This month’s election has prompted much reflection among Democrats shocked by the outcome. There’s been heated discussion about how the Left got to the point of such a resounding defeat, with many blaming “woke” culture. Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton may have best captured the zeitgeist when he told The New York Times, “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” As if to prove his point, Moulton was promptly denounced as a bigot.

We’ve grown accustomed to viewing such exchanges as part of a lamentable “culture war.” But that misses an important dimension to what’s going on. As Mike McShane and I noted this spring, it’s not like the nation is split 50–50 on issues of gender, DEI, illegal immigration, or shared values. The divide tends to be more like 70–30 (or 80–20), with large majorities on one side and a progressive rump of academic and cultural elites on the other. Unfortunately, especially in recent years, the education sector has too often reflected the 20 or 30 percent.

It’s not just the marginalizing of the 70 or 80 percent that’s the problem—it’s also how they’ve been marginalized. Those who disagree on gender or DEI are reflexively shouted down. They’re smeared as white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes, xenophobes, and book-banners, even when such labels are laughable. This is an awful way to order education in a free nation. The strategy has been to silence inconvenient concerns and shame dissidents into submission. Along the way, sensible distinctions were discarded in the name of fealty to social justice.

Gender is a good example. While the acronym LGBTQIA+ has become commonplace in education, it ignores crucial distinctions—like the difference between respecting same-sex love and pretending that sex is a fiction. On the one hand, protecting students from bullying or respecting their right to date whom they like is mostly about respecting individual privacy. On the other hand, accommodating gender dysphoria has yielded something very different, requiring schools to impose new norms on everyone else (e.g. embrace pronoun culture, accept biological males using girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, or allow schools to hide a student’s gender identity from parents). Regardless of one’s commitment to tolerance or mutual respect, though, anyone who questions this litany has been smeared as a bigot and a transphobe.

Or take immigration. There’s an obvious, glaring difference between individuals who are here legally and those here illegally. Yet, in education, this sensible distinction is oft dismissed as a matter of illegitimate hair-splitting. Look, educators have a professional obligation to help every student in their classroom feel valued and welcome. But the day after the election, the California Undocumented Higher Education Coalition (representing 20+ associations, universities, and such) declared, “All students deserve the opportunity to obtain an affordable college education in their pursuit of the American dream, whether documented or not.” Actually, given limited resources, it’s not unreasonable to prioritize the needs of citizens and legal residents rather than those in the country illegally.  Yet, those who maintain that distinction are casually dismissed as xenophobes.

Then there’s diversity and inclusion. One can believe in the importance of respecting every individual while rejecting crude, neo-Marxist paradigms of “privilege” and “oppression.” Teachers who seek to promote universal values—like their students’ “independence,” “individual achievement,” “individual thinking,” and “self-expression”—have been rebuked by professional developers for endorsing oppressive “white individualism.” But one can be for inclusion and mutual respect and against radical, race-based dogmas. And yet, failing to sign onto even the goofiest claims (like the insistence that expecting educators of all races to be on time is racist) has been enough to get dissenters labeled as KKK-style white supremacists.

Another telling example is the gaslighting around “book banning.” In reality, there’s a big difference between banning books and curating what schools put on their shelves. Today, though, authoritative entities like the American Library Association and PEN America pretend no such distinction exists. When parents voice concerns about texts that feature explicit accounts of minors playing with sex toys or engaging in oral sex, they’re belittled as censorious villains. It’s as if one can’t possibly be against pornographic or aggressively sexualized texts in schools (like Gender Queer) and for students reading complex, controversial literature (like Slaughterhouse Five). There’s also a troubling hypocrisy here, given that the ALA and PEN America were conspicuously unbothered when, in the name of social justice, ideologues got Dr. Seuss’s estate to expunge six books and Roald Dahl’s estate to censor his beloved children’s books.)

Progressive ideologues have repeatedly seized upon widely shared sentiments (like tolerance) and then insisted that the only way to honor them is by signing wholesale onto a catalogue of radical propositions. The very act of acknowledging distinctions has become evidence of wrongthink. (It’s of a piece with Ibram X. Kendi’s celebrated contention that the act of questioning “anti-racist” dogma is . . . proof of one’s racism.) By the way, that’s why I admire Moulton for speaking up—and hope others get his back—but also why I sympathize with those parents and populists reluctant to let bygones be bygones now that Moulton and others on the center-left are admitting that social-justice ideology went too far. If you’d spent half a decade or more being labeled a racist, a book-banner, and a bigot, you too might be reluctant to say, “Gosh, let’s just let it go.”

I mean, I’ve lived this all firsthand over the past decade. I’ve been investigated and chased out of university teaching jobs for improper thought. I’ve been lambasted by funders for my supposed bigotry and for failing to use “appropriate” language. I’ve been pilloried as a racist by self-styled social justice advocates. While I believe in the value of leading with shared principles and seeking common ground, it was galling to experience the effectiveness of a strategy of intimidation and denigration.

But bullying and blackmail work only so long. A free people will eventually grow restless and push back. And the 70 or 80 percent has grown more and more irate. The resistance has bubbled up in many forms: parent protests at school board meetings, laws restricting DEI, and litigation around girls’ sports. Now that things have boiled over and are now being recognized by national Democrats as having helped return Donald Trump to office, we may be on the verge of a reckoning—one that will mean that sensible distinctions are once again deemed permissible. If so, it won’t be a moment too soon.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”