As San Fransisco voters overwhelmingly recalled three school board members recently, there are a lot of commentaries on the push-back to the woke progressivist agenda. In this particular case, these members’ priorities were seemingly not on educating children, but renaming schools that included names of Lincoln and Washington, because of their imperfect past. But perhaps most importantly, they wanted to end access to an elite school based on meritocracy and replace it with a lottery system, since apparently too many Asians* were getting in. The school board members suggested they were being targeted by racists and closet Republicans, but this is San Fransisco–not much of a chance of that being a reality. And as the Wall Street Journal stated,

If it can happen in San Francisco, of all places, Democrats should be worried. They need to escape their union bondage and woke fixations. Republicans have a great opportunity to press parental choice on curriculum, charters and vouchers. The woke may wake up to a far bigger shock in November.

While I think the dangers of wokeism to the Democratic Party are real, I think there is a bigger danger, which is at the heart of economics: the idea of opportunity cost and the necessity of real trade-offs. When progressives are focusing on wokeism, they necessarily are at some level dropping the ball on what people care about. It’s why Donald Trump won in 2016, as core white working class abandoned Hillary Clinton: the feeling was “they care about the gays, the environment, and blacks, but they don’t seem to care about me.” They had forgotten to practice Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” public empathy (Mrs. Clinton did not really even campaign in Wisconsin, Michigan & Pennsylvania until much too late).

San Fransisco’s progressive mayor London Breed was in favor of the recall, being much more political astute than most of her fellow progressives:

“We failed our children,” she acknowledged. “Parents were upset. The city as a whole was upset, and the decision to recall school board members was a result of that.” Breed said parents demanding their children receive a quality education shouldn’t be divisive along partisan lines and is not “a Democratic-Republican issue.” “My take is that it was really about the frustration of the Board of Education doing their fundamental job,” she said. “And that is to make sure that our children are getting educated, that they get back into the classroom. And that did not occur. They were focusing on other things that were clearly a distraction.”

Democrats are seemingly immune to the issues that people care about, as they pander to their radical base–refusing to listen to the results of last fall’s elections. People really care about their kids and education, parents want a big say in what they’re being taught, and they certainly don’t want to see their children’s opportunities sacrificed on the alter of wokeism (e.g., ending elite school access by merit).

But beyond the wokeism, we also have the climate ideology that permeates everything they do. And this has real effects. With inflation running wild in large part due to energy prices, and Mr. Putin using his petro wealth to intimidate Europe and carve up Ukraine, the Biden administration has a full scale assault on domestic energy production, even while begging despotic regimes like Russia and the Arab states to pump more. How is he doing this? It begins with hostility to domestic production through the US, to include his almost immediate cancellation of the Keystone pipeline. It includes Mr. Biden’s nominee for regulatory compliance on the Fed who has a fixation on limiting access to capital investment for fossil fuel companies. It includes the Department of Defense making climate change part of its national security strategy, even while the threats of Russian and Chinese military expansionism are growing. Recent reports have North Korea and Russian launching hypersonic missiles, while our military does not overtly have that capability. But we’ll be leading the way on climate change!

The voter’s message is increasingly clear: take care of the main job–these other issues may be well and good, but get the main job done first. If Americans are losing trust in their political institutions, it is precisely because those institutions have taken their eye off the ball, and have focused on problems that most Americans don’t feel are the top priority: ending the pandemic, stopping inflation, opening up schools for our kids and stop indoctrinating them, stopping the inflow of illegal immigrants. Following Mayor Breed above, we need to stop focusing on other things that are clearly a distraction. Memo to progressives: November is a comin’.

* EDIT UPDATE. To be perfectly clear, the comment “too many” comes from the progressive worldview which suggests that disparate outcomes that are detrimental to the most disadvantaged (e.g., blacks/Hispanics) must be overthrown. In many of the education issues going through the courts, the issue is whether educational institutions such as Harvard and Yale are in violation of civil rights laws by trying to reduce the Asian proportion of the student population, since they are over-represented relative to their share of the overall population. What has been a battleground for the universities has also more recently become hotly contested in premier high schools.