MAYBE MOMS FOR LIBERTY SHOULD REBRAND ITSELF AS A LIBERAL ORGANIZATION

The New York Times tells us that we don't really have to worry about Moms for Liberty anymore -- the group's influence is waning, in part because of a sex scandal involving one of its founders, and in part because of resistance to its agenda.

Moms for Liberty ... was born in Florida as a response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates. But it quickly became just as well known for pushing policies branded as anti-L.G.B.T.Q. by opponents.

So when one of its founders, Bridget Ziegler, recently told the police that she and her husband, who is under criminal investigation for sexual assault, had a consensual sexual encounter with another woman, the perceived disconnect between her public stances and private life fueled intense pressure for her to resign from the Sarasota County School Board.

... as Moms for Liberty reels from the scandal surrounding the Zieglers, the group’s power seems to be fading. Candidates endorsed by the group lost a series of key school board races in 2023. The losses have prompted questions about the future of education issues as an animating force in Republican politics.

Donald J. Trump ... makes only passing reference in his stump speeches to preserving “parental rights” — the catchphrase of the group’s cause. Issues like school curriculums, transgender students’ rights and teaching about race were far less prominent in the three Republican primary debates than abortion rights, foreign policy and the economy.

I'm wary when I'm told that a right-wing group's influence is waning. For years we were told that the larger religious right was "finished," and then the Dobbs decision came down, accompanied by an anti-LGBTQ backlash.

Maybe Moms for Liberty really is a spent force. Or maybe it should just tweak a few of its policies and rebrand itself as a center-left organization.

I say this because I've been reading the comments in response to Michelle Goldberg's latest Times column. Goldberg writes about former liberals and leftists -- Naomi Wolf, Matt Taibbi, Robert Kennedy Jr., and others -- who've moved rightward in recent years, along with ordinary people who've done the same. Her column is a response to an In These Times essay by Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet on the same subject.

The essay and Goldberg's column are well worth reading. However, Goldberg's commenters leave me despairing for the future of liberalism. I've sorted the comments so I can read the most highly recommended ones, and they include these:

I have always considered myself pretty far left, yet I'm repulsed by cancel culture and much of DEI ideology, so I have found myself drifting to the center on social issues and sometimes even nodding in agreement with the right.

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I think most of us who have left the left have not joined the right, contrary to what this column implies. Most of us have simply become politically homeless. The right is of absolutely no appeal to me, as I am pro-choice, pro-immigration, in favor of a robust social safety net, in favor of environmental regulation, etc.....but I have come to detest the left's obsession with race and gender identity, and I think it is seriously damaging American institutions and public discourse. Covid policies advocated by the left were also quite shocking to me. So I am nowhere. I know many others who feel the same.

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I have two children, girls, in elementary school.

The school district has decided to teach them novel, incoherent ideology about race and gender. The school board thinks this is the role of public education.

I disagree. So, I'm telling my children that I don't believe what the school is telling them, and they don't have to either. When they ask why the school is teaching that, I'm honest: people with an agenda think more people will believe what they want them to believe, if they can get to them while they're young. It's manipulative.

When I was a young progressive, I never thought I'd be in the position of criticizing the left for trying to brainwash kids. I thought only the racist, evangelical Christian conservatives did that.

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I think many of us are just bored with the endless demands for "Societal Change" and outright condemnation of any suggestion that personal responsibility might still be a factor in determining the quality of one's life. Being told that the world needs to adjust to each individual has really gone to seed and just sounds like white noise I'd really like to turn off, and my empathy for those making the demands is drying up quickly.

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I think this piece misses the most important part of the story. As a retired academic, I can testify to the pressure for ideological conformity that takes place in universities that has only worsened in the years since my retirement. We are no longer individuals when we teach and write- we are representatives of the categories we belong to. We can write about victimization and white privilege and masculine privilege and cis-gendered privilege but we will always be suspect if we belong to the wrong social categories. There is no way of escaping this suspicion. If you're not a conscious racist or sexist, then you're an unconscious racist or sexist. Moral impunity exists only for those who belong to the categories of the most oppressed. But of course, these hierarchies themselves are constantly changing.

The right wing offers respite from this shaming. But of course it's a false comfort. They propagate their own brand of political correctness and they are as draconian in their rejection of apostates as their so-called enemies on the left.

I'm not dismissing all these complaints, but I wonder just how radical the gender message really is in the schools attended by the daughters of the fourth commenter, and I also wonder whether the perception of all the commenters that the left has an "obsession with race and gender identity" is driven in part by the media's obsessive coverage of the left's alleged excesses.

The Moms for Liberty article points out that the group "was at one time particularly strong in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, where education issues helped spur Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, to victory in the 2021 governor’s race." I'm not surprised. Northern Virginia is seen as a liberal enclave, but I'm sure it's full of people who are as ready to move right as these commenters.

The upcoming second Trump presidency is going to make these people nostalgic for the days when their worst problem was pressure to include pronouns in their work email signatures. In the meantime, Moms for Liberty can probably just make a few tweaks in its book-banning policies, then retarget its message to upscale Democrats after buying a mailing list from the Times. Bonus: The new recruits will probably be totally cool with at least the consensual aspects of the Zieglers' three-way.