What's Wrong with Loudoun County?

 

Loudoun County, Virginia has become the epicenter of the “cold civil war” between the woke/progressive movement – the latest incarnation of the revolution -- and people who are – or who at least consider themselves to be -- “normal”, i.e. ordinary American citizens who ask nothing more than to be left alone. But the question arises, why there, and why now? I believe I can shed some light on the subject, since I lived there for all of 24 years.

First, a bit of geography. Look at a map of Virginia which highlights counties. Working out from D.C., you first come to Arlington County, which was, long ago and far away, part of D.C. (which explains why it's the other part of the 10x10 mile diamond). Arlington, which up until World War II was a scattering of small settlements, got a shot in the arm with the war and the building of the Pentagon and became what is known as a “bedroom suburb”. Over time, Arlington got filled up, so the cancer which actually began with the New Deal spread to Fairfax County, which over time became an even larger and more sprawling bedroom suburb. But like any malignant growth, the government blob needed ever more space, so by 1981 the cancer had spread across the county line into Loudoun – not far, mind you, but enough to constitute a significant “fringe”, beyond which all was still bucolic and green (in the traditional sense). (I used to joke that the suburbs on the eastern edge of Loudoun County were the servants' quarters for Fairfax County. True up to a point, except a lot of the hapless Loudoun residents had to commute all the way into D.C. on a daily basis, a process so brutal that it could be compared to the Trail of Tears. And even so, we spent a lot of time “pitying the fools” who commuted from places even farther away, like Harper's Ferry, Gettysburg, and the Eastern Shore of Maryland. You look hard enough and you can always find someone more miserable than you are.)

So, taking a snapshot circa 1981, Loudoun County was still, by and large, rural. We settled in one of the “borderline” developments, and right across the main road there were horses grazing. And from where we lived to Leesburg (the county seat) it was all horses. Now it's all developments. In fact, the developments have oozed around Leesburg, which is protected by ironclad ordinances, not to mention political pull – in order to preserve its colonial-era, quaint, and picturesque features. (You can't move a brick or prune a tree in “old” Leesburg without getting a permit from the authorities. Needless to say, real estate prices there are comparable to those on Martha's Vineyard. But who can argue with a place that has more boxwood hedges than anywhere else in the U.S.?)

The last time I checked, which was 15 years ago, the suburban sprawl had reached all the way to the first ridge west of Leesburg, and was quickly crawling up said ridge in search of new worlds to despoil. But that was not the only trend of note, by any means. The social history of Washington, D.C. and its suburbs has one overriding theme, which is that people come there in order to get good-paying jobs. And who wouldn't? Problem is, they bring their – in some cases “traditional” – points of view with them. Why, many of them have intact families! And they “cling” to guns and Bibles! And so on. This is because they generally come from farther west or farther south, which means from “the hills”, from “God's country”, and all of that feisty Scotch-Irish DNA doesn't always take kindly to the New Deal/enlightened/progressive/liberal/socialist/woke-ism that emanates out of D.C. like fallout from an atomic blast, except over a much longer time.

So even way back in 1981, there were already signs of trouble. The “Billy Bobs” from up in them thar hills who attended the Evangelical and Fundamentalist churches had to confront, on the job and occasionally right next door, the opposing force – namely big-government socialism and all of its attendant annoyances and persecutions, not to mention its true believers, who considered the outer suburbs as a kind of mission field – the thinking being something along the lines of  “We will enlighten these knuckle-draggers and mouth-breathers, at the point of a gun if need be, and turn them into citizens of the New World Order whether they like it or not.”

Not only that, but the first notable entity in Loudoun County to succumb to the new New Deal mind set was the county government. So you had, basically, a county with a suburban fringe on one end, a “hunt country” elite on the other end (quickly moving on to greener pastures in order to escape suburban sprawl - after cashing out handsomely, needless to say), and in the middle a county government that was indistinguishable from what one might find in, let's say, Sweden, but with even more of an animus toward religion, “family values”, and conservatism of any kind.

“You say 'mayter', and I say to-mah-to”. The ruling class of Loudoun County were NPR listeners, everyone else was into country music. It was BMWs vs. pickup trucks with gun racks. It was polite Episcopalians vs. charismatic Fundamentalists who spoke in tongues. It was gourmet shops vs. BBQ joints. And so on. But, all in all, despite these canyon-like cultural differences there was a kind of peaceful coexistence – the two sides tended to stay out of each other's way most of the time (except when the “regular folks” wound up in court and were confronted by prosecutors straight out of Stalin's show trials).

And – bringing us up to the present day – all was, at first, more or less quiet on the public school front. The “agents of change” had yet to flex their muscles in that venue, and although the county education officials had definite totalitarian tendencies, this had not yet trickled down to the grass roots. Besides, many of the serious traditionalists already had their kids enrolled in church-based schools – all across the spectrum from Evangelical to Fundamentalist. So the public schools were an accident waiting to happen – and sure enough, it has now happened, much to the amazement and puzzlement of all. But if you understand the social history of the place, you understand exactly what's going on. The traditionally-minded, family-oriented people saw nothing terribly wrong with sending their kids off to the public schools, assuming that the “3 R's” were still being taught. Which they were, up to a point – and that was the point at which the agents of change... the vanguard of the revolution, of the culture war... decided to shift into high gear and start introducing... well, you know... all the garbage that is now – whether virtually or in-person, masked or unmasked -- being dumped on public school kids without the knowledge or consent of their parents. And ironically it's the very incidence of the pandemic that has helped bring things to a head. As has been pointed out any number of times, remote, at-home learning necessitated by the pandemic enabled parents to see, for the first time, what their kids were being taught in school, and the response was indignation, outrage, and an urge to not only speak truth to power but to topple that power from its throne. And this was at the same time CRT came along – along with transgender bathrooms and athletes – sex education at a fever pitch (“sex ed” has been with us for decades, but it has now reached escape velocity) – and any of the thousand varieties of race- and gender-shaming that are now everyday business in the public schools. Not to mention masks! Another way of putting it is that the pandemic was supposed to have served as a rationale and as a cover for an escalation of the culture war, in spite of any new level of awareness on the part of the parents. (Or – to put a finer point on it – no one expected the parents to notice that their kids were being brainwashed by Marxists, so when they did notice it caused great consternation and dismay. Busted! And now that sleeping giant known as “parents” is speaking up, and getting in the way, and disturbing the traditionally tranquil atmosphere of school board meetings.)

So imagine if you're a parent with kids in public school in Loudoun County. You moved there to get closer to the cornucopia of unlimited cash and jobs that is D.C. – who wouldn't? And you, innocently, expected the values and attitudes you grew up with in East Overshoe, West Virginia to be reinforced, or at least not actively opposed, by the schools you were sending your kids to. Then came the “reveal”, and now parents are standing up in school board meetings and demanding to know what in hell is going on – and the school board members just sit there stone-faced, like Soviet officials standing on Lenin's Tomb during the May Day parade on Red Square. Yes, they've been “outed”, they've been exposed, but hey – they have all the power, the law is on their side, they represent the dominant culture, and, basically, the parents can just stick it where the sun don't shine. This is their attitude. But I say that this attitude has been building up for nigh unto 40 years now; it's just recently that it has come out into the open through repeated confrontation. And, by the way, it's also a subset of the broader premise that the government owns your children, and all you are is a caretaker at best. And, that the real work – the work of creating a new type of citizen for the servile state – is done away from the atavistic and suffocating atmosphere of “the home”.

And if that weren't enough, now the school boards have called in the FBI to protect them from indignant parents. If you're looking for a Soviet Union starter kit, seek no further – this is not the first battle, nor is it the last, but it's the most consequential. The revolution has always known that the next generation is key – not the grandparents, not the parents (AKA “deplorables”), but the “young skulls full of mush” as Rush Limbaugh used to say. Win the hearts and minds of the next generation and you've won, and the old folks can go to hell; that's the attitude. And the thing is, this works! Or, it works if it is unopposed. Right now the revolution holds all the cards... it has all the political power... it has most (but not all) of the guns... so prospects are not good. But to not oppose would mean to capitulate, to be less then men, less than human... and is this the legacy we want to pass on to the next generation? I fervently hope not.

To paraphrase an old political saying, as Loudoun County goes, so goes the nation – if people do not speak the whole truth to the real power. If they do and fail anyway, it will usher in a long night, and many of us may not live to see the dawn. The Soviet Union lasted 70-plus years before the Russians finally came to their senses and reasserted themselves as a culture – a very traditional and religious one at that. This will take patience, but it will take faith even more.