Republicans schooled the left in Virginia’s elections

After Terry McAuliffe stumbled to defeat in a state that Joe Biden won by 10 points one year ago on Nov. 2, a mild suggestion seems in order: Democrats probably need a new way to talk about progressive ideology and education.

In Virginia, the script for both candidates was straightforward: Glenn Youngkin attacked critical race theory, combining it with an attack on how the education bureaucracy has handled the pandemic, while McAuliffe denied that C.R.T. was taught in schools and also insisted that the controversy was a racist dog whistle.

The problem with the McAuliffe strategy is that it fell back on technicalities — as in, yes, fourth graders in Virginia are presumably not being assigned the academic works of Derrick Bell — while evading the context that has made this issue part of a polarizing debate.

That context is an ideological revolution in elite spaces in American culture, in which concepts heretofore associated with academic progressivism have permeated the language of many important institutions, from professional guilds and major foundations to elite private schools and H.R. departments.

Critical race theory is an imperfect term for this movement, too specialized to capture its full complexity. But a new form of racecraft lies close to the heart of the progressivism, with the somewhat different, overlapping ideas of figures like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo enjoying particular influence. And that influence extends into schools and public-education bureaucracies, where Kendi and DiAngelo and their epigones often show up on resources recommended to educators — like the racial-equity reading list sent in 2019 by one state educational superintendent, which recommended both DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” and “Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education.” That superintendent was responsible for Virginia’s public schools.

Now progressives will counter that the backlash that may have helped carry Youngkin to victory isn’t just about these ideologies but about a broader discomfort with any tough truth-telling about America’s racist past, whether it takes the form of Toni Morrison novels or Norman Rockwell paintings.

But progressives can’t isolate and attack the second kind of objection unless they find a way to address the first kind as well, especially when it comes from voters who may have supported Hillary Clinton or Biden but feel unsettled by the ideas filtering down into classrooms. And the McAuliffe approach isn’t going to cut it: You can tell people that C.R.T. is a right-wing fantasy all you want, but this debate was actually instigated not by right-wing parents but by an ideological transformation on the left.

So Democrats may need to decide what they actually think about the ideas that have swept elite cultural institutions. Maybe those ideas are worth defending. If so, Democrats should say so, and fight boldly on that line. But if not, then they should consider what I suspect a lot of them really think: That the future of the Democratic Party depends on its leaders separating themselves, to some extent, from academic jargon and progressive zeal.

As for what Republicans might learn from their Virginian triumph, the short version is this: You don’t need a Trump-like figure at the top of the ticket to mobilize his core voters.

The problem is that the core Trumpian constituency still wants him. But maybe, the solution is for the party’s less-Trumpy constituencies to rally around an alternative. Yes, that’s probably a fantasy, but at the very least, a certain kind of GOP donor has had a very pleasant dream Youngkin as a 2024 presidential candidate.