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No one has more reason to be shocked by the results of last week’s San Francisco recall election than the three school-board members whom voters threw over the side. The vote totals to kick them off the progressive island were 72%, 75% and 79%.
Commentaries by Democrats are now emerging to argue the party will be wiped out in November’s midterm elections unless its candidates distance themselves from the progressives. As a long-ago boss of mine might have said as he prowled the loading dock: These Democrats are a day late and a dollar short.
With readers’ indulgence, I’d like to play the devil’s advocate for the three card-carrying San Francisco progressives. Across the whole landscape of American politics the past five years and more, what evidence has there been that influential Democrats were willing to break with the party’s left? Nearly none.
Take cancel culture. The destruction of careers, businesses and reputations for giving offense to the new woke orthodoxies has been running for at least eight years. It is one of the worst phenomena the American left has ever produced, not least in San Francisco.
Two years ago, a respected senior curator of American art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was forced out for saying something vaguely favorable about “white artists.” An internal museum-staff petition said his removal “is nonnegotiable.” His colleagues around the art world pulled the curtains and said nothing.
Recall last year’s firing of the docents at the Chicago Art Institute for racial reasons. As the late Bob Dole once asked, where was the liberal outrage? How did the default become that only conservatives called out this stuff?
Why shouldn’t the three San Francisco school-board members have thought that erasing the names of Abraham Lincoln or George Washington would be no problem when simultaneously monuments to “racist” presidents and other Americans were torn down all over the country with little liberal resistance, or even with assent?
Presumably the San Francisco school-board members watched or attended the Democratic National Convention in August 2020, where no speaker—not any of the presumed “moderates”—tried to separate the urban protests in May over George Floyd from the store lootings and pitched battles with police.
Defund the police and progressive prosecutors aren’t Republican-concocted “messaging” issues. Where were the liberal critiques arguing for a more common-sense balance between decriminalization and the police function? By the way, those 70%-plus vote totals happened inside the context of San Franciscans living in a city occupied by shoplifters and street people.
Why shouldn’t the San Francisco school-board members have thought they could ignore objecting parents? President Biden himself had their backs. When parents in Loudoun County, Va., noisily objected to their school board imposing progressive racial theories on curriculums, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice sicced the FBI on them.
But here’s the fun part: No Democrat, including the party’s new critics, dissents from the notion that their common cause is protecting “our democracy.” Nancy Pelosi on ABC: “Nothing less is at stake than our democracy.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the New Yorker magazine: “What we risk is having a government that perhaps postures as a democracy, and may try to pretend that it is, but isn’t.”
This is almost wholly about Donald Trump’s clinical obsession that the 2020 election was “rigged.” If that’s the Democratic Party’s unifier, then by all means they should ride the Trump voting-fraud horse until it drops.
History may thank former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for pulling the plug on the Trump Twitter account. With Mr. Trump’s post-midnight tweets no longer blotting out the U.S. political sun, Democrats have to stand before voters with their own policies and behavior. The recall vote in San Francisco was a portent, summed up in this remark to the Washington Post by a recall organizer:
“I’ve always thought of myself as a progressive—until now, recently, when I’m looking at this situation,” said Siva Raj. “I’m shocked—like, how can progressives be for something like this? This is not me. These are not the values that I buy anymore.”
Democratic self-reflection after the startling schools defeat in San Francisco and Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial win in Virginia may reflect the natural ebb and flow of American politics. But it isn’t enough.
The progressive problem is deeper than the Democratic Party’s loss of independents. The left achieved a fundamental ideological transformation that has gone unanswered by liberals for years, starting in the universities. Liberal academics who spoke out were censured by administrators and shunned by colleagues.
Then when novel ideas about identity, race and gender—now being criticized as a liability because they alienate non-base voters—marched toward the country’s cultural and corporate institutions, liberals held the doors open. Coercion had become king.
A midcourse November correction won’t change that. Only a resounding midterm defeat will force a necessary revision of these destructive ideas. The Democrats deserve to lose. They’ve earned it.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
