One major political theme the last few years has been disagreement over the proper extent of local control. Between local mask restrictions, school board policies about critical race theory, and debates over the federal government’s role in containing COVID-19, the question of how much sovereignty local governments ought to have has been undergirding many of political conversations. With Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial election, energized by promises to return educational control to parents and school boards, conversation about “localism” is once again a mainstream topic.
Localists like Youngkin believe that with complex and sensitive political issues—like the ones that involve education—decisions should be relegated to the lowest level of power: parents and school boards. This infuriates many progressives, who believe that the faulty decision-making of uninformed parents will have such a detrimental impact on children that these decisions should be left to more informed “experts” that promulgate the right policy.
Progressives are right about one thing: questions about education are important, and deserve weighty consideration. One recent example is the McMinn school district “Maus” controversy. In this instance, a school district voted to remove the graphic novel “Maus” from its curriculum. Maus is an allegorical retelling of the Nazi rise to power and the Holocaust with cats acting as the Germans and mice the victims of the German slaughter. It was removed due to what the school board deemed, “inappropriate content, including swear words, nudity, and depiction of suicide.”
This immediately caused many across the Twitter-sphere to erupt in anger against what they considered the “banning” of a book meant to elucidate to children the horror of the Holocaust in a way that captures the violence and terror without disturbing children with real pictures and videos of the actual concentration camps. If a book with cats and mice was too graphic for kids to read, how can kids learn about the Holocaust?
This is a difficult question with no easy answers. On one hand, one can understand the desire to shelter children from graphic imagery and language until they are at a more proper age. On the contrary, one can also understand the argument that we live in a graphic world, and that sheltering kids from that reality increases the likelihood that such events could reoccur.
It is questions like this that show why localism is essential for dealing with complex and controversial issues. The question of what content is appropriate for children has as many different answers as there are people in America. Not all experts can create a consensus that would satisfy every parent. The best solution is to allow local communities to make the decisions that they think best, regardless of the national narrative.
The hurdle that many politicians and elites have is a fundamental distrust in the ability of Americans to make correct decisions. Matt Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox and avowed progressive, commented that the problem with school boards like McMinn was that school board members are generally “extremely stupid.” This is coming from a progressive who has criticized institutions like the U.S. Senate for not being democratic enough. Why would someone who thinks that the people aren’t smart enough to decide what their kids should be reading in school want the people to make legislative decisions on a national scale?
This is the contradiction that lies in the heart of the progressive view.
Progressives will often speak highly of the wisdom of “the people” and insinuate that any institution standing in the way of the people’s will being electorally manifested, such as the Senate or the Electoral College, must be abolished so that the voters can fix the country. What the “Maus” case and Yglesias’ reaction show is that the progressive rhetoric about the people is more of an attempt to brand themselves as champions of the people then it is a genuine belief in the people’s wisdom. They do not think that common people are capable of making good decisions in their own lives, but they do believe that they will vote for progressive politicians who will rule as paternalistic technocrats, making all the right decisions for them.
This contradiction between what progressives say they believe about people and what they actually believe undercuts their objections to local policies. If Americans cannot be trusted to make decisions about their own communities, then they certainly shouldn’t have a say in national politics. One cannot have it both ways. Progressives need to choose between believing in Americans’ right to self-rule or abandoning the democratic ideal of self-government.
