As Hanania says, left-wing policies often achieve more success through managerial and legal channels than they could by appealing to voters. Over time, as status-quo bias kicks in, that can even provide a backdoor route to popular support. But as the alternative examples show, just as frequently it doesn’t. At which point the consensus of the managerial class can become a problem rather than an aid.

To return to critical race theory, and how Republicans made it an issue: Was the name technically inaccurate when applied to public school curriculums? In many cases, yes. Was the breathless conservative media coverage making what was happening sound more radical, and more common, than it actually is? Also yes. Would some of the angry parents really prefer the lightest possible gloss on America’s history of racial injustices? Yes once more. Is it impractical for every parent to have a veto over every lesson? Undoubtedly.

Nonetheless, the absolutely worst possible political response was to say “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions,” as Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe did. Nor was it much better to insist that nothing was happening in schools — even as schools were talking about their “equity work” — or to deny that CRT had anything to do with primary or secondary schools even as the educational bureaucracy was calling it an “important analytic tool in the field of education.”