An old-school conservative goes to a school board training seminar with Awake IL

On September 25th I went to a Leadership Institute training in the west suburbs sponsored by Awake IL, a local group, and Moms For Liberty, a national organization. The Leadership Institute (LI) has been training conservatives how to run for public office since 1979 and boasts 250K alumni, including, as our trainer Charlie O'Neill proudly pointed out, Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz. This particular day-long training was to help local folks run for seats on school boards and understand what's involved in a political campaign, what it takes to win. 

It was all very practical information, some of which can be seen here. If you have any interest in running for office or working on a political campaign at any level, this sort of information is essential and, as the LI trainer and the LI website insist, non-partisan. Very simple, foundational stuff like knowing campaigns are tough--"a contact sport"--but also personal--built from neighbor to neighbor. Knowing who your audience is and how to target them, how to reach them, and how many you need to reach, persuade, and motivate to win. 

Useful for anyone running for office. 

But we were in a room full of "conservatives"--the folks the LI has been training all these years. 

What does "conservative" mean anymore? I know what it used to mean to me. My impeccable conservative credentials include early John Bircher parents, a Hillsdale College degree (complete with Russell Kirk as commencement speaker), and a GOP political activist grandfather. While he didn't necessarily believe in getting a college degree, my grandfather wanted to make sure mine wasn't wasted, and when I graduated, he put me through my paces with a little interview: What is a conservative? he asked. What is the basis of your beliefs? How will conservative principles guide your life? (Comically, in those years I as a Christian had some answers that probably made my grandfather cringe, an old time fierce ex-Baptist for whom religion had little to no place in the GOP, but he listened, in that old-fashioned big tent way.)

So this stuff runs deep with me. Here, in a nutshell, is what "conservative" used to mean to me. [Progressive readers, this section is going to strain your credulity. Just bear with me and try not to guffaw too loudly if you are reading this in public.]

Conservatism meant both a set of beliefs and a set of policy positions derived from those beliefs. The foundational beliefs included, most basically, an understanding of human limitation. Everything else derived from that. The importance of traditions and institutions as a check on poorly-thought-out innovation. That local community was the most important locus of human interaction. That individual autonomy is critical in a free society. That an exterior moral authority, loosely defined, can be a check and balance on injustice, bad laws, bad ideas. That the separation of church and state is fundamental. That truth is based on objective data, not feelings or intuition. That the American Dream still exists. That democracy--government of the people, by the people, and for the people--is this country's most precious gift and inheritance. And finally, slow change is preferable to burning it all down. 

The policy positions derived from those beliefs included being for the expansion of voting rights, expansion of legal immigration, laws that strengthen free markets, and laws that safeguarded individual, family, and local rights. 

I need to pause here to acknowledge that the rhetoric of these beliefs and positions was not reflected in policy. The rhetoric was often used to push opposite policy positions. It took me many years to see that, and more to finally abandon my devotion to the idea that the beliefs I was taught just needed to be "properly" implemented. The right has always contained, and utilized, multitudes, and one of them has always been the one we see in charge today--Christian nationalist semi-fascists, who now have no one pushing back against them, and whose dangerous and decidedly un-conservative notions have won the day completely. 

What do these newly, completely dominant and unchallenged voices advocate now? Autocracy over democracy, with strict limits and controls, including intimidation and use of police, on voting rights. Morality policing based on a very narrow definition of Christianity. Truth solely based on gut feeling and opinion at the expense of all objective data. "Supply side" economics run amok with untaxable billionaire CEOs making exponentially more than ever before at the expense of ordinary workers. A blatant hatred of immigrants. A loud, unconcealed, contemptuous antisemitism. The absolute unimportance of any wider community outside of the individual nuclear family unit. The unimportance of integrity and character in the face of the will to power. The unlimited power potential of humans in establishing a new order of a Christian state, to be  exercised by any means necessary. In this cultural moment, actual traditions (such as the peaceful transition of power) and actual institutions (government at any level, the institutional church, academic institutions) are now all bad. It is now time to burn it all down. 

Conveniently, The Federalist just published a piece outlining all of this and insisting that "conservatism" is dead; it is time for revolution. 

That's my brief summary of what was and is no longer. What prevails today on the right. This is now the entire shape and character of the GOP. 

Our affable LI trainers haven't noticed. Or if they have, they didn't acknowledge the sea changes that have occurred on the right since the LI started training the people for a conservative takeover.

 It's really worked, this effort! These methods have managed to flip entire states, as Jim Reavis, volunteer political organizer helping with the LI training, explained about Arkansas, which he helped switch from blue to red in merely two election cycles, starting with only a handful of local seats. Local, on-the-ground political organization really pays off. Finding money from somewhere, making links with neighboring states, supporting a wide swath of GOP candidates really pays off. It's paid off spectacularly for the right: they now own the Supreme Court and are close to taking over most state-level election processes, guaranteeing GOP winners in every election regardless of voting. After that, the only remaining work is grabbing extremely local power levers such as school board seats. 

To accomplish this requires a certain single mindedness, a certain deep partisanship. The partisanship has to be the only thing that matters if you really want to get this color-flipping done. As Jim repeated a few times for emphasis, "The worst Republican is better than the best Democrat." 

What such a statement does is remind and reinforce that what matters is NOT character, values, or tradition. The only thing that matters is power. And this kind of mantra comes in very handy when what the GOP turns up with at the top of their ticket is the opposite of character and values, or even the opposite of conservative. 

Because of course, Republicans winning is the only important thing. Securing power at all levels regardless of the cost, or even what is gained, or what any of it means anymore. 

But anyway, this is why we were here that day--to learn how to apply these sound principles and take over school boards. 

Reavis's casual dismissal of everything but partisan political power is very apparent in the two organizations that sponsored this training. 

Today's conservatism, expressed by Awake IL and Moms for Liberty, is about partisan power acquisition at all costs. Moms For Liberty, founded days before the Insurrection,  is a national organization well funded by undisclosed donors; they started out in Florida and were immediately understood to be "foot soldiers" in DeSantis' army, and became instant national right wing media darlings. They love military and martial language, proudly and bafflingly calling themselves "war moms." Like Awake IL they trade in a mix of parental anxiety, fear mongering, and lies. Awake IL is a smaller, local group; founded during the pandemic to oppose any and all covid-19 restrictions, the group has moved on to a wide swath of "parents' rights" issues including protesting "critical race theory" in the schools, marching against the sexualization of children in schools,  harassing children's hospitals and school boards, and establishing a pugnacious social media presence. 

Much of what these groups advocate is not based on truth, or principle, or a belief system; but it is based on lies, and requires assenting to lies to participate.

Parents who join might not know this. They might hear the rhetoric about parents' rights and feel that they do in fact want more of a voice in their school district--vis à vis autocratic control. The may see a book like Gender Queer and think they really don't want their child reading that--worrying about the sexualization of children that has long been evident in our consumer culture. They may hear about worrisome trends regarding test scores--and want to know how to change weak curricula. And so they get involved with these dark money-supported national organizations and have little idea of what they're actually involved in, how they're actually being used. 

Here's what they're involved in. 

What Awake IL bases all its work on is claims about public education that are false. All of them. This is not my opinion. The claims they base their organizing on are objectively, verifiably false. 

Awake points to tanking test scores, post pandemic, and blames them alternately on schools being closed (covid-19 mitigation) or schools being open (bad curriculum). They worry and rant about SEL (social/emotional learning) as the Trojan horse that has ushered in uncomfortable talk about racism ("CRT"), inappropriate sex education, and sliding academics as children sit around learning nothing more than how wonderful they are. SEL, I heard over and over from attendees at the LI training, is the reason for tanking test scores. One father told me his kids had conflict resolution for two hours a day; his kids' literacy class had been hijacked by SEL and reading and writing had been supplanted by talking about feelings. He was worried his kids were learning nothing. 

But using SEL as a test-score whipping boy is odd. SEL was introduced into Illinois school curricula in 2003 (as a result of the Illinois Children's Mental Health Act). The only testing apparatus consistently in use since 2003 is the NAEP. Between 2003 and 2019, across the board, NAEP test scores all rose. Illinois 4th and 8th graders in 2019 did everything better than they did in 2003, and everything better than 4th and 8th graders nationally. You can look for yourself here.  

New NAEP scores just came out. This was the first administration of the NAEP since 2019. All US students did not fare well. This could hardly come as a surprise since more than 200,000 children lost a parent or family member, 25 million jobs were lost, and everyone was huddled together at home, with huge swaths of students having only their bed as a space to do zoom school. Many public school districts didn't have the technology for online school. Many families didn't either. That anyone could possibly expect standardized testing to keep improving during a global pandemic strains all logic, rationality, and credulity. But there is something surprising about these results. Test scores were challenged no matter where in the country you were, or what your district was doing. Reopening, unmasking, returning to "normal"? Test scores sank. Maintaining online classes for an extended period? Test scores sank. And every iteration in between. Our kids, at best, were holding steady, treading water, trying to stay afloat. Like everyone else in the U.S. Like everyone else in the world.

The pandemic was hard on routines, structures, habits, families, young children, teens, and teachers, regardless of how and where it was weathered. And the way in which Awake IL uses the fact of the pandemic to push fictions about the damage somehow uniquely inflicted by Democrats is disingenuous at best. And claiming that Illinois' covid-19 mitigations and/or "SEL" caused test scores to plummet is just incorrect. Insisting on it is a lie. 

What about worries over "porn" in school libraries, public libraries, and in Illinois' new sex education standards? Awake IL has posted reams of lessons from this curriculum on their website. I read them all. It took me a while to figure out if they posted this material in order to damn it, or if it was their own alternate lesson plans--that's how far from their characterization this material is. Many of the lessons have been developed in light of Erin's Law, a 2010 law requiring Illinois public schools to provide child sexual abuse prevention education for children in pre-kindergarten through twelfth grades. Speaking as a hyper-prudish Christian Sunday school teacher who did not relish the sex ed piece in my parent job description, I found the lessons to perhaps hit some topics a little earlier than I myself would. But in general these appeared to be data-based lessons that illuminate topics in a healthy way. Furthermore these standards aren't even mandatory. And as to the availability of library books that some families would find objectionable--as a traditional Christian hyper-prude I have to point out the glaringly obvious fact that much, much worse material than Gender Queer is readily and instantly available to all our precious flowers on their phones. School libraries have always handled books for mature readers in different ways, and school librarians certainly know enough not to place such materials in the hands of primary students. (Of course, in CPS, the very idea of a school library with librarians is a fantastical notion with a nostalgic shimmer to it, but that's another story.)

The assumption that teachers, administrators, and staff such as librarians are hell-bent on harming our kids is another lie. We heard more than one person at the training say that not only was SEL destroying our schools, but teachers and administrators were doing this on purpose in order to harm children and make test scores implode. A decades-long evil plot. Children's hospitals that treat gender dysphoria in children are now accused of establishing the "school-to-trans" pipeline for reasons that are unclear--it could be profit, it could be just general malignance and hatred of children and society.  You hear both. 

When this purposeful-harm narrative becomes a base-level assumption, it becomes okay, even necessary, to disrupt and threaten these institutions, especially the leadership. This group of parents--"war moms," remember--makes such imaginatively retributive work a regular part of their actions. During the pandemic they swarmed en masse into locations they found objectionable, unmasked where masks were required. Weeks into Illinois stay at home orders, these people were comparing Pritzker to Nazis. These days they bulk up their actions with members of the Proud Boys and others at private businesses and public spaces alike to decry outrages that aren't real--recently packing the Lincolnwood Library board meeting, for example, to object to drag queen story hours that don't exist. 

When you examine these facts--that what Awake IL says about education is all a lie--you have to look at what remains. Taking away unwarranted concerns about test scores, SEL, parents' rights, and porn, this is what is left: vitriol, threats, and violence directed against LGBTQ+ people, minorities, immigrants, and "globalists" (we all know who they are), nicely illustrated at that Lincolnwood Library board meeting, which devolved into a shouting match where within short order, "Gay people are mentally ill!" was among the loudest proclamations. 

It's interesting to pause a moment and consider a repeated admonition made by our Leadership Institute trainers: "Be nice." Along the lines of catching more flies with honey, it's true, as a campaign dictum it does work better, or did in years past, to be publicly nice rather than publicly rude. This had to be news to the Awake IL leaders, who routinely take to twitter and facebook to humiliate, abuse, and slander those who disagree with them and engage in shocking name calling. I wonder if it's part of the LI playbook to respond to everyone who expresses a nuanced differing opinion to "go start your own school"? Is it part of the LI playbook to call everyone who disagrees with you a "pedophile"? What would Jim Reavis say to that? 

This is one of those places where LI reveals its decades-old roots, and where it comes perilously close to being no longer relevant at all. That kind of advice--"Be nice"--is sentimental these days, or saccharine; in the wake of Trump, now name-calling is an essential part of establishing power. Threats, denigration, slurs, winking hints at violence drive the right now. 

But the LI trains on. They don't seem to notice that these groups hiring them are not only not nice, but no longer hold a single conservative policy position or belief. It's now down to pure, undistilled partisanship, where the means and the end are the same and the goal is encapsulated in the mantra, The worst Republican is better than the best Democrat. The right wing exercising domination over all culture by any means necessary and no matter what--even if the right wing turns out to be Qanon conspiracy theorists, loud anti-semites, or Christian nationalists drawing on a modern invented heretical theology--it does not matter who, or how. The only thing that matters is (R). The Republican party literally does not care if a candidate is accused of beating his wife,  is a convicted rapist, a serial abortion provider, or someone recently caught masturbating in the parking lot of a preschool. As right wing pundit Dana Loesch recently fumed, she doesn't care if Herschel Walker aborted baby eagles, SHE WANTS THAT SENATE SEAT. 

When you've swept all the lies aside and stare objectively at the will to power that drives the right, you can begin to see a few more things clearly. 

Like who is using these Moms For Liberty and Awake IL parents. The goal of the folks funding these groups is the same as it has been for decades--to get rid of public school. Since Brown v. Board of Education, the right has been attempting to destabilize public education through white segregation academies (the rise of Christian private school), disinvestment and defunding, privatizing, charterizing, and yammering about how school choice is the new civil rights (it's not). The goal of the right has long been to weaken public ed to the point of death, and get rid of the entire federal Department of Education for good measure. 

Now all these Moms might not be aware of that. They might. But I can promise you that many of the parents that they're sweeping up in their campaigns to crash library board meetings, threaten childrens' hospitals, and run for school boards do not know this. They like their public schools. As most Americans consistently do. 

More ominously, these parents getting swept along by the right wing activist current may or may not understand the rising fascism these groups represent. What does it look like? Awake IL requires an enemy (alternately "the gays," immigrants, "globalists," libraries/librarians, and/or school employees or board members), they require assent to obviously disprovable lies, they require silencing dissent and punishing those who do not uphold their vision, and they envision this punishment being inflicted by an authoritarian power. 

The Leadership Institute keeps training folks all the same despite the elephant in the room: that "conservatives" are now fascist-leaning, conspiracy theorizing, violence-prone Christian nationalist cult members. Getting these people on school boards will only increase the speed with which our schools, and all our public institutions, are defamed, defunded, and dismantled. It will only erode long standing conservative--and American--ideals. In the guise of helping parents, these organizations are misleading and misguiding the very parents they purport to aid. And with its non-partisan, very effectual, and complicit training seminars, the Leadership Institute is merely putting lipstick on this pig.