(Just) a little context, please. Regarding Tuesday and the Democrats’ "ugly reality" (Politico) and their "reeling" from the election results (The New York Times) and how "this is 2009 all over again" (former DCCC chair Steve Israel), ask yourselves two questions:

How many of the stories you have read, seen on TV and online, or heard on the radio have mentioned the fact that 11 of the past 12 Virginia gubernatorial contests were won by the party that lost the previous presidential election … just like on Tuesday?

How many of the stories you have read, seen on TV and online, or heard on the radio have mentioned the fact that no Democratic governor of New Jersey has been re-elected in the previous 44 years … until Tuesday?

I’m not saying it was a good night for Democrats. I just think the tiniest bit of historical context might help stem some of the panic. Much of the Virginia coverage has focused on what Axios called the "Anti-CRT" forces that allegedly "won" across the nation, though it offers the corrective that "[s]chool officials are concerned there’s been intense hype and misinformation … about what’s actually being taught in most schools." The Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson also reports the story under the ridiculous (but likely not the reporter’s fault) headline "Youngkin Pledged More Parental Control of Education, but Changes May Prove Difficult." In her piece, we learn that Republicans are "tapping a national vein of anger among some conservative parents, who insist their children are being indoctrinated with critical race theory." But next we learn that "[t]he theory, a college-level academic framework that holds racism is systemic in America, is not taught at the K-12 level in Virginia—or anywhere else in the country." So good for the Post, in this case. One of the biggest problems with American journalism is the fact that politicians’ lies are rarely corrected in the places where they are robotically repeated—one reason why all that work by its fact-checking teams does the world little good. The fact-check needs to directly follow the lie.

Axios also claims that what we are seeing is the triumph of a "non-Trump Republican surge." This could hardly be more nonsensical. It’s Trumpism with or without Trump, aided by the mainstream media’s constant need to normalize the dangerous turn taken by the modern-day Republican Party. What its candidates are running on are lies in support of racism and ignorance, combined with contempt for the actual mechanics of governance. How else to explain a campaign that closes with an advertisement attacking a Pulitzer Prize–winning 1987 novel by a Nobel laureate (who happens to be a Black woman) in an AP English class, as if this were a genuine question that should decide who should be the next governor of Virginia? I asked a similar question last week, but that was before I saw the power of this transparent nonsense. Who can honestly believe that this line of attack is unrelated to the toxic mix of hatred, aggressive ignorance, and racist fear that Trump doubled down on—but was already present in the party of Reagan and Gingrich? That the media say Youngkin’s campaign marks a turn toward a "post-Trump," less racist GOP demonstrates the unwillingness of our political media to face up to the ugliness that lies very near the center of our political universe. And by refusing to call racism by its real name, they are contributing to its success and are therefore implicated in the damage it does both to our democracy and to the victims of its mendacity.

This political moment reminds me, in a way, of the 1968 New York City teachers’ strike—a fight that caused tremendous lasting damage to liberalism and helped to pave the way for a resurgent right-wing backlash in the form of the Nixon-Agnew administration and all that followed. Historical analogies are always flawed in significant ways, but what that moment has in common with our own is the foolish (and usually phony) demand that teachers need to be policed when choosing their curricula. Back then, a group of largely Jewish public-school teachers found themselves "transferred"—which to them meant "fired"—from their positions in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville area of Brooklyn by the newly ensconced largely Black administration there. Black parents in Ocean Hill-Brownsville were understandably worried that their kids were falling behind on tests and dropping out at astounding rates; some were frustrated that predominantly white teachers didn’t live in the community in which they taught, and they thought Black teachers—or at least those chosen by local Black leaders—might achieve better results. But like Virginia voters, they fell victim to a group of political hucksters who exploited their legitimate concerns on behalf of a political agenda that had virtually no relevance to the actual problems the community faced.

Rhody McCoy, a Black educator who had previously specialized in teaching "teenagers considered too violent for regular classes," was hired to oversee the new experiment with community control, with the blessing of the city government. A Washington, D.C., native, McCoy had attended Howard University and then moved to New York to teach in public schools, by which time he had become an acolyte of the separatist teachings of Malcolm X.

McCoy hired a man named Herman Ferguson as one of his school principals just months after Ferguson had been indicted on charges of conspiring with radical Black activists to murder liberal civil rights leaders Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins. (He would later be convicted and jump bail.) Ferguson authored an article calling for "instruction in gun weaponry, gun handling, and gun safety" and played Malcolm X speeches over the school loudspeakers all day. Next, McCoy transferred 19 teachers and administrators—18 of whom were Jewish—from Ocean Hill-Brownsville, despite this being a clear violation of their union contracts. When they filed a complaint, he announced, "Not one of these teachers will be allowed to teach anywhere in this city. The black community will see to that."

Albert Shanker, the Jewish head of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) union, pointed out that the argument of the community control school boards was similar to the one in which "Southern governors demand the right to do as they wish in the name of states’ rights," and that the issue would end up working not for liberals, but for conservatives. After all, he continued, how to prevent the harassment of teachers who are "teaching about the UN" in conservative neighborhoods? Shanker asked his old friend and ally, the Black labor leader Bayard Rustin, for help. Rustin mobilized Black labor union leaders and activists to support the UFT. When he spoke at rallies, Rustin repeated Shanker’s critique of community control: "What will prevent white community groups in Queens from firing black teachers—or white teachers with liberal views? What will prevent local Birchites and Wallaceites from taking over their schools and using them for their purposes?"

As McCoy was hiring replacement teachers in violation of the UFT contract, Shanker called for a citywide teachers’ strike in support of reinstating the transferred teachers. He argued, "This is a strike that will protect black teachers against white racists and white teachers against black racists." Next, just as the school year was beginning, McCoy announced the replacement of 350 UFT members who had gone out on strike. When the teachers won in court, Shanker called for McCoy to step down and abolish the local governing board. This had the effect of mobilizing the Black community to support their own. Shanker then threw gasoline on the fire when, on behalf of the union, he distributed 500,000 copies of a leaflet left in employees’ mailboxes at a junior high that called Jewish teachers "middle east murderers of colored people" and "bloodsucking exploiters"; it also accused them of "brainwashing" Black children into "self-hatred." It concluded, "The idea behind this program is beautiful, but when the money changers heard about it, they took over." Aryeh Neier, who was then executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, called Shanker’s distribution of the leaflets "a smear tactic reminiscent of the McCarthy era against the governing board in an attempt to create guilt by association."

Victorious in court on September 11, 1968, the teachers returned to Ocean Hill, but Black militants blocked their entry and a crowd gathered to shout anti-Semitic epithets and chants. New York’ s liberal Republican mayor, John V. Lindsay, sought to mediate, and Shanker got most of what he wanted in negotiations. The teachers were by and large returned to their original posts. But the poison remained behind, and almost all of it was understood on all sides to be the fault of "liberals."

What is the point of my rehashing the above (which is drawn from my history of postwar American liberalism, The Cause, where you can find footnotes for all of the above)? Well, what’s playing out in Virginia is the mirror image of what happened in Oceanside-Brownsville 53 years ago. This time, it’s white supremacists using teachers as the scapegoats for the problems they face in their lives, and unscrupulous politicians exploiting their fears and disappointments to try to keep their constituents ignorant. In both cases, the people who will suffer are the students—and the teachers trying to help them, for little money, little respect, and endless abuse by people who don’t give a shit about anything but holding on to the levers of power, by whatever means necessary.