Greg Sargent has some news for Democrats:
As Democrats debate the GOP’s all-culture-war-all-the-time campaign strategy, here’s a maxim worth remembering: If you’re wasting political bandwidth denying lies about yourselves, you’re losing.
A new CBS News poll offers data that should prod Democrats into rethinking these culture-war battles. It finds that surprisingly large majorities oppose banning books on history or race — and importantly, this is partly because teaching about our racial past makes students more understanding of others’ historical experiences.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.
The poll finds that 83 percent of Americans say books should never be banned for criticizing U.S. history; 85 percent oppose banning them for airing ideas you disagree with; and 87 percent oppose banning them for discussing race or depicting slavery.
What’s more, 76 percent of Americans say schools should be allowed to teach ideas and historical events that “might make some students uncomfortable.” And 68 percent say such teachings make people more understanding of what others went through, while 58 percent believe racism is still a serious problem today.
Finally, 66 percent say public schools either teach too little about the history of Black Americans (42 percent) or teach the right amount (24 percent). Yet 59 percent say we’ve made “a lot of real progress getting rid of racial discrimination” since the 1960s.
This hints at a way forward for Democrats. Notably, large majorities think both that we’ve made a good deal of racial progress and that we should be forthrightly confronting hard racial truths about our past and present, even if it makes students uncomfortable.
That shouldn’t be too hard a balance to strike. But it’s exactly the balance that some Republicans who seek to restrict teaching about race seek to remove from the agenda entirely.
Democrats have got to stop running from these culture war issues and face them. There is a sub-group of right wing activists who are making a lot of noise. But they aren’t representative of the country. There is a common sense approach to most of these issues if Democratic politicians would just stop being so spooked by the screaming right wing fringe. They need to recognize this and act accordingly.