fund Black Lives Matter, an organization opposed to the private sector. They have used social media companies to silence conservatives where the government cannot. They have pressured companies to stop advertising in conservative spheres. They’ve advanced their agenda across corporate America and academia taking advantage of the right’s rules of lax regulation and constitutional parameters. They have seized on the libertarian argument of “if you don’t like it, go build your own” to push conservatives out of social media and private spaces while depriving those conservatives of the means to build anything new without extraordinary sums of money.
But no sooner does one put forth that view than a bonehead like Laura Ingraham comes along, threatening to bring the coercive power of the state to bear against private organizations.
I won't take the space to reprint it all here - for one thing, it's getting rather lengthy - but have a look at the comment thread under the latest piece at Ordinary Times by Jennifer Worrell. She gets into some interesting considerations, such as why Rachel Dolezal came in for such castigating as a phony black, while trans people, no matter how much or how little physical transforming to the other gender they have done, are lauded for their authenticity. But her overall premise is well summed up by a money line in the second to last paragraph:
. . . both the act of defining woman, and the act of not defining woman are each controversial.
There is one progressive-type viewpoint that shows up prominently in the comment thread that takes advantage of the overreach of Ingraham-types by arguing that there is some sort of definable oppressor class of white heterosexuals who want to stiff the voices of oppressed classes using any means at its disposal.
But we can't get away from the well-documented encroachment of identity-politics militancy on every sector of out society, including the sector that has access to the noggins of our youngest and most impressionable:
In a recent Washington Post article, SEL [social and emotional learning] advocates argued that the conservative outcry is an unwarranted attack on crucial mental-health programming for kids.
A review of SEL materials obtained by the nonprofit Parents Defending Education (PDE) confirms parents’ concerns that mental-health language is being co-opted to advance radical ideas about race, gender, and sexuality. But even if some of the SEL material is innocuous, parents told NR they’d still be concerned because time spent on SEL is time not spent helping kids recover from the learning loss they suffered during two years of school closures.
As Spiegel put it: “Where is the algebra? Where is the biology? Where is the English?”
A life-long Democrat, Spiegel joined the fray over the school reopening issue. Her activism grew after her son started complaining about the weekly social-justice-heavy SEL lessons, curated by each individual teacher and administered to high-schoolers county-wide. One question on a quiz caught her eye: “How do you feel when you see two men kissing?” she said it read, paraphrasing. The choices were “A.) Aggressive, B.) Passive aggressive, C.) Neutral, or D.) None of the above,” she said.
Her daughter, a high-school senior, took a quiz that asked something to the effect of: “If you didn’t have a diverse makeup of friends in your friend group, is it racist to seek out another race to fill your friend group?” Spiegel said.
Given that the district never explained the purpose of the SEL lessons, Spiegel and many of her fellow moms felt like the lessons were either a waste of their kids’ precious instruction time or a manipulative tactic to diagnose a bigotry problem in the schools that didn’t exist.
“My daughter’s asking me if she’s a racist and my son’s confused about why he has to take these,” Spiegel said.
Of course, examples of SEL in the classroom extend beyond Howard County, Md.
Elementary-school students in West Hartford, Conn., public schools were subject to “social-emotional learning through an equity lens,” and their parents were not given the choice to have their kids opt out, PDE discovered in November.
Parents from the district sounded the alarm over materials being used to teach their kids about niche sex-and-gender identities, including transgender content being taught to kindergartners. For example, a first-grade text included Jacob’s New Dress, a story about a boy who wants to wear a dress to school, and a fourth-grade text included When Aidan Became a Brother, which pushes gender theory and teaches kids to question the sex they’re assigned at birth, parents told PDE.
The West Hartford district’s director of equity advancement, Roszena Haskins, emailed parents that the schools have “redoubled district-wide efforts to attend to the social and emotional needs of children and adults” with “social justice standards” that come from the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning framework, or CASEL.
Haskins wrote that “CASEL acknowledges that ‘while SEL alone will not solve longstanding and deep-seated inequities in the education system, it can help schools to promote understanding, examine biases, reflect on and address the impact of racism, . . . close opportunity gaps and create a more inclusive school community.’”
Yes, a movement aimed at reviving classical education - education that focuses on the Western canon of great works and the question of what constitutes a well-lived life - is going to serve as an antidote to this kind of identity-politics militancy - which is referred to with the shorthand term "wokeness," even though that term is fast outliving its usefulness - but these parents' kids are not going to be able to enroll in a classical-education setting tomorrow or next week.
My point here is not to offer any hard and fast solutions. I would merely say that none of us should be surprised that school board meetings are scenes of bitter accusations and tense standoffs, and that types such as Ingraham are inclined to issue threats to corporations.
In ten short years - fifteen at the outset - we have codified the flouting of the universe's basic architecture in institution after institution.
We are treading, en masse, onto completely untrod territory. Not everyone is going to be on board with that.
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