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ecently, for the first time in a long time, I went to an actual party... It was a mild May evening, a hotel patio teeming with people I knew only vaguely (if at all), and the group was unmasked except for the wait staff. This contrast lent the event an edge of postlapsarian feudalism. But it also meant that while all could see our hostess’ expression sour when the bartender she’d hired announced there would be no champagne, only “Argentinian Brut,” said bartender was free to smirk as widely as he wanted behind his KN95.
It was the kind of party where I never actually met the banker birthday boy officially being feted – and where, as the evening and the Argentinian Brut flowed on, I found myself increasingly the confidante of closeted conservatarians. Publicly doctrinaire liberals were itching to confess their private patriotisms and secret suspicions about “cancel culture,” almost as though they’d been muzzled for months. I’m in training to become a psychotherapist, and I spent years as a staff writer at the nation’s preeminent conservative weekly... This is what happens to me at parties. More so than in the unmuzzled prelapsarian past, though, I heard secondhand fretting about the great private-school “awokening.” (As fate would have it, I was a private-school humanities teacher before the writing stint.) Everywhere, I learned – yes, even, or perhaps especially, on patios with open bars – parents are aghast at the Lefty social-justice programming their expensively educated children regurgitate with purity of heart and unimpeachable but-my-teacher-says-so authority.
At the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Right-wing pollster and Kevin McCarthy roomie Frank Luntz taught me to ask everyone I meet some version of the same core question – What do you care most about? What keeps you up at night? What issue deserves more attention than it’s getting? For the semi-inebriated urban professionals at this event I tagged along to, there was one answer: the woke contagion afflicting our nation’s private schools! CRITICAL RACE FURY First there was talk of the father, somebody’s colleague, who pulled his daughter out of the Riverdale Country School over the reputedly unthinking anti-Trumpism she, at age 13, quoted over dinner and attributed to a social studies assignment. “ He’s the worst president ever ,” the teen is said to have declared. Her father purportedly fumed back, “ Worse than the antebellum anti-abolitionists, worse than Andrew Johnson, worse than that rank anti-Semite Birth of a Nation fan Woodrow Wilson ?!” Her blank stare at these historical names was the last straw...
American Consequences
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