As a guest on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin encouraged Republicans to run on “kitchen table issues.” While most anyone will agree with his statement on the surface, we may disagree on what a kitchen-table issue is. For Youngkin, they include inflation, schools, and safe communities. The fact that he included both economic and cultural issues in his characterization demonstrates his political aptitude and provides a bit of a warning for Republicans in coming election cycles. While they should certainly knock Democrats for the Biden administration’s failures in economics, they should not forget that there are cultural battles that continue to need fighting.
One of the reasons that last year’s Virginia gubernatorial election was so contentious was that many saw it as a referendum on the issues of Covid-19 governance and critical race theory. Americans have little tolerance left for the vestiges of the draconian pandemic policies that kept children out of school and, if they were lucky enough to be back, masked up for far too long. Democrats will likely (and hopefully) not push new regulations, with the new variants becoming much milder, but CRT and other cynical ideologies like it will not disappear any time soon.
The future of the @GOP is centered around kitchen table issues. Rising inflation & high gas prices don’t discriminate whether you have an R or D by your name. Voters want leaders that cut taxes, stand with law enforcement, & understand that parents matter, just like in VA. pic.twitter.com/THchBjdyVz
— Governor Glenn Youngkin (@GovernorVA) July 10, 2022
On that front, the prime driver of Youngkin’s success was his ability to not only take advantage of the ill will toward CRT, but also prove that Republicans could campaign against it responsibly. The arguments of CRT defenders and proponents on the left, which we especially saw in Virginia’s Loudoun County, changed often. At first, CRT was a graduate-level concept and was absolutely not being taught in schools. Later, it was just synonymous with teaching about slavery and Jim Crow.
Youngkin’s great strength was his articulation of the case against it: Far from simply teaching about past instances of racism, CRT is the belief that the American system is set up to advantage white people at the expense of black people, an untrue idea that makes white kids feel unnecessarily guilty and tells black kids that they will never be able to succeed, both because of the color of their skin.
When he became governor, he followed through on his critiques of the belief system, issuing a directive that prohibited the dogmatic teaching of “inherently divisive” topics, such as those that were in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He had the same attitude in his Sunday interview, in which he said that we have to “teach all of our history, the good and the bad, but we shouldn’t play privilege bingo with children.”
Both the political and economic realms of our politics exist in a delicate balance, to which we must adapt each year. Sometimes, one may need greater focus than the other. In 2021, the economy was in relatively healthy shape, so people may have been more enthralled with cultural issues. This year, our economy is undergoing serious difficulties, so CRT may need to take a back seat.
This is the most effective way to look at the relationships among different issues. If we determine that one issue is particularly salient, however, we should be sure not to focus on it at the expense of the others. Being in politics requires playing a long game, and every righteous battle will be important at one time or another.