I want to look at the woke education agenda and the Democrats. They can still push away from the woke regime and improve their prospects for survival in the next election, but they must move quickly and be clear. Our bias in this column is that it’s good for America if there are two strong parties duking it out—they may not mean to but they function as a unifying, stabilizing force in this broken-up country—and it would be a great national good if the woke regime were disrupted. Nobody likes it but the extreme cultural left, including the teachers unions. It did famous harm to the Democrats in the latest election.

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Protesters stand at attention as the national anthem is sung at a Loudoun County Public Schools board meeting in Ashburn, Va., Oct. 12.

Photo: andrew caballero-reynolds/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

I want to look at the woke education agenda and the Democrats. They can still push away from the woke regime and improve their prospects for survival in the next election, but they must move quickly and be clear. Our bias in this column is that it’s good for America if there are two strong parties duking it out—they may not mean to but they function as a unifying, stabilizing force in this broken-up country—and it would be a great national good if the woke regime were disrupted. Nobody likes it but the extreme cultural left, including the teachers unions. It did famous harm to the Democrats in the latest election.

The debate over nomenclature—why, critical race theory isn’t even taught in third grade!—is mischievous and meant to obscure. The woke regime rests primarily on a charge that racial evil was systemically and deliberately embedded long ago, by the white patriarchy, in the heart of all American life, and that this ugliness thrives undiminished, which justifies all present attempts at eradication. We are not individual persons with souls; we are part of identity groups marked by specific traits. We hate each other and must fight each other. This regime is variously compared to China’s Cultural Revolution, the French Revolution’s Terror and Puritanism. It is an ideology. A philosophy bubbles up from lived experience and emerges in time; an ideology is forced down into people’s heads from above, and its demands are always urgent.

An important piece appeared in the Washington Post this week by Virginia public school mothers Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich. They wrote that the antiwoke movement among parents is driven by many things—mask mandates, reading materials, critical race theory—but is about something “more profound.” When parents “were suddenly within earshot” of online classes, they became alarmed that children were “being fed lessons on highly divisive topics of questionable academic benefit.” But when parents began to push back, they discovered who really runs the schools: unions, school boards whose members are often handpicked by unions, and businesses that sell curriculums and textbooks. “None of them put students’ interests first.”

The public-education system is a cartel. It’s a big thing when people discover this, and the movement against it will continue, powered by two other dynamics. One is that when parents heard indoctrination during the kids’ Zoom classes, they’d heard it before. They knew it from work, from endless human-resources antiracism and gender-bias sessions. They didn’t know the kids were getting it too, and didn’t like it. Second, when parents were home they had time to master the arduous process by which government documents are requested. That’s how a parent in Loudoun County, Va., found out the system was paying consultants to instruct teachers, among many other things, in the difference between “white individualism” and “color group collectivism.”

I’ve been meaning for a long time to mention the seminal piece on this subject, the one that pierced through and made liberal parents in my liberal town sit up and take notice: “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids,” by George Packer, published in October 2019 in the Atlantic. “The organized pathologies of adults—sometimes known as politics—find a way to infect the world of children,” he begins.

“Around 2014, a new mood germinated in America,” then rapidly spread. “This new mood was progressive but not hopeful.” It came to take on “the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology.” In New York City’s public schools, which Mr. Packer’s children attended, the battleground was “identity.” Grade-school “affinity” groups were formed “to discuss issues based on identity—race, sexuality, disability.” The city was spending millions in “antibias” training for school employees. One slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture” and included such traits as “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word.”

It’s a brilliant, early piece, full of arguments on why one should have reservations about the new regime.

It didn’t start during the pandemic; it continued during the pandemic and accelerated after the murder of George Floyd. Almost as if ideological opportunists coolly observed an opening—a nation in paroxysms of grief and shock—and exploited it.

Back to the Democrats. This ideology is of the left. You are the party of the left, not the right. If you do not kick away from the woke educational agenda you will own it. Republican operatives who don’t have a clue about the implications of woke ideology, or why it is so damaging, or how to answer it in the schools, will deftly hang it around your neck. Parents will demand you take a stand, for or against, and if against what will you do about it—tell the unions that fund and support you to knock it off?

Do that. You’ll look like you have some seriousness, some guts. You’ll look like you care about parents. And it would actually be sincere: I’ve never, ever met a moderate Democrat who personally approved of the woke education regime.

Moderate Democratic officeholders fear party progressives, who might challenge them in a primary. But the fight between the party’s energetic extreme and the majority of moderate Democrats can’t be managed or dodged anymore. The election of Joe Biden papered it over. Three months ago the battle was engaged in Washington, over economic issues. It will spread back home.

It won’t work to deny there is a problem in the schools. That is what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did this week, denying there was any “woke problem.” It’s all made up, she insisted: “ ‘Woke’ is a term pundits are now using as a derogatory euphemism for civil rights & justice.”

It was classic AOC. Deny a thing exists, accuse those who say it does of using racial coding, then come up with new ways to define the thing. Some progressives are trying: We’re just trying to make sure the reality of slavery is taught in the schools! It worked for

Terry McAuliffe !

She’s foundering on this issue. She is not a stupid woman; she does not, as they say on social media, think Daylight Saving is a bank. She is cunning, with a naturally political spirit. A former Democratic lawmaker said dismissively of her that she’s not a congresswoman, she’s a social influencer. True enough, but in the current moment that’s a powerful thing to be. Yet she and other progressive politicians are out of touch.

One indicator: Jacobin, the American socialist magazine, this week issued a study done with YouGov saying the socialist project needs the working class and can get those voters by focusing “on bread-and-butter economic issues.” Then, carefully: “Certain identity-focused rhetoric is a liability.” In the study, “candidates who framed [opposition to racism] in highly specialized, identity-focused language fared significantly worse than candidates who embraced either populist or mainstream language.”

They shade the problem as a rhetorical one as opposed to what it is, a substantive one. But they admit there’s a problem.

Even socialists are telling progressives to knock it off. If they can, a moderate Democrat can.

Main Street: It's much easier for progressives to smear the opposition as haters, bigots and racists than engage on the political substance of the issues. Images: Zuma Press/AFP via Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition