The politics of loud and obnoxious
Jamelle Bouie turns a phrase that distills the loud-and-belligerant’s approach to politics: the heckler’s veto.
From Clear Skies to Healthy Forests and beyond, American conservatives have displayed a knack for couching objectionable legislation in unobjectionable terms. When Democrats were 19th-century America’s conservative party, they framed their defense of slavery as “states’ rights” — “pro-slavery” being too gauche even for Southern slave owners.
MAGA Republicans’ 21st-century enthusiasm is for “parents’ rights,” a catchall for “pro-book-banning,” “pro-censorship,” and “pro-discrimination.” Particularly in Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida-based, freedom-frosted fascism incubator. Envious GOP governors in Texas and Virginia nip at his heels.
Bouie explains:
The reality of the “parents’ rights” movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community. It is, in essence, an institutionalization of the heckler’s veto, in which a single parent — or any individual, really — can remove hundreds of books or shut down lessons on the basis of the political discomfort they feel. “Parents’ rights,” in other words, is when some parents have the right to dominate all the others.
Jim Crow practices secured the blessings of white dominance over former slaves for 100 years. The taste for dominance in Jesus’ name over racial, ethnic, religious, and other disfavored monorities never worked its way out of much of American culture. It’s where the phrase “dominant culture” gets its bite, after all.
And, of course, the point of this movement — the point of creating this state-sanctioned heckler’s veto — is to undermine public education through a thousand little cuts, each meant to weaken public support for teachers and public schools, and to open the floodgates to policies that siphon funds and resources from public institutions and pumps them into private ones. The Texas bill I mentioned, for instance, would give taxpayer dollars to parents who chose to opt out of public schools for private schools or even home-schooling.
The culture war that conservatives are currently waging over education is, like the culture wars in other areas of American society, a cover for a more material and ideological agenda. The screaming over “wokeness” and “D.E.I.” is just another Trojan horse for a relentless effort to dismantle a pillar of American democracy that, for all of its flaws, is still one of the country’s most powerful engines for economic and social mobility.
Ultimately, then, the “parents’ rights” movement is not about parents at all; it’s about whether this country will continue to strive for a more equitable and democratic system of education, or whether we’ll let a reactionary minority drag us as far from that goal as possible, in favor of something even more unequal and hierarchical than what we already have.
Team Parents’ Rights would like that just fine.