…and how self-styled supporters of “democracy” need to ask if they are really committed to representative government — or just raw power.
by SHAUN KENNEY
Columnist
Spotsylvania County elected four conservatives to the school board after a multi-decade reign of arrogance and heavy-handedness. Imperious, backed by an all-powerful public education lobby and soaked in cash, the Spotsylvania County Public Schools behaved more like a fief than a school district.
Yet for the first time in decades, conservatives — tired of being locked out and mocked by public servants — made the decision to mobilize new leadership with a vision more in line with the views of the community and carried the day in an election of their peers.
For this victory, they have been mercilessly attacked from within.
At first, the guns were turned on the firing of “Mr. Baker” — and how embarrassing for Spotsylvania County as the bureaucracy itself attempted to mobilize public support through yard signs and protests. Nothing is more limp and anodyne than astroturf. Nevertheless, they persisted. Nevertheless, the new conservative majority got to work, bringing in new leadership more reflective of their views and aspirations — as elections ought.
Yet as the new board began making its appointments and reshaping the culture, it slowly and then quickly dawned on the bureaucracy itself what was happening — the conservatives were using precisely the same tools the left had been weaponizing against them for decades.
That is when the central nervous system reacted in predictable fashion.
Don’t Democracies Respect the Will of the People?
When Democrats use the term “democracy” they don’t mean it in the sense of a political process, but rather a political religion. Democracy isn’t a method but rather a living thing that is the body politic — us.
To be a Democrat is to believe in democracy and progress as the highest good; these public works — education, academia, transportation, social services, libraries — these are the sinews of this democracy, and if any part of the body politic is under threat, then the central nervous system of this body flings itself into action until the pain goes away.
The problem is that where Democrats see the functions of government as society, Republicans make a division between government and society. Society existed long before big government through our families, churches, public houses, and fraternal organizations. Progress — that fallible god — wasn’t always very kind as in marched through the old institutions and replaced them with new ones. Penicillin and electricity are great; eugenics and segregation not so much.
Eric Hoffer once noted that every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
Public education was a tremendous achievement from the time of Thomas Jefferson through the desegregation era and into the present day. Yet like all great ideas and causes, has more of the feeling of a jobs factory than ideas factory — with the Virginia Education Association behaving more like mob enforcers than the professional’s organization it was 50 years ago.
When the VEA is not in power? There’s a playbook for that.
Question Until It Fails Isn’t Fair Play
What followed next was a method known as “Question Until It Fails” — pulled out of the old AFL-CIO Playbook of the 1950s and 1960s and used and updated by the VEA redshirts. No longer do we have to respect the democratic will of our neighbors, a strategy would now be imposed:
Disrupt every school board meeting.
Question every school board decision.
Create and build a climate of mistrust and fear.
Use the media to whip up and magnify public sentiment.
Admit no defeats; claim every victory.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and then destroy it.
Thus the conservative majority on the Spotsylvania School Board found itself under siege, albeit with a multi-million dollar school apparatus at their back.
True, the present majority has not precisely done the best job of observing Roberts Rules of Order. Nor has the book burning crusade done members any favors, with 86% of Virginians thinking the one-woman obsession with smut to be flat out weird and wholly ignorant of the works of Chaucer — or as she spells it, “Chauser” (I have receipts).
Yet there is something terribly un-democratic about what these people are doing to our duly elected public officials, and I think we know it at core.
What Republicans see — and frankly, resent — are four elected officials prevented from governing by a controlled but angry mob that uses the word “democracy” but really means stopping conservatives from governing at all.
What Democrats most likely see is a local school board taken hostage by the Christian Taliban — temporarily at least — where the solemn duty of any true defender of democracy is to keep them from destroying the jobs factory the sinews of progress.
Don’t Pretend at Democracy While Violating Democratic Values
Of course, a rock solid argument could be made that it was the intent of the Virginia General Assembly to allow local school boards to preside over a system where charter and public alternatives could co-exist. Not only have these alternatives been stifled, but they are also deemed enemies of democracy and progress.
Further arguments could be made that parental choice is the best path forward to revolutionizing and modernizing our 19th century approach to education. Not only has this alternative been stifled — and presented by none other than that arch conservative villain former Florida Governor Jeb Bush — but they are deemed enemies of democracy and progress.
Enemies. Not alternatives — but enemies.
Of course, the problems do not go away. In Spotsylvania, test scores continue to wobble. Yet the same criticism is never turned toward Fredericksburg City Public Schools for coming out of the same pandemic and similar struggles — and without the additional problems of fighting a politically-driven insurgency. Some might even argue that the dip reflects a thousand self-inflicted wounds designed to embarrass the administration. Prove me wrong.
Which raises the even more pointed question for careful observers of le affaire Spotsylvania — do they really hold the conservative majority in such contempt that they are willing to sacrifice student performance just to make the point?
Spotsylvania’s School Board Has the Right to Govern
With all of this, I add several caveats.
I will not sit and make apologies for banning books. Nor will I make apologies for the heavy-handed refusals to engage local and state media in Spotsylvania. Nor can I explain why math teachers are being told to inform parents in case there is any sexual content in the classroom. Nor can I defend the total lack of decorum in their meetings.
Mark Taylor has been invited for some Q&A on The New Dominion Podcast for months after his “anytime, anywhere” pledge.
Folks deserve better.
Yet on the balance, Spotsylvania voters made a decision not to repeat Loudoun’s mistakes on questions such as enforced transgender pronouns, Critical Race Theory, an increased emphasis on test scores and the introduction of just a smidge of competition to the government-run monopoly on education — giving parents the voice they had been denied for so very long.
There is nothing extreme or extraordinary about these requests or policy decisions. Nor is there anything extreme in a parent asking what their children are reading or learning in the classroom. Nor is there anything extreme about parents objecting to sexualized profanity masquerading as literature in public schools. Nor is there anything extreme in asking whether or not public education could withstand a little bit of competition from charter schools. If the product is so good, why fear challenges or change?
Yet thus far, the school system itself continues to resist and is refusing to even entertain the word reform — all in the name of so-called democracy. The reason? Because it was never about democracy or even education. Just power.
Yet if this isn’t just about power, and it really is about education as a vocation, then maybe — just maybe — Democrats need to start listening to the very real concerns of parents and the conservative right. Don’t bring in January 6th — that has nothing to do with the question at hand and is a dodge at best. Ask yourselves whether if Republicans behaved likewise in local government, interrupting meetings and even reducing the effectiveness of the school district, would it be democracy? Or insurrection?
Don’t Become the Monster You Seek to Destroy
Spotsylvania Republicans have a point in all of this — respect it.
The school board in Spotsylvania has a right to succeed or fail on their own merits rather than through acts of deliberate and orchestrated sabotage — accept it.
Yet for my friends on the left, do not pretend to the values of democracy while actively breaking its spirit. Do not condemn insurrectionists while actively undermining democracy back home. And for the love of God, quit hating us for disagreeing with you. It’s gauche, and worst of all the very monster — intolerance — you claim to oppose.
Otherwise, we can simply admit this is all about power and come up with new ways to select local representatives other than elections. Trial by combat? Baseball bats at dawn? Rock, Paper, Scissors best 2 out of 3? Maybe we can bring back jousting and let God (or Gaia — I’m open minded) determine the right?
I, too, am a big fan of process and the civil spirit. Yet if we cannot reason together and accept when we have lost elections, then what’s left?
By the way — if you’re one of my Democratic friends, I still love you and will even buy you a beer. Same is true with my Republican friends (maybe a whiskey). But as for the rhetoric, as my father used to remind me, God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason.
More listening, less talking.
Whiskey helps.
New Dominion Podcast
We have had tremendous response to Michael Bush’s appearance on the New Dominion Podcast. If you missed it yesterday, listen to an incredibly talented young man at his best by skipping to the 35:45 and 40:00 mark. Thank you, Ms. Foreman!
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Sorry, no matter how much noise dissenters make, a Board that has a solid majority voting block only has itself to blame when they can’t get things done.
On that I think we can all agree. Yet there is a certain hamstringing that seems to happen when conservatives are in charge that the left just doesn’t seem to have to wrangle with when they have majorities.
The old line from the War College was “culture commands” — but perhaps you are right: it’s a constant and not a variable, and whining about it doesn’t change the math (or the headwinds).
Fair point indeed, Kassie.
Happily, I have little to do with Spotsy schools. What little I have to judge the matter on is the words of Mr Davis vs those of Mr Kenney.
Having read both, what I do note is that Mr Davis appears to be much more able to provide facts regarding what he claims and what he concludes. Whereas Mr Kenney appears to provide multiple suppositions and conclusions with few specifics to back them.
In that Mr Davis provides clear examples of not only the public being closed out of discussions regarding policies, but even minority members of the school board being equally shut out.
What Mr Kenney blithely skims over with 1 sentence, halfway into his apologetica as “True, the present majority has not precisely done the best job of observing Roberts Rules of Order. ” – I would posit is much more imperious and acting more like a “fief than a school district” than any complaints, comments, challenges lawfully provided by those who oppose or question a 1 vote majority on a school board who, by that one vote – one person out of 7, sees themselves as mandated to do as they please without notice, debate, or challenge.
What could be more undemocratic?
And for someone who proclaimed just yesterday about the problem’s of incivility impeding discourse, he sure does throw around terms like “mob, arrogance, imperious, mob enforcers, etc.” If that isn’t polite and welcoming to discourse, I don’t know what is. Not so sure he does, either.
And even he is apparently too revulsed by many of this board’s partisan and egregious actions to defend all of them.
The book bannings, refusal to account to the public, nor address grievances. I guess that’s the local equivalent of fair and balanced. Yet he still demands that they be obeyed without question. That their rightness is unquestioned despite an absence of facts backing his claims.
For those who claim they believe to the bottom of their soul in limited government, doesn’t seem to apply when they get in charge, does it? Then every standard, promise, courtesy is abandoned in a glut of expediency.
Don’t believe me?
Ask Judge Garland. Oh, you can’t. Trust Roe v Wade as settled law. That’s right, you can’t – ask Judge Kavanaugh. That you can do. Or you can just read the edicts from Superintendent Taylor. Nothing could be clearer examples of imperiousness posing as sound governance.
And yet, we are supposed to abandon generations of professional standards, accountability, or the wisdom of those in the trenches, doing the work that most parents choose not to, or cannot do as well, if at all – and blindly and on faith turn over the core education of our children – because Betsy Davos or some anonymous billionaire in Texas supports such stuff?
No thanks. Hope Spotsy gets this sorted out. They needlessly suffer, otherwise.
Like I said, long on claims, short on facts, and shorter still on sound reasoning.
Good thing I ain’t grading it.
Though it looks like the parents in Spotsy would be wise to do so.
“…long on claims, short on facts, and shorter still on sound reasoning.”
Man, projection really is a thing — isn’t it?
Really? How so?
How so what?