There was a time when challenging broken institutions was the Democratic Party’s calling card. Democrats didn’t just tolerate disruption, they drove it, demanding that schools, health care and government agencies answer to the people they were supposed to serve, not the other way around. That instinct produced some of the party’s greatest achievements.
Once the populist force — suspicious of institutions and champions of those too often overlooked and left behind — the party is now widely perceived, and increasingly operating, as the party of elites and institutional insiders. Meanwhile, Republicans, long the party of the establishment and elite-oriented, have absorbed the populist energy that once defined the left.
Nowhere is that reversal more glaring or more costly than in America’s K-12 schools. Since the end of the Obama years, Democrats have defended the system despite evidence of mounting failure. Reading and math scores fell sharply. Achievement gaps widened. Chronic absenteeism surged. And the Democratic Party’s answer has been to default to a system-protection mindset, rather than question whether that system is working. The party has deferred to administrators, shielded unions and told frustrated families to trust a system that has repeatedly failed their children.