If I can, in a spirit of charity, encourage Democrats to tattoo one headline onto their forearms, as they attempt to recalibrate their political strategy in the wake of either Youngkin’s victory or McAuliffe’s near miss, it would be this, from Fox News’s Juan Williams, writing Monday in The Hill: “‘Parents’ rights’ is code for white race politics.” If you tell parents that attempting to exert influence on their kids’ school policies is just some kind of “Let’s Go Brandon” wink-nudge for hating on the dark-skinned, those parents will rightly tell you to go fuck yourself. Such choices do not successful political strategies make.

Calling people racist can work in the short term—to shut critics up, guilt people into accepting policy changes they don’t agree with, even drive out the demographically/ideologically undesirable. But for those who find themselves unfairly on the receiving end of, or even adjacent to, our political culture’s remarkably breezy standards for deploying the scarlet R, the results can be radicalizing. The potency of shame wanes with its overuse, and people no longer afraid of speaking are going to say many things you do not want to hear…

Public schools are one of the last allegedly neutral playing fields in American civic life, at a time when partisans do not care much for neutrality. It is inevitable that their governance will be hotly contested, with hyperbolic overreach on all sides. But if McAuliffe loses Tuesday, and Democrats retreat to a blame-racists storyline, this very institution that they overwhelmingly influence in 2021 will teeter that much closer toward collapse. There’s a lesson to be learned there.