What seems to be happening in the dog days of summer 2022? On the one hand, 1.5 million students went kapoof in national public-school enrollment from 2020 to 2021. And more recently, opinion polls show an improvement in Democrat fortunes. After all that has happened in the past two years, what gives? The former is not surprising. The latter is downright insane given the riots, the overall urban breakdown of civil order, the schools being turned into revolutionary propaganda mills, the mandatory masking and school closures, the inflation and shortages, the “transition” of energy from affordable and available to extortionate and unreliable, and the full-throated attack on the family sedan to, by hook or by crook, force people into the lifestyle preferences of the DNC donor class. The economy is in a shambles.
The Greeks and Romans of antiquity saw the Mediterranean heat of mid-to-late summer changing people into mad dogs, thus the “dog days of summer”. Are parents mad for leaving the public schools in droves? Hardly. A clue can be found in the places with the greatest defection numbers. Big city districts are quickly losing the warm bodies to fill the desks. NYC Mayor Eric Adams put it succinctly when he called it a “massive hemorrhaging of students.” The city’s public schools, the largest school district in the nation, lost 4 percent at the start of the 2020-2021 school year, and nearly another 2 percent in 2021-2022, a total of 64,000 youngsters. Over the last five years, the total runs to 120,000. Democrat bastions are experiencing the greatest disaffection.
Flipping over to the west coast, Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest, has fallen from 737,00 to 430,000 over the last 21 years, and the picture gets even bleaker with the district projecting a further 30 precent erosion to 309,000 into the next ten years. It’s a dismal picture for other big cities such as Detroit and Chicago.
The losses in places like Los Angeles can only be partially explained by the very real Great California Exodus. New York State, in one year alone, 2020-1, in the midst of its own exodus, lost over 319,000 residents, the largest decline of any state. Yes, Democrat-governed states dominate the flight statistics. The classroom overcrowding problem of a few decades ago has shifted to states like Texas and Florida.
Another facet of the trend has little to do with loading a U-Haul. Increasingly, parents are developing a love affair with options that free their kids from the grip of Randy Weingarten’s (AFT) and Becky Pringle’s (NEA) teachers’ unions.
Private, sectarian, charter, micro (private with 15 students or less), and home schools are some choices rising in popularity. Maybe the pandemic exposed to parents who’s running their kids’ classrooms. The racism-against-racism CRT claptrap and sex-change ideology, with the attendant display and glorification of sex-addiction behavior to adolescents, and the thought of their daughter sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with penis-girls, have shocked parents out of their lethargy. Many are coming to the conclusion that the trillions of “investment” in government schools is a monumental loser, more of a jobs program for special-interest clients of the DNC. It isn’t about the kids. That’s just empty rhetoric for the plebes.
Simultaneously, as school boards are reintroduced to the socio-political phenomena of people voting with their feet due to a growing revulsion of Democrat-led schooling, the political prospects of Democrats have brightened a bit, amazingly. Opinion polls show a tightening in the generic ballot. In key Senate races, Dem neo-socialists hold leads. In North Carolina and Ohio, it’s a dead heat. Oz is down double digits in Pennsylvania to a stroke-addled Bernie Sanders acolyte. How is it possible given the complete Dem-inspired unraveling of civilization from the summer of 2020 to summer 2022?
My best guess is a trifecta: it’s still the “dog days”; the Dem’s Trump campaign strategy; and inherent Republican political disabilities. Oh, the polls are junk, so it’s actually a quadra-fecta. Taken together, this is a bad time to gauge the state of play.
The “dog days” don’t have to mean madness. Sometimes, the dog of public opinion sleeps or is distracted during these hazy, lazy days of summer. Assessing what the public thinks at a time when people are vacationing and cramming bar-b-ques, ball games, concerts, yard work, and activities, activities, and activities, and expecting it to be authoritative, is absurd. Unless you are Antifa and BLM and have the convenience of a viral video to exploit and bountiful free time to indulge in recreational rioting, most people have other things on their minds.
The public is generally distracted and the Democrats want to keep diverting their eyes away from the disorder and decay all around them. Look, over there, it’s Trump, they say. In the 2018 midterms, they made it all about Trump and swept the near octogenarian, now octogenarian, Nancy Pelosi into the speakership. In 2020, they did same thing to such an extent that they got away with another near octogenarian, Joe Biden, campaigning from a basement computer. Governor Gavin Newsom in the recall election hung Trump around the neck of Larry Elder and the effort to remove him from office. They’re at it again.
Though, it’s hard for the shopper who just experienced sticker shock after a look at the supermarket cash register receipt. At the pump, at the utility meter, at the hardware store, you name it, the sense of dystopia surrounds us. The Dem’s best strategy, a proven winner, at a time when they have soiled themselves and us so badly, is to somehow make the election about Trump. Could that be behind the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago?
All of a sudden, it’s all about Trump again. Trump squeezes other GOP hopefuls out of prime-time news coverage. Trump sops up media attention and fundraising cash that might have gone to down-ballot races. At least for a short while, the raid jumbled the complexion of the federal midterm races.
It – the raid – may have worked in a perverse way. Trump’s personal approvals tick up and the GOP’s tick down. Trump gets to play the part of victim, which he could very well be, and the rest of the GOP gets momentarily lost in the news cycle. For the Democrats, the strategy is to avert the public’s attention from the representative and senator who defended rioters, defund the police, the DA’s who unilaterally ignore most of the criminal code to the detriment of us and our property, voted for more inflation through trillions of new spending, and have assisted in dismantling what it means to be woman. For those potentially in the gravitational pull of the Democratic Party, the prospect of an imminent Trump reappearance trumps everything. The strategy worked in 2018 and to a great extent in 2020. Why not this time around?
We’ll see how long the Democrat hall-of-mirrors campaign obscures the horrifying facts of life for most Americans under Democrat rule. We’ll also see how GOP command central responds. They’re lack of aggression and the Trump anchor may militate against a powerful counter. Working against them is . . . Trump. Just think, if that $100 million in Trump’s war chest had gone to Oz or to the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC), the current donkey party bump would have been compressed to a micro-second blip. Trump in his semi-retirement has all the time in the world, two years away from the next presidential election, and is frenetic in his fundraising far earlier than any other braggart in history. The rest of the GOP is left to be the dog licking the crumbs falling from the table.
Trump is a mega-magnet due to his ego-run-amok. His overbearing brashness is a cheap imitation of what Alice Roosevelt Longworth said of her father, Theodore Roosevelt: “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.” I reckon that Trump prefers to see a lot of TR in himself. He sucks media attention out of a room, and fundraising cash out of the pool of GOP donors.
Maybe he’ll shovel some of his cash to his preferred candidates, making them even more beholden to him. Some of those selections in Senate primaries were . . . bizarre. In some cases, the weakest general election candidate was endorsed. But Oz, only recently a convert to the GOP and with no previous political footprint, and a man with carpetbagger and national loyalty liabilities? The same consternation in Ohio (J.D. Vance). The same in Arizona (Blake Edwards). But Eric Greitens in Missouri, wife beater and abuser of his children?
What explains the choices? The most controversial endorsements reflect what Trump sees in himself: “anti-establishment” and “outsider”, meaningless words that frequently grace the lips of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. The “establishment”? Well, after a process of elimination, it must mean anyone in the party opposed to Trump. It’s that simple. Anyone finding Trump abhorrent is automatically assumed to be a country clubber. It’s an outdated cliché since the millionaire and billionaire class is just as likely, if not more likely, to be a Democrat booster than a Republican one. As for “outsider”, history is littered with them from Paul Marat (Parisian mob rabble rouser of the French Revolution) to Lenin’s Bolsheviks to Jane’s Revenge. “Outsider” isn’t limited to being a moniker for someone with a fresh perspective. It could, and mostly does, mean a person so revolting to broad sensibilities to cause people to cringe and keep them at arm’s length.
Still, these are the Trump chosen in Senate races that he has fobbed off on us, and a large tranche of Republican voters have foisted on us in their primaries. In the general election, important races will pit a campus-socialist Democrat against a Republican with both feet immersed in the narrow habitat of the Trump cult. I fail to see why this shouldn’t be a red-tsunami year, given all the carnage that the Democrats have gifted to Republicans. Instead, much of the Republican base, enchanted by Trump’s self-serving verbiage, have turned sure-winners and easier gets into toss-ups and double-digit holes. Indeed, at this juncture, Biden may have a radical-Left Senate majority in January 2023 to rubber stamp us into an inflationary spiral and the centrally planned existence of the Green New Deal by executive edict.
Democracy is not synonymous with wisdom. The crooked timber of humanity is evident at the micro and macro levels. In 1964, Goldwater was pasted by LBJ in what many observers described as a sympathy vote in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. A popular mania gave us a bloody, miasmic morass in Vietnam and a morally bankrupting War on Poverty. Guns and butter profligacy would wreck our country for the next decade and a half. Then came the 1980’s and the beginning of a turnaround. 2022 could be the beginning of our turnaround, but will we seize the opportunity?
It would be lot easier if Trump stopped being so self-absorbed and divisive in the ranks of those trying to right the ship. Meanwhile, parents are taking matters into their hands by taking their kids away from the influence of Democrat client groups. I daily thank God that Trump hasn’t made any endorsements in school board races.
RogerG
Sources:
* “New Federal Data Confirms Pandemic’s Blow to K-12 Enrollment, With Drop of 1.5 Million Students; Pre-K Experiences 22 Percent Decline” at https://www.the74million.org/article/public-school-enrollment-down-3-percent-worst-century/#:~:text=A%25203%2520percent%2520decline%252C%2520measured,of%2520roughly%25201.5%2520million%2520pupils.
* “With Plunging Enrollments, A Seismic Hit to Public Schools”, New York Times, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/us/public-schools-falling-enrollment.html
* “Census Bureau: N.Y. population loss greatest in nation”, The Daily Gazette, Dec. 23, 2021, at https://dailygazette.com/2021/12/23/census-bureau-n-y-population-loss-greatest-in-nation/.
* “Latest Polls”, FiveThrtyEight, Aug. 19, 20222, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/.
* “Poll Finds Increase in Number of Republicans Who Support Trump over GOP”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-finds-increase-in-number-of-republicans-who-support-trump-over-gop/.