In the 1996 presidential election, political reporters made the “soccer mom” a major focus of campaign coverage. It was one of those flattening and often highly misleading stereotypes that political journalists like to cook up to add color to their coverage, like “beer track vs. wine track,” or “NASCAR dads,” or “security moms.”
Yet behind the dumb slogan, there was at least some reality. The soccer mom conjures up an image of a suburban homeowner with kids, whose primary political goals are protecting the value of her home and finding the largest possible advantage for her children. She’s constantly shuttling her kids from sports to music lessons to tutoring and so on, so they can get into a high-status prep school, go to Harvard, pick up a cocaine habit, and get appointed to the Supreme Court.
Even if few parents are as neurotic as the stereotype suggests, there really are tens of millions of people with some version of these priorities. Owner-occupied housing is the largest source of middle-class wealth, and half the reason parents spend so much on it is to get into a good school catchment area. And this orientation is basically conservative—about protecting family wealth and status.
So it was interesting to see that in the recent elections, as Greg Sargent writes at The Washington Post, the right-wing extremist group Moms for Liberty faceplanted badly in its effort to take over school oversight positions across the country. Millions of voters who in ages past would have been open in theory to voting Republican got an up-close look at what the conservative movement is like these days, and reacted with slack-jawed horror.
Now, one shouldn’t overstate the inherent conservatism of suburban homeowners. Federal policy is arranged such that homeownership is about the only way for the middle class to build wealth; we exactly can’t blame people for trying to get a piece of the subsidies. And a single family can’t change the preposterously unjust and outdated way that school attendance is organized either. In most places, that’s just how things work.
All this is why homeowner voters have traditionally only leaned right rather than being overwhelmingly Republican. According to Apartment List, Republicans won them by 2 percent in 2000; by 5 percent in 2004; by 4 percent in 2008; and by 5 percent in 2016. But in 2020, Joe Biden edged out Donald Trump by 1 percent.
That might just be the start of a trend, which brings me back to Moms for Liberty. As Olivia Little writes at Media Matters, it was originally founded to oppose pandemic control measures, but has since evolved into an anti-LGBT hate group. Leaders are constantly howling the “groomer” libel holding that all gay and trans people are pedophiles out to abuse schoolchildren. Those who catch their attention—like Florida school board member Jennifer Jenkins—often face a deluge of harassment and death threats. The Moms’ policy agenda, aside from KKK-esque intimidation of gay and trans people of all ages, is to ban various books and curriculum elements deemed politically incorrect. They would basically turn every public school into a mini Liberty University, with education provided by Prager U videos and PE classes consisting of big bonfires of literary classics.
Millions of voters who in ages past would have been open in theory to voting Republican got an up-close look at what the conservative movement is like these days.
The group also has deep ties to prominent Republican politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—whose infamous “Don’t say gay” law is of a piece with Moms for Liberty’s seething bigotry—and it is almost certainly funded by major conservative donors.
Obviously, harassment and violent threats are utterly at odds with any analytically respectable notion of “liberty.” But Moms for Liberty is actually a paradigmatic example of what conservatives mean by the term. They mean liberty for themselves and not for you. They get to drive gay teachers out of the profession, they get to decide how you raise your children, they get to shut down gender studies programs in universities, and they get to decide what books your kids read in the classroom. You, by contrast, get to shut up and do what they say—or else.
But all that is powerfully repellent to the suburban homeowner class. Screaming hysterically that popular children’s books are pornography or inciting your feral followers to threaten to murder school board members is alarming to buttoned-down family types used to a baseline of politesse. In terms of policy, as Amanda Marcotte reports at Salon, residents of Philadelphia suburb Bucks County “also feared that rewriting history classes to adhere to right-wing mythologies would ultimately harm the school’s reputation, which could hurt both their property values and the ability of their kids to get into good colleges.” Thus does violent extremism, delivered by the most viscerally unpleasant personalities imaginable, drive a formerly conservative-leaning voting bloc into the arms of the Democrats.
For a leftist, this may be cause for concern. If well-off suburbanites come to constitute the core of the Democratic coalition, then perhaps it might come to reflect their traditional policy views from decades past. But that’s not the only possibility. Suburban homeowners instead might become acculturated to their new coalition, and come to adopt Democratic views on most policy questions. There are signs this might happen—in Minnesota, for instance, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party majority in the legislature passed the most aggressive progressive reforms in decades, at a time when the party’s voters were more educated and suburban than they had ever been before.
And this makes more policy sense than one might suppose. After all, the Bernie Sanders agenda of expanding the welfare state, ending corporate abuses, expanding union rights, and fighting climate change would powerfully benefit middle-class homeowners, if not quite so much minimum-wage workers.
At any rate, that’s a question for the future. For now, we can conclude that Moms for Liberty’s lunatic culture war is not likely to find many adherents in America’s suburbs.
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November 13, 2023 at 05:16PM
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'Moms for Liberty' Fanatics Lose Out Big-Time - The American Prospect
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