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Something about reading school vouchers as far-right just rubs me the wrong way. Though I agree it comes from people generally associated with the right the actual policy feels very liberal to me. Politics have strange coalitions I guess where certain policies become coded to a tribe.
On one hand you have “Individuals get to choose what and how their children are taught in school while selecting an environment that best fits them as an individual” versus a “top down the government decides what and how children are taught”.
The origional purpose of public schools was a bit of let’s teach kids to read and do arithmetic plus a lot of we are a new nation state and public schools will uniform our language, memes, national Origen mythology and become good citizens within the territory we have won thru war and declared a unified political authority. The building of a nation-state or the process most formed thru feels very right-wing.
Perhaps, initial America founding was a little left wing but public schools also served a purpose in American history of taking Irish/Italian/Polish/Hispanic immigrants and turning them into nice little Protestant value Americans or as close as they could.
Alright, if the public schools are teaching the pre-existence of souls, I want a voucher right here and now.
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It is very liberal, philosophically; it's just not inherently left-wing.
Principled right-libertarians exist (though in insufficient numbers...), and many other modern right-wing people have been pushed to adopt liberal philosophies, at least out of expediency, since liberal philosophies are the ones that still let you coexist when (like the modern right) you're not powerful enough to expect to come out on top in an illiberal system. @ArjinFerman is probably correct below when he writes "Politics is not about policy as it relates to various philosophies, as nice as that would have been." I fear many supporters of school vouchers would never give the idea a second glance if only control of their public school systems was still in their allies' hands rather than their opponents'.
There's this too. Schizmogenesis is a powerful force. I never imagined I'd see leftists defending the unimpugnable integrity of pharmaceutical companies and voting machines, or rightists becoming pro-Russian tankies, but maybe that's just what happens when the vibe of "not only am I not like Them, I'm the most not-like-Them it's possible to be!" gets socially rewarded.
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The most hilarious part is that Elizabeth Warren wrote favorably about school vouchers in The Two Income Trap. She also expressed a decidedly mixed view on women entering the workforce. The past really is a foreign country.
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It's not even so much about coalitions, as it is about assets. Public schools are a center of power for progressives, a voucher system would upset the structures this center is built on, it might even let the conservatives build a few forts of their own. Politics is not about policy as it relates to various philosophies, as nice as that would have been.
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