EDITORIAL: Woke politics crashes and burns once again

After Democrats woefully underperformed in the 2020 congressional elections, party moderates shot warning flares to highlight the voter toxicity of “defund the police” and other woke extremism. But the message fell on deaf ears, and now Democrats have again paid the price for playing footsie with radical progressives.

On Tuesday, voters in San Francisco — San Francisco! — recalled three school board members who unrepentantly elevated woke politics above the children they were elected to serve. Board President Gabriela Lopez, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Alison Collins were overwhelmingly shown the door, none garnering more than 28 percent support.

The trio helped constitute a faction on the board that kowtowed to the teachers’ unions and kept San Francisco schools closed well into 2021, long after campuses in many states, including Nevada, had at least partially reopened. But while board members couldn’t be bothered to get kids back to school, they had oodles of time to concoct a harebrained woke scheme to rename 44 district campuses, including those that honored George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

This is the same mindset that produces high school students who can’t calculate their times tables or construct a coherent paragraph but are well-versed in “systemic” discrimination. “It was like you have this house on fire, and they’re basically painting the front door,” Autumn Looijen, one of the recall organizers, told Reason this week.

The San Francisco vote comes just three months after Republican Glenn Youngkin unexpectedly defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race. Polls showed that parents irate over coronavirus school closures and arrogant elitist attitudes about curriculum were a significant bloc for Mr. Youngkin. It didn’t help that during a debate Mr. McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they teach.”

It’s more than a simple perception that progressive extremists are in another universe when it comes to the concerns of many Americans. Beyond the school closures and historical vandalism, look no further than “defund the police.” The proposal remains wildly unpopular even in minority communities, and Democrats have spent a year trying to rinse themselves of the stink.

“Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something,” former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville told PBS in November. “I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. I mean that — people see that.”

Republicans are taking advantage of this. No surprise. Yet many of the Democratic Party’s high-profile progressives argue that moderation is what threatens their electoral fortunes. Is anybody still buying that bilge? After all, when you’ve gone too far in San Francisco …