It Isn't Populist to Defund Rural Schools

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Jennifer Berkshire

@BisforBerkshire
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You should care about rural schools because this is just about the only issue right now where GOP voters (and some pols) are bucking the party. Seems like somebody should be able to do something with that...

thenation.com
It Isn’t Populist to Defund Rural Schools
The Republican Party has won rural America by fanning the flames of the culture war. But by taking a match to public schools, it may have finally gone too far.
5:24 PM · Nov 2, 2022

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/gop-populist-defund-rural-schools/

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https://archive.ph/yUvcW

Rural Americans have been voting Republican for more than half a century. And while Democrats have periodically attempted to convince rural voters that their economic interests are ill-served by the GOP’s agenda, they have mostly failed. That’s because Republicans have used a kind of fake populism—populism expressed chiefly through culture war, rather than through policy—to maintain their white, working-class base.

Portraying Democrats as out-of-touch coastal elitists, the GOP has turned rural voters against universal health care (despite lower rural life expectancies), climate action (despite growing threats to crops), immigration reform (despite reliance on migrant labor), and wealth redistribution (despite higher levels of poverty in rural areas). Now Republicans have trained their sights on public education, including rural schools. Painting classrooms as sites for “woke” indoctrination and vilifying teachers as “groomers,” they’re hoping to convince rural voters to turn on public education. But this is proving a riskier tactic than they expected.

Ronald Reagan’s brand of Goldwater conservatism—distinguished by a libertarian obsession with tax cuts, privatization, and deregulation—has been Republican orthodoxy for decades. And viewed through that ideological lens, public education looks like a staggeringly expensive, big-government welfare program. Yet defunding schools has long remained a wildly unpopular proposition, even in red states. Reagan’s attempt at a private-school voucher program, for instance, was one of his rare stinging defeats while in office, and his successors took great pains to depict themselves as supporters of public education.

Attacking the public schools is a bold move anywhere, but particularly in rural America. School districts are often the largest employers in rural communities, and they still serve as vital cultural anchors. In some communities, the schools represent the last remaining piece of public infrastructure.

*snip*

[Just A Box Of Rain]

1. It seems like The Nation--a once proud newspaper--has totally lost their way

They have become a den of Putin apologists and now they are trying to convince people that right-wing populism is "fake-populism," as if there is a good kind of populism.

The truth is that populism--an ideology based on the idea that only some of the people are really people--sucks in all its forms. It is an ideology that fuels rage and demagoguery, instead of reason.

Populism is a reactionary tendency that is antithetical to liberalism and one that is the greatest threat of our era worldwide.

The Nation has lost the plot.