Last week saw the start of “a cultural rebellion within the Democratic Party”, says Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. In a special “recall” election, three members of San Francisco’s school board were unceremoniously ousted in “landslide” votes. Their crime, in one of the most liberal cities in one of America’s most liberal states? Being too woke. Instead of rushing to reopen classrooms after lockdown, they were busy looking into whether they should rename schools named after previously respectable figures like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. Not only that, they then tried to force an academically elite public high school to admit students based on a lottery rather than testing or grades. Parents “exploded”, San Francisco “rose up” – and the progressive officials were booted out.
This was much more than just a local issue. “It was a battle in the Democratic Party’s civil war between liberals and the progressive left.” Parents across the country are tired of woke dogma – voters in usually blue Virginia elected a Republican governor in November, in part to prevent the left’s beloved Critical Race Theory taking hold in schools. Democratic leaders want to wait until the party “loses big” in this year’s midterms before they “crack down” on their progressive wing. But as San Francisco showed, ordinary Democrats “aren’t waiting for permission. They are taking a stick to wokeness whether the party’s leaders do or not.”