Virginia as Political Culture War
The Struggle in Virginia Schools is real, but far from being a contest between parents and school boards, it is between two different parents, a minority and majority.
I have written several things about the Virginia Governors race, on twitter, on emails, and on AMAC, two of which have been reposted on Real Clear Politics. This does not make me unique. In fact, I have probably written far less about Virginia than most American politics nerds. Part of that is due to something I learned when coaching debaters, which is that occasionally it is better to listen to what others have to say than to push your own view. That is especially true when the goal is to figure out what is going.
The point of political analysis is to figure out what is going to happen. It is not to convince others that you are right by shouting them into silence. And yet, the takeover by twitter and social media of discussion has meant that increasingly the younger generation of analysts, especially on left-leaning “Election Twitter” seem more focused on reassuring themselves than convincing. I do not mean to single them out given I follow many, and they perform important work in terms of statistics, mapping, and coverage of politics. And the right too has tended to have its own blind spots. But they are different.
The Right tends to believe that more is happening than really is. Every rally, every story, every interview is built up as a factor which must have an influence. The result is a tendency to discuss stories which no one outside those media circles follow, and then convince themselves that these stories are what “everyone” is talking about.
The Left has mistakes of its own. The first is that while recognizing the tendency of the Right to over-focus on single stories, the Left rejects the idea that any single story or instance could possibly correlate with a wider trend which is important. It is only multi-year, multi-state, multi-country trends which matter. I believe these exist and are important. I have written a lot about them. But they are not mutually exclusive with events, as Harold Macmillan would say, and events tend to matter not in isolation but when they confirm wider trends.
Virginia
How does this apply to the Virginia Governor’s race? Well both worldviews above have produced two distinct analysis. There is what I would term the “meta” view of the election, which tends to be most heavily embraced by Democratic-friendly analysts, which is that Virginia, which Joe Biden won by 10% is now a Democratic leaning state. Polls may show a close race or even momentum for Republican Glenn Youngkin over Democrat Terry McAuliffe, but they showed the same trend in 2007 when Democrat Ralph Northam was tied or even trailed in some polls to Ed Gillespie. As with this year, when Republicans have seized on the “culture war” issue of education, including disputes over the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools, accommodation of transgender students, or crime, there was a focus on immigration in the form of the threat posed by the gang MS-13. Stories flooded the DC media of voters turning on Democrats over it. On election day Northam won by the largest margin of any Democrat in decades.
The lesson, reinforced by the results of the California recall, is that the 2020 polarization is here to stay. Suburban college-educated voters, especially women will not vote for Republicans, and campaigns do not matter. While some caution regarding polls is definitely warranted after 2017, in certain quarters this outlook has manifested in a form which not only suggests that nothing has mattered but that nothing could matter. That this race was always going to be a six point or so Democratic victory and will be one.
Proponents of this view will tend to seize on available evidence, whether it be unskewing polls(much less justifiable than 2017-induced skepticism) or focusing on dubious early voting data in a state which did not have widespread early voting in previous elections, and has no party registration data. There are things to be found in the early voting data mind you, but they relate, as I will discuss later, to raw turnout and engagement. Not to mention the effectiveness of Democratic GOTV efforts.
This is not to say the above view is wrong. I think there are things analysts who can be said to ascribe to it say which are probably true. But the conclusion reached is unsupported by evidence and likely will be even if the eventual outcome is what they predict.
The Two Sides
I think it is important to draw a distinction here between analysts, by whom I mean those who generally work on campaigns, data analysis, etc and journalists who are assigned to cover stories for the media. The latter, while very cautious after 2017, and often guarding their words with the concession that “Virginia is a blue state,” “Joe Biden won it by 10%”, “Glenn Youngkin still has an uphill climb” are clearly approaching the race from a narrative perspective in which discontent with Joe Biden nationally and a suburban revolt against radicalization in the schools is fueling a suburban revolt against Democrats. Many will just come right out and say that they think Youngkin is winning.
By contrast, analysts who focus on numbers, not just in Virginia, but nationally and around the world tended to find in 2017 a vindication of what they always believed. Namely, that fundamentals, demographics and trends, matter more than events. Even 2020, where covid upended the landscape, and Donald Trump defied predictions of a landslide loss to come within a hair’s breadth of reelection, powered by historic gains among non-white voters, is now factored into this analysis despite most of those pushing it having been very wrong in November 2020. Their error was in viewing voting as a matter of demographics, but in misjudging how demographics would vote. With elections throughout the Western world increasingly turning on culture, and voter choice being correlated with education, of course Hispanic and white voters of otherwise indistinguishable background would begin voting similarly.
Vindicating this analysis are the results in California where college educated whites did not budge at all from 2020. Despite predictions of tax/lockdown driven revolts by angry well off voters, Republican Orange County voted No on the recall. If anything, Asian Americans with degrees trended leftward.
This is important because Virginia is far more Orange County and California than it is Texas or Florida. Hispanics are a small part of the population. Asians, at almost 9%, make up a steadily increasing share, and the DC area is dominated by college educated professionals many from other parts of the country. They not only have no historical attachment to the shibboleths of Virginia history – hence would be unlikely to be moved by the Robert E Lee statue, but are actively hostile to those who do value that stuff, seeing it as an effort to make them feel like outsiders. In fairness to them, the last gasps of Republican rule in Northern Virginia counties sometimes resorted to hard-line culture war to rally their voters against their opponents who they painted as interlocuters. That meant the Wisconsin born Prince William County Executive, Corey Stewart, playing up his attachment to the Confederate flag on his way to a crushing defeat in the 2018 Senate Race.
Prince William County, which Stewart presided over until 2019, when he was replaced by the first Democratic county executive, has shown a steady Democratic trend representative of the region.
Loudoun for what it is worth:
That Stewart continued to rule until 2019 could be seen as a sign of residual Republican strength. But electoral analysts who dig deeper will pay attention to the fact that Republicans went from 6/8 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates from Prince William County in 2015 to one in 2017 and zero in 2019. That is the sort of trend which seems unlikely to be reversed.
Prince William is not atypical of Northern Virginia local governments, and Stewart not atypical of the type of Republican who continued to dominate local government outside of the Beltway. Ken Cuccinelli represented part of Fairfax county in the State Senate before being elected Attorney General in 2009, while Richard “Dick” Black, and outspoken conservative who compared polygamy favorably to homosexuality, and praised Syrian President Bashir Assad, represented Loudoun and Prince William in the Senate until January 2020.
Outside of inner Fairfax, where former Congressman Tom Davis and his wife, a former state senator ran a moderate political machine, and Frank Wolf'/Barbara Comstock’s the moderates were largely relegated to federal politics. Local power was in the hand of Republicans who heavily identified with cultural issues as a matter of differentiation. If your voter base generally is made of long-time VA residents or those who see themselves as southern, and your opponents voters are made up either of newcomers or individuals who see “southern” cultural ideas as bad, then you are going to play that up. Hence as Democrats gained strength at the federal level, local Republicans did not moderate like their federal counterparts, but went in the opposite direction. This is important context for understanding why the eventual Democratic takeover led to such a revolutionary overturning of everything - statues, street names, staffing, curriculum. It was not a shift of power from moderate professional Republicans to moderate, professional Democrats but from culture warriors waiving Confederate flags to culture warriors hanging Black Lives Matter posters in government offices.
Some observers, though not enough journalists or analysts might note that the Democratic takeover of local government in much of Northern Virginia only occurred in 2019. And the current backlash against school districts in the region correlates exactly with the first Democratic controlled school boards in the history of the counties. Of course there would be changes in the administration of education following a partisan change-over, and of course when the differences between parties are not policy alone, but cultural it would be wider. Democrats in Prince William/Loudoun are not southerners. They see themselves as part of the “Accela Corridor” with New York, Philadelphia and DC. The Republicans they ousted saw themselves as southerners. So when it comes to the Civil War and historiography, school boards whose ancestors identified with the Confederacy were replaced by ones who could no have imagined anyone not supporting the Union. That was a cultural revolution so of course the backlash followed.
This local context is I feel missed by the narrative campaigners. They begin their coverage in 2020 or 2021, ignoring that the people protesting were those who had been in power locally forever. This is their first time out of power, and they are being defined out of existence in their own communities. If you viewed yourself as a Virginian and Southerner, not only have the schools been taken over by your political opponents, but by political opponents who view themselves as neither Southern, nor in your view Virginian and furthermore, view both of those identities as morally and historically wrong. They have now not just ousted you from power, but are teaching your children in your schools with your tax dollars that YOUR identity is wrong. Which in turn implies that the values you taught, and lessons you promoted during your rule were racist.
That is the “Anti-CRT” argument stripped of caricature. The Right and too many in the media buy that something is occurring out of the blue and radical. The Left rejects that anything radical is going on. But something radical is happening, but it makes perfect sense, it is not pushed by a small clique but by a majority of voters in Northern Virginia.
Anyone who paid attention in 2017 could be forgiven for feeling a bit of déjà vu when it comes to national coverage of “Democrats” and “independents” in Northern Virginia turning on the Democratic party over some hot button cultural issue no one had heard of prior to the campaign. And in all honesty, aspects of the CRT protests became almost cringe-level embarrassing in the late spring as unemployed GOP staffers began using their connections to get themselves on TV as the faces of an angry parental movement. Watching some of those who showed up on Fox, concluding the whole thing was astroturfed would be a legitimate view.
A legitimate view, but perhaps not a complete one. Because even if some of those who tried to ride the protests to fame and prominence were astroturfing it, they were doing so because they had discovered a real movement. Formerly liberal journalists like Bari Weiss have spent the last year chronicling the absurdities which invaded elite private schools in Manhattan following the George Floyd protests, as America’s (largely white) elite tried to confront entrenched inequality, both racial and economic, with almost clownish virtue signaling.
As someone who entered academia for a PHD, I will be the last person to deny the dominance of identity politics, or its total weaponization to exclude candidates from positions on the basis of race, gender, or politics. It is toxic. And it is spreading to corporate HR departments, professional associations and the schools. And as I will show later it is happening in Northern Virginia as it is happening everywhere the type of individual who attends elite academic institutions or is part of professional associations tends to send their kids to school.
Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William are as close as you will get to the demographic of those elite Manhattan schools as you can find anywhere other than perhaps suburban Boston. And it would be shocking if the sort of younger, progressive professionals, motivated by the campaign against Donald Trump in 2020, the BLM protests, and tensions created by Covid lockdowns had not begun pressuring the NVA schools to transform themselves in imitations of America’s most elite private schools.
This is what Conservatives miss. What they term “CRT” was not forced onto schools by a cabal of academics and school board deep staters. It was something parents who paid $60,000 or more a year demanded of the private schools they paid tuition at, and parents who paid $1m for houses in elite public school districts demanded their schools follow suit. Was the motivation ideological? Perhaps. For some. For others it was likely class signaling. “Wokeness” especially on racial matters, was, post-George Floyd, a matter of class signaling. It is not a coincidence that the two issues most at stake in Loudon schools, transgender student policy and race, are both the issues most important to liberal white parents.
Therefore Conservatives are wrong to portray this conflict as “parents v. schoolboards”. School boards did not push the sort of stuff that is being termed “CRT”. Parents did. The culture war is two sets of parents against each other. And that is why the issue was never going to produce the decisive win Conservatives thought because both sides involve parents trying to control the schools. And McAuliffe, in his attacks on parents dictating curriculum, could just as easily have been talking about the “Woke” parents pushing the objectionable reforms as about the Conservatives protesting.
But this does not mean the fight is not real. There is a war going on. And that war is between left-wing parents and old-style Conservatives. Yet if that was the entire conflict, given these areas voted 65% for Joe Biden, the conflict would be over. And that is why if that was all it was, and Conservatives were right about the nature of the war, Liberals would be right about its outcome. “Conservatives” of any stripe are a minority, and would lose.
But there are non combatants, and if there is a story of the culture wars over the last 18 months, it is that the non combatants, despite historically having sided with the left, and holding views on policy closer to the left – often favoring legal abortion, same-sex marriage – have tended to split more evenly than would be expected or even come down on the rightwing side.
The people who have led the fight against this sort of “woke” invasion of academia have all been Democrats. Those who fought to preserve exam schools in NYC were Democrats. A Constitutional Amendment which would have repealed the 1996 ban on Affirmative Action for state universities failed in California 57-43 even as Joe Biden won 64-35. The evidence is that a large number of Democratic voters do not like this stuff, and when given the chance will vote against it.
Hence the idea that all Democrats, or even most Democratic voters in Northern Virginia like the things being tarred as “CRT” defies common sense. Given the close identification of Northern Virginia Democrats with the public school system, the major culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s pitted home-schooling, Evangelical Christian Republicans against public school supporting Democrats, an assault on the integrity of the system must grate.
I therefore suspect that the actual question is not whether these issues and controversies are real. It would be illogical to think they are real everywhere else in the country and world, but somehow not in Northern Virginia. Both the British Labour and Liberal Democratic parties are currently enmeshed in disputes over Transgender policy. It would be silly to think issues centrist and center-left parties in the UK, much less the UK Greens cannot resolve, would not also be an issue in Virginia. Pretending not just that no one who isn’t a partisan cares about issues like that, or curriculum or statutes raises the question of just who cared enough to make those changes in the first place? And in that case, Democrats have no better answer than Republicans. Because if it is not parents, then it has to be some shadowy cabal of officials.
Does this mean they will vote Republican? Here I think there is myopia too. Democrats deny these voters will feel any reason to. Many Republicans, however, have a blind spot for why many voters may not want to. A common refrain is that Glenn Younkin, the former CEO of Carlyle is a moderate in the vein of Mitt Romney. He can’t be that scary.
The thing Democrats need to realize, however, is that Youngkin does not need to win these voters. He needs to make inroads. And one thing the education issue is demonstrating is that the Democratic coalition in Northern Virginia was very much a negative one. While there were two cultural-identity based groups, the Democratic margins in federal elections were buffeted by those who were opposed to specific GOP policies, but not onboard with the Democratic vision for local government.
This is important. Because if the backlash is not solely about what Democrats are doing in local government, and partially merely the fact that they are there, they are doing things and they are just as ideological driven as what the GOP did. And if one can argue that the presence of flags, whether American or BLM or LGBT or what have you are purely symbolic politics designed to irritate your opponents, and much the same can be said about curriculum about race, there are substantive decisions going on as well.
The issue of selective admissions and Advanced Placement courses are far more substantial issues, and have a much greater impact on non-ideological parents than much of what the Stewarts of the world did. It is possible that even if Democrats argue “both sides-ism” at the culture war stuff while claiming to be on the side of the angels of progress, that some of the things they are doing will annoy certain groups more.
Those defections, if they take place will be on the margins. And here I think is where the GOP erred. Because the GOP is not offering an alternative vision. It is attacking what the Democrats are doing, but Youngkin has been fearful in offering a clear alternative. I suspect this because a majority of Republican voters in NoVA do desire a restoration of the old order, but an overwhelming majority of voters do not. The problem is that by not specifying any sort of third way which is neither Corey Stewart nor whatever is going on now in Loudoun, he has allowed Democrats to claim the vote is a choice between Stewartism or the devil they have.
One of the major trends with the movement of college-graduates away from the populist right has not been policy, how much of what Donald Trump was assailed for was not in fact to the left of what Mitt Romney ran on? Instead it is their unwillingness to be in a coalition that they are not in charge of. And the Pro-Life issue for many of them has become the “test” of whether a GOP candidate is loyal to them or “those other folks.” Charlie Baker and Larry Hogan passed this test. It was not their lack of fealty to Trump, but that they swore fealty to this sort of demographic. If this voter is turning on Democrats over education, it is because Democrats no longer owe fealty to them, the rightful owners of American liberalism, but to a different rabble. And while Glenn Youngkin is hardly part of any sort of rabble, and definitely is right to point out that Democrats are in thrall to a rabble, he has refused to break or repudiate his own.
I may be wrong. I am not one of these voters in Virginia. My family and relatives are however. And my impression is Youngkin did not need to be Pro-Choice to break through with these voters. He did not need to perform a same-sex wedding. He did not need to repudiate Donald Trump openly, and that might have been unhelpful. But he did probably need to do at least one of those things. Not because they matter substantively at all. They don’t. But rather because symbolically they would have functioned as an act of fealty.
Had Youngkin done so, I think the floodgates would have opened and we would be looking at a potential Maryland 2014. But they did not, which means this third world does not exist.