Eighteenth-century essayist Samuel Johnson wryly called second marriages “the triumph of hope over experience.” We are now living through a national version of this. From policing to education to welfare, recently ascendant liberals have imposed woke ideology in place of time-tested policies and practices. And the evidence suggests it’s not going well.
Take the recent progressive crusade against policing. Liberal prosecutors and the defund-the-police movement foresaw a new age of Aquarius as social workers replaced law enforcement. Summarizing their case, Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, stated in June 2020: “The Minneapolis Police Department is rotten to the root, and so when we dismantle it, we get rid of that cancer, and we allow for something beautiful to rise.” Meanwhile, back in reality, Minneapolis “saw an increase in homicides, carjackings, robberies and other criminal acts in 2021,” according to local news outlet KARE 11, which its embattled mayor this month described as “a very grave problem.”
Low-income and minority individuals are disproportionately harmed by crime, and Minneapolis is not alone in seeing spikes.
Murders continued to surge across the United States in 2021, following large increases in 2020. Cities at the vanguard of the defund-the-police movement, such as San Francisco, are now in full retreat, with the mayor recently pledging to refund the police to end “the reign of criminals who are destroying our city.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki admitted defunding the police has contributed to the recent surge in crime, which occurred despite her pledges last summer that the administration was “moving decisively to act with a whole-of-government approach” to “combat violent crime and gun violence.”
On the front lines of the education policy fight, efforts forcing the teaching of critical race theory and other woke ideology into public schools yielded angry reactions from parents in places such as Loudoun County, Virginia. And as woke ideology ascended, real education fell. One principal in nearby Fairfax County, Virginia, just reminded parents of how low the bar is now set when he hailed the “successful” first day of the second semester this way: “Students were able to find their new classes on time, and all students, staff, and visitors were able to wear masks appropriately throughout the school day.” The battle over progressive indoctrination in schools helped defenestrate Democrats from the Virginia governor’s mansion last fall and promises to be an equally explosive subject during the midterm elections.
And on welfare policy, multiple pandemic relief laws provided cover for embedding woke “just give everyone a check” ideology into federal benefits, akin to universal basic income schemes. Several rounds of federal stimulus checks were paid to nearly all adults, and policymakers such as Kamala Harris called for continuing monthly checks throughout the pandemic and beyond, ignoring the ruinous cost.
Unprecedented new national unemployment programs, subject to historic levels of fraud, paid large weekly checks to even those who didn’t previously work or pay payroll taxes. And woke reforms of the child tax credit turned that long-standing tax benefit for workers into monthly welfare checks for even nonworking parents, converting the IRS into America’s No. 1 welfare-paying agency along the way. Those record subsidies for nonwork help explain the labor shortages, as well as the president’s failure to achieve his job creation promises, as millions remain on the economy’s sidelines.
So as the problems pile up, experience is actually triumphing over being woke. But the good news is that the rejection of woke ideology has already started and seems to be growing.
That may ultimately open the door to reforms such as school choice that offer more people (most importantly, lower-income and minority families) the chance to escape failing schools that have trapped their children for too long. Young people will also learn of the hard-fought and successful policing and welfare reforms achieved on a bipartisan basis a generation ago. Coupled with sensible reforms, these policies show the nation the right path forward, unlike the failed woke experiments that people are now rightly rejecting.
Matt Weidinger is a senior fellow and Rowe Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
