Politics & Power Quote by Peter Brimelow

Brimelow’s line is a scalpel aimed at a familiar Republican self-image: the party of “local control,” “parental rights,” and tough-minded culture warriors. The charge isn’t that private school is hypocritical in itself; it’s that opting out quietly rewires incentives. If your own children are insulated from the public system, the argument goes, you lose visceral urgency. You can talk about curriculum battles and unions in abstract, but you’re not living the stakes daily, so your politics drifts toward theater over endurance.

“Subverted” is doing heavy work here. It suggests an internal sabotage, not a defeat at the hands of Democrats or teachers’ unions. The enemy is comfort: leaders whose personal choices soften their willingness to absorb the costs of sustained conflict. “Don’t really have the stomach” frames school politics as trench warfare, a fight that demands tolerance for ugliness, backlash, and long timelines. Brimelow is implicitly praising a different kind of conservative: one willing to keep their kids in the system, endure frustration, and keep swinging.

Contextually, this lands in the long-running school-choice paradox. Many Republican elites champion vouchers, charters, and exit ramps from public schools while still claiming to defend public education’s values. Brimelow flips that: exit becomes betrayal, or at least strategic disarmament. The subtext is a populist jab at party leadership class signals: private schools as a marker of distance from the voters who can’t opt out, and therefore a reason the movement’s rhetoric outpaces its results.