San Francisco’s recall isn’t entirely about the ‘woke left’ going too far

Pandemic fatigue, money and anti-Asian racism all played a role in the recall, writes Eric Garcia

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As soon as the polls closed and declared that voters successfully recalled three members of San Francisco’s school board, the stories almost immediately wrote themselves about how this was an example of the “woke left” having gone too far, even for a decidedly liberal city like San Francisco.

In 2020, stories abounded about how the school board sought to rename schools named for Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. This made the recall seem like once again, crunchy California liberals have run amok and are caring about minute details. This has launched a slew of takes about a backlash against “woke” politics or “the left” and how it’s a warning for Democrats ahead of the midterm elections.

Meanwhile, Axios wrote that “Squad politics backfire,” using an image of Reps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, the original members of the Squad who have become a vessel for the left-wing of Democratic politics. This also comes off the heels of Democrats losing the governorship in Virginia for the first time in a decade largely on the backs of Republicans harping on teaching “critical race theory,” a niche legal theory that has become a catch-all for any education about race.

Similarly, Politico reported that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s own research found that Democrats are seen as “preachy,” “judgmental” and “focused on culture wars.”

The recall was in fact a shocker for many reasons, but the idea that it is a referendum on the Squad specifically is unfounded. The four progressives – and their fellow Squad members Reps Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush and their allies – have not made renaming schools or teaching anti-racism cornerstones of their campaign. Rather, they have mostly focused on passing the president’s far less ambitious Build Back Better agenda, which was why all of the members of the Squad were the only Democrats who voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

While Ms Bush has said she would not let up on talking about defunding the police, there is little chance of Democrats adopting it when Joe Biden, who clearly opposes doing so, is president. Similarly, equating one group of women of colour for people of colour simply because they are all progressive people of colour is intellectually lazy thinking.

Similarly, in the case of San Francisco’s recall, plenty of the concern was also due to frustration with the fact the school board was not sufficiently focused on the pandemic.

“If you want to rename 44 schools, that’s great — but please make sure the kids inside those walls can read,” Autumn Autumn Looijen, co-founder of the Recall SF School Board campaign, told Politico in an interview. In addition, as The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel noted, the recall campaign raised $1.9m whereas the campaigns to keep former board vice president Alison Collins, former Commissioner Faauuga Moliga and school board President Gabriela López raised only $90,000.

In addition, there were intensely local politics in the recall. Mayor London Breed, a Democrat, backed the recall and old tweets showed Ms Collins making disparaging remarks about Asian-Americans, which came at a time when many Asian Americans are understandably concerned about their safety as people blame them for the Covid-19 pandemic.

There are legitimate lessons to be learned from the recall. But they go far beyond the normal left-punching.