How Culture Breeds

For the past two weeks, I’ve been writing here and here about the Salem Library’s levy. The increase in taxes is not to increase services. It’s to sustain spending on services beyond core library functions—you know, boring, old-fashioned book circulation. In short, the Salem Public Library is behaving like a school.

That’s true in more ways than one. Part of the problem with Oregon’s public schools is their focus on reproduction rather than the other three Rs that we expect to train a workforce.

What do I mean by that? Cultural issues in our body politic can be boiled down to procreation. The folks on the left have an anti-natal outlook that they themselves tend to practice. They have fewer children than conservatives. To use a Darwinian term, to be conservative is a trait that has a differential reproductive success over being a progressive. As time goes on, if parents have more impact on passing down culture to their children, then conservatives will literally breed out progressives.

For that reason, you’d be surprised how conscious progressives are about the need to control the commanding heights of educational institutions. To sustain their worldview over time, progressives need to contest the cultural influence of conservative parents on conservatives’ children. From John Dewey (pictured above) to today’s schools of education, there is something more important than training the future workforce: reprogramming the values of children.

Ultimately, this is on the ballot across Oregon next Tuesday. This is the fundamental question behind most school board races and even the Salem Library tax increase: who has the right to have the most influence over the values that are passed down from one generation to the next?

If you live in the Salem-Keizer School District, like I do, and you want parents to retain this influence, like I do, you should vote for Anthony Mitchell, Jennifer Parker, Jason Kroker, and Jeramiah Radka for the school board. You should also vote no on the levy. Neither is a vote against public education or having a public library. These are votes against a DEI industrial complex that expensively uses these institutions for an agenda at variance with what the broader public values them for.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.