I Was a Radical Republican – For About a Week – And I Didn’t Change a Single Progressive View
I do not like Ronald Reagan.
I own no guns.
Back in high school I won a debate arguing for pro-choice.
Trickle Down sounds more to me like a bladder condition than an economic theory.
So why was it that last week so many right wingers were retweeting me on Twitter?
Did I say “retweeting”? They were taking my words and memes and sending them out to the Twitterverse as their own thoughts with a reference to my account.
I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but I think Michelle Malkin pushed down the new heart emoticon on something I wrote.
She may have retweeted me, too. Heck! I may have retweeted her back!
“What new Hell is this?” I thought. “Why am I getting so much love from people who – if they met me in person – would probably try to give me a wedgie and scream, “NERD”?
It turns out I was caught in a maelstrom of political events. And his name is John King.
President Barack Obama named the former New York Education Commissioner as his pick to replace Arne Duncan as US Secretary of Education.
As a public school teacher, this really pissed me off. It pissed off just about every public educator in the country.
Are you kidding, Obama!? John-Freaking-King!? The guy whose only previous experience was teaching for three years at a “no excuses” charter school!?
This is the guy who oversaw the systematic destruction of schools in one of the most populous states in the country all the while pointing his finger at teachers. He approved an obviously fraudulent charter school run by an obvious conman. He ignored and dismissed parents at various education forums. The people of New York hated him so much, he sparked the largest opt out movement in the nation.
And THIS is the guy you’re nominating as Secretary of Education!?
It’s not like he’s even pretended to change his stripes. After New Yorkers booted him out of their state, he was offered a job at the US Department of Education – a prime example of falling upward. Soon afterward, his wife took a job at a corporate education reform company, Bellwether Education Partners!
Isn’t that a conflict of interest? I mean – through her – Bellwether will have the ear of the highest education official in the land. And the rest of us will just be supplicants sending letters, making phone calls hoping for an audience with the King.
THIS was why I was upset. THIS was why I was writing angry blogs and pounding out my rage on Twitter.
And I wasn’t alone.
The usual gang of educators and far left progressives gave me the usual support.
But we were soon joined by a tsunami of social media activists from the other side of the aisle.
Very soon someone made a popular hashtag, #StopJohnKing, and I started seeing hundreds of retweets, restatements and messages of support.
Two of my tweets were particularly popular: one about the conflict of interest of King’s wife working for Bellwhether, the other a seemingly unrelated message about the need to fund public libraries.
That’s when I started to notice the Twitter accounts of the people joining in. There were folks proclaiming their love for Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. They described themselves as libertarians and refused to speak to “libtards.” And the pictures on their Twitter accounts were often famous conservatives, racist cartoons of the President, pictures of themselves packing heat or just the darn guns, themselves.
“What the heck have I gotten myself into?” I thought.
That’s when I questioned why they were supporting me. For many of them I wondered if it had less to do with how terrible King would be as Education Secretary than with who nominated him in the first place.
Ever since Antonin Scalia died, many Republicans have sworn a blood oath not to approve any of Obama’s nominees – for the Supreme Court or ANY office.
For them this wasn’t about opposing a terrible Presidential pick. It was about blocking everything Obama did.
I had to face it. I had become a radical Republican, and I hadn’t even needed to change one of my positions to do it. The GOP came to me.
I have to admit, my right wing supporters were mostly very nice. I felt like I had a stronger group behind me than during most progressive campaigns.
There was some strain, however. A few times I could tell they were choking back anti-union rhetoric. “Why don’t we fund our libraries? Because unions,” apparently. “Who needs libraries – I home school.” That kind of thing.
And unfortunately, my progressive buddies were starting to notice the right wing support and take offense.
I got trolled by several lefties demanding I support Common Core.
“How can you be against it?” they’d ask. “Rand Paul hates Common Core. Do you agree with Rand Paul?”
I’d respond politely that even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Card-carrying Democrats refused to listen to any criticism of the Obama administration’s education policies. Little did these progressives realize, they were the exact opposite of the GOP activists they hated.
Many Republicans hate Common Core because Obama touched it. Many Democrats love it for the same reason.
The majority of teachers throughout the country hate it because we’ve read it, tried to use it and seen what a load of bullshit it is. We know it was developed with very little input from classroom teachers or child psychologists. We know it has no research behind it to show that it works. We see how it erodes our autonomy in the classroom and increases the amount and difficulty of high stakes tests for our students.
But my progressive friends refused to accept that anything Saint Hope and Change approved could be so terrible.
I’d turn to my newfound Republican posse only to find many of them hated Common Core beyond reason. It wasn’t just bad practice – it was going to turn our kids gay. It was a liberal plot to make children progressive atheists.
Oy vey.
The week just flew by. Eventually the Senate voted to approve King, both Democrats and Republicans – though the opposition was almost entirely in the GOP.
In my home state of Pennsylvania, the Senator I can usually count on to have my back (Bob Casey) stabbed me in the same place. And the Senator who usually only votes for things that are officially endorsed by Lord Satan, himself, (Pat Toomey) was my boy.
What kind of a topsy-turvy world am I living in!?
Elizabeth Warren – the liberal lion – said she wasn’t going to vote for King but ultimately gave in. Oh, Elizabeth. They got to you, too?
There were two points of light though. First, there was one Democrat who actually voted against him: Senator Kirsten Gillibrand from New York – the sight of King’s last catastrophe. Second, my Presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, didn’t vote at all. Fwew! I can irrationally justify that – he was too busy, that’s all. Bernie would never have voted for King. Tee-hee!
So once again we see the two major parties as mirror images of each other. Where Republicans made the right choice for the wrong reason, Democrats made the wrong choice for the right one. Progressives were circling the wagons around the President. They were making a point that they weren’t going to let the evil GOP block his nominees – even if one of those nominees was an absolute pathetic failure.
This is politics in 2016, folks.
Decisions are rarely made because of logic, experience, or sound judgement. It’s all political maneuvering, personal gain or both. Meanwhile, the world goes to Hell.
After the vote, I got a smattering of conservative retweets and then… nothing. As quickly as they had come, they were gone.
My tiny caucus of teachers, academics and other ne’er-do-wells are still there. We shout our truths into the wind hoping someone will hear.
On days like today it seems impossible.
But perhaps there is a silver lining in there somewhere. If people from such opposite sides of the political spectrum can agree on something like how terrible John King is, maybe there’s hope. If we can shake hands over the fatuousness of Common Core, maybe we can find other points of agreement.
Maybe these brief moments of concord are opportunities for understanding. Sure my GOP compatriots supported me for the wrong reasons, but maybe some of them were exposed to the right ones.
I know I’ve learned from them. I consider myself an FDR Democrat with an abiding faith in a strong federal government. But even I can see how both the Bush and Obama administrations overstepped their power with No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
I don’t buy any of that baloney about Big Government vs. Small Government. But I do think that some things like education policy don’t belong at the federal level. The federal government should ensure public schools are funded properly and maybe regulate outright abuses, but local communities and districts should be deciding how to educate the children in their care.
If those ideas rubbed off on me, what rubbed off on my brief Twitter followers?
Will there come a day when we meet again, join hands and fight for our common good?
Can we overcome the blinders of party and politics to build a better world?
#IHopeSo
TOO many things, here, break my heart. It is 2016 and we are all fighting about the "right" and the "left" -- and yet it is clear that we have almost zero true liberals (as in those who not only understand that Corporate School Reform is happening, but who see that they must stand up and fight every aspect of it with energy and interest.) I'm trying to be optimistic, but....
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