Most people think “democracy” is that thing whereby all of us get to vote for mayor, congressman, and maybe a new tax hike or bond issue. For a lot of most rabidly “pro-democracy” folk on the Left, though, democracy means something completely different. It means that a mob of activists get to tell you how to raise your children.
“Democratize everything” is a terrifying and authoritarian mindset witnessing massive new popularity. It’s behind cancel culture. It’s behind the culture-war efforts to crush conservative and religious institutions. It’s behind the Marxism ascendant in Western nations.
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“Democratize everything” means that nothing should be beyond the control of what an empowered mob demands. This is a view fundamentally antagonistic toward not only individual liberty, but also civil society and property rights. If a store owner gets to set his or her prices, that’s some rich person making decisions that affect the rest of us, without our input. If a local church’s membership decides it will have only men as pastors, even though the broader society has adopted more egalitarian standards, that’s “undemocratic.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, whose home country of France had been convulsed by the democracy of the guillotine decades earlier, wrote in Democracy in America about how the zeitgeist of democracy was antipathetic toward civil society. “Little platoons” are inherently anti-democratic, whether they are internally democratic or not. Local government control allows a small town to have rules the state as a whole might dislike. Capitalism means that owners make decisions with very little control by others. Clubs, churches, and congregations can set their own rules and prevent people from joining, which means nonmembers, who surely outnumber members, effectively have no say over the club’s rules.
This is the root of the growing appetite to crack down on and control businesses, churches, and other small groups that might buck elite morality.
Nowhere does this show up more than in education. The everything-democratizers are pretty upset that some people might be educating children in a way that the public-education establishment doesn’t approve of.
Here, by the way, we see what democratize everything really means. It doesn’t merely mean that the majority gets to oppress the minority. It really means we give control over people’s lives to specific people who are politically powerful that leftists approve of. Special interest groups, such as socially liberal activist groups and teachers unions, are the ones who call the shots when government power becomes stronger and more centralized.
The Pennsylvania School Boards Association flatly asserted this week that private schools are less accountable than public schools.
Taxpayer dollars should not be sent via vouchers to unaccountable private schools that do not have the same requirements for public meetings, transparency, governance, academic achievement, testing/reporting and financial responsibilities. @PaLegis @PaHouseDems @PAHouseGOP pic.twitter.com/sREyrpLEAe
— Pa School Boards Asn (@PSBA) September 27, 2021
Anyone who has ever dealt with a public school bureaucracy, especially in a large city or county, knows that these entities are the opposite of accountable. In contrast, private schools are intimately accountable to the school parents — often to a fault.
Over the weekend, education commentator Jennifer Berkshire expressed a weirder opinion.
This kind of thinking – that kids should only be taught what their parents want them to learn – is absolutely anathema to a democracy. And that’s exactly the point. https://t.co/aq9FtYNLYn
— Jennifer Berkshire (@BisforBerkshire) September 24, 2021
How is letting parents control their children’s education “anathema to democracy”?
Maybe this is just lame partisanship. There are plenty of people on the Left these days who claim that any policy they dislike is “undemocratic.” It’s a facile way of trying to delegitimize all opposing opinions. (The clearest example of this absurdity is when abortion defenders say that overturning Roe v. Wade, so that we get to vote on the issue of abortion, would be undemocratic.)
But I think it’s something deeper than that. I think that “democracy” in this case means, again, that the elite technocrats and educational establishment get to control how you educate your children. Leaving the educational decisions up to parents is terribly undemocratic, you see.
The left-wing activists who want to ban homeschooling regularly cite “democracy” as their justification. Elizabeth Bartholet, who was profiled for her anti-homeschooling argument in an article illustrated by a photo hilariously showing the homeschooled child locked in a prison made of the Bible and other books, leans on the idea that homeschooling is anti-democratic.
Harvard Magazine’s piece about Bartholet mentions democracy four times. Bartholet “views the absence of regulations ensuring that homeschooled children receive a meaningful education equivalent to that required in public schools as a threat to U.S. democracy.” “From the beginning of compulsory education in this country, we have thought of the government as having some right to educate children so that they become active, productive participants in the larger society,” she says.
Bartholet’s journal article refers to democracy 22 times. “Even homeschooling parents capable of satisfying the academic function of education are not likely to be capable of satisfying the democratic function.” That is, “Maybe you can teach your children fine, but we still can’t let you make your own child-rearing decisions without our control.”
This mindset is what we call “illiberal democracy,” and unfortunately, it’s on the rise. One result is the creepy speech police. As I wrote in February, “Journalists and commentators are increasingly worried that we’re not holding people accountable for their private conversations. … ‘Democratize what Sarah is having for dinner’ is tyrannical. So is ‘democratize who can quarterback the Saints,’ or ‘Democratize what you can say in private to your friends.’“
This has got to be the forefront of the culture war: We need to undemocratize more things, especially how we educate, form, and raise our children. These are private matters, not subject to the whims of the demos.
