This week, my local school board voted on a final appeal by a very small group of people in my district to ban five books. The school board used this special working group meetings to act more like a book group than a policy and oversight board, which troubled me. But at the the end of the discussion of each book, they voted not to ban it from the classroom or the libraries of the town.
(Toni Morrison will not be banned, here. Books about coming out as gay will not be banned here. Sex education reference books will not be banned, here. Book that display honest and truthful depictions of the teen experience will not be banner, here.)
Yes, that is a victory. But it is a battle that should not have to be fought.
You see, we had a school board election a couple of years ago in which the candidates newly nominated by the recently radicalized/trumpified local Republican committee—which included none of the Republican incumbents—all lost, and lost badly. They lost even though by local regulation, no single party can hold more than a bare majority of seats on the school board.
Which means that the Trump-Republican candidates got the GOP line on the ballot and the GOP incumbents had to run as independents. And the crazies still lost 2-to1. I do not mean that they only got 1/3 of the the school board; I mean that their candidates only got 1/3 of the vote. And I’d bet serious money that most of that was simply habitual supporters of GOP candidates, as opposed to voters who understood what they were running on.
These losers simply do not accept that they have lost. The community heard what they have to say about these values that they wish to rule by, and the community turned them down decisively. The community does not believe that educators are groomers or that our public schools are at threat to children or families.
I wish that these kind of refusal to accept that they have not convinced anyone was limited to this district. Unfortunately, we see the losers on bigger stage than this. Today, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case in which these same sorts of people want private businesses who do not want to be associated with their garbage to be forced to publish it, bearing whatever it costs them. Freedom of association and freedom of expression be damned!
As Twitter (now X) makes more room for this garbage on its own platform, advertisers are running away. The market speaks.
But these losers—in elections and in the market—simply refuse to listen. They want to force their ideology on others, abandoning any respect for democracy or markets.
It is bad enough that their ideas are odious, grounded in fantasies and other untruths, based on a need to hate and demean others, theocracy and quite often naked racism. No, that’s not enough. They also refuse to accept when they have lost or adjust their goals—or even their tactics—for that reality.
I do not know how to live in a society with people like that. I just don’t.