The Trump problem hides bigger trouble in the body politic.

We can't even talk about real issues like school reform until we get this guy off the screen.

National Archives (altered with text)

I understand that the upcoming presidential election is more important than any other in my (very long) life. It’s all the chips, break the bank, pretty much life and death for democracy as we have known it in America. I just find it terribly galling that it also has to be so stupid.

It’s a one-issue presidential election. Trump. And not because of a single policy position or social issue. This election isn’t even political, really. The only issue is that Trump is a loon.

Trump has tremendous support among his insanely loyal loon base. The loons love him. A Trump victory would turn the country neither right nor left. It would turn the country loon. And we can’t have that. Certainly, I understand.

So I have to sit on my hands, keep the duct tape over my lips and vote against lunacy. Got it. That’s fine. I am against lunacy. I don’t want lunacy to win.

But getting Harris elected and Trump off the streets means not talking about the very powerful underground river I hear rumbling beneath my feet, which is the collapse of the post-New Deal liberal compact.

What would a 200-year-old, retired, local, newspaper columnist in Dallas, Texas know about that? Yeah, I know. It’s a bit above my pay grade, not really in my wheelhouse, all that stuff. But I can’t help feeling keenly aware of it because of my proximity to the public school reform effort underway in Houston, which I have been writing about here.

State-appointed reform superintendent Mike Miles has been in place only a little over a year, and already he is racking up hard indisputable data showing that his program works. Kids who had been abandoned to the kindergarten to prison pipeline now can be rescued by raising them to full literacy by the end of the third grade.

It’s not a debating point. It’s a fact. He's doing it to scale in a huge urban school district.

The teachers’ unions are solidly and adamantly opposed to the Miles reforms. I would run through all of that in more detail, but I’ve already done that here so often I worry about boring people.

 The elevator pitch is this: an indispensable element of the Miles reforms is performance-based pay and tenure for teachers. The unions hate that. They don’t want to give up seniority-based pay hikes and job protection for all.

No union would. No union wants management picking winners and losers among the rank and file. All of that even would be fairly legitimate – a classic labor/management standoff – if the teachers’ unions ever owned up publicly to their own real issues. But they won’t.

I have offered theories here before about why. Today I think I’ll leave my mind-reading talents on the shelf and stick to observable fact. Instead of stating their true issues clearly and publicly, the teachers’ unions have invented an entire action movie mythology about a sinister Wall Street plot to take over public education, with the unions in the role of caped heroes protecting the children from the greedy capitalist bastards.

They never explain why on earth the greedy capitalist bastards would want to own public education. What’s the game? Couldn’t the greedy capitalist bastards make a lot more money manufacturing barn-wall-sized television sets in Viet Nam?

But in the end I guess I view all of that the same way I view most labor/management disputes. People say crazy stuff. May the best side win. That’s not what I hear rumbling beneath my feet.

What worries me deeply is the reflexive support the teachers’ unions receive from liberals and specifically from the Democratic Party. I have heard and read a lot of analysis explaining it on the basis of money – a flood of cash the party and candidates get from the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. I’m sure that’s a lot of it.

 But it’s not the full explanation. When I talk to my liberal friends – most of my friends are liberals – I find there is a sticking point, a kind of brick wall that I run into when I start talking about what Miles is doing in Houston. That point of resistance occurs exactly where I start talking about successfully teaching reading skills to children who are victims of poverty, racism and segregation.

Most of my liberal friends believe that teaching literacy to those children without first resolving poverty, racism and segregation is a profoundly conservative and possibly even racist proposal. Baked into their worldview is the assumption that these greater societal ills must be resolved before any real academic achievement can or should be expected or achieved.

And here is the rub. No one has the slightest idea how to truly resolve poverty, racism and segregation. But Mike Miles does know how to teach reading.

What happens to his kids? Nobody knows yet, because they’re still in grade school. But a wealth of historical data predicts that children who can read and do arithmetic, as opposed to those who cannot, will stay in school and graduate prepared for higher education, the military or employment. (The teachers’ union in Chicago has dared to deride this outcome as producing “corporate widgets.” They need to go spend a week in an Illinois state penitentiary and see what life is like for prison widgets.)

In other words, armed with literacy and math, the children Mike Miles is teaching in Houston right now will go forth into this sometimes brutal world armed with what they will need to resolve their own poverty, racism and segregation. Right there – at that precise point in the story – is where my friends and I hit our wall.

It won’t be us, really. The kids won’t need us. We will have done a wonderful thing for them and for our nation if we have contributed in any meaningful way to their own achievement in school. But then they’re ready to rock and roll on their own. We can go back to selling insurance. Maybe someday we’ll be able to sell some to them.

That’s the wall. The thing we can’t give up is our own role as Lord and Lady Bountiful. We can’t be satisfied with helping make this happen for disadvantaged children and then getting the hell out of their way. And why?

Well, the Bountifuls, you know. They are the lord and lady. In that sense, our refusal to accept the full potential that dwells within reach in the hearts and minds of disadvantaged children is the last grasp we have on our own superiority.

The teachers’ unions, I get. I don’t like how they go about it, falsely accusing their opponents of corruption and mendacity, and I hate the way a weakened local press plays accomplice to it. But there you have it.

Much more troubling to me – the river beneath my feet – is the thought that my own tribe, we liberals, may actually be mounting racism’s last stand.

But forget everything I just said. It makes absolutely no difference right now. If I weren’t such a cripple, I would go buy myself a nag and ride it through the town at dawn crying, “THE LOON IS COMING! THE LOON IS COMING!”