Several nuggets have been circulating in the news during the past week or so that crystallize, again, the veracity of Richard Weaver’s book-length observation that “ideas have consequences.”

Someone, for instance, had the bright idea a couple years ago that keeping schools shuttered for an extended period of time was a worthy endeavor, indispensable in fighting COVID, and of little consequence. That someone (though she was not alone) was predominantly Randi Weingarten, the neo-Trotskyite head of the American Federation of Teachers. She strove ferociously against opening schools up for classroom instruction many months after it was abundantly clear that about the only thing inconsequential about that policy was its impact on the spread of COVID.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released their 2022 student test scores last week, which put an empirical punctuation on that particular left-wing failure. The numbers are as depressing as one would expect: math scores among average nine-year-olds saw the biggest drop since the scores starting being recorded in 1973 — 7 percentage points since pre-pandemic 2020; reading scores among the same group fell by 5 points, the largest margin since 1990, erasing three decades worth of (still modest) literacy gains. That loss, though experienced across all socio-economic strata, was particularly acute among lower-income and minority students.

Predictably, the liberal educational autocracy tried to either downplay the results, or conjure up a host of alternative explanations, blaming everything from staff shortages and cyber bullying to school shootings for the score declines, everything except the most obvious disruption — Weingarten and other union leaders demanding that schools remain closed, and the local school boards and governments who placated them. In retrospect, probably the best thing for American education in the last two years (aside, of course, from a workable voucher system) would have been for Weingarten to stay home and not do her job, rather than try to tell her members not to.

It needs to be added that the prolonged school shutdowns, the absurdity of which the NAEP test scores highlight, signify only an acute part of the more intrinsic problem facing public education. Much has been, can and will be written on the subject, but public education has for decades now faced a crisis, the victim of a liberal faith in the magical properties of public education to impose an egalitarian homogeneity on society, which has translated into public schools being the instruments of achieving the lowest common denominator. The failures of this are steady, gradual and pernicious; the failures of abiding by union dictates to keep schools closed was naturally more acute, but merely a symptom of a greater disease.

The failures of other left-wing experiments are not difficult to spot, the most immediate being in the area of crime. Here again, the statistics put an empirical point on the real-world experience of increased violence, theft, drug use and disorder that plague virtually every major U.S. city, Denver quite conspicuous in not being an exception. Here we see the results of liberal “justice reform” experimentation playing out in the highest rate of car thefts in the nation, a tragic increase in fentanyl (and other drug) overdoses, street violence and property crime rates increasing; virtually every measurement of criminal disorder one can come up with paints a grim, dangerous picture. And yet we still are subject to railings about the police use of force, the indignity of incarceration for offenders, the injustice of pre-trial detention — and now we must even watch absurdities like the city of Portland, Oregon. Portland embraced some of the most preposterous anti-law enforcement policies in the nation, and countenanced lawlessness to an egregious degree. It’s outmatched only by Seattle’s surrendering of part of its city to a criminal insurgency.

The failures in energy policy are just as obvious. Here, we start to see the starkness of reality setting in. Not in California, of course, where the push for electrification and the imposition of impossible renewable mandates has resulted in entirely predictable and preventable blackouts — but in Germany, where the realization that at least 80% of electricity has to come from either nuclear power or fossil fuels has prompted the relentlessly Green government to hold off on abandoning the country’s nuclear program and keep three of its plants operating. This after they quietly resumed importing coal.

Small steps, but hopeful. As was Chileans’ overwhelming rejection of a proposed new constitution that looked like something that would be drawn up if you put Karl Marx, Anton Lavay and Timothy Leary (on his less coherent days) in a room together. Such events fuel faith that reality does indeed have a way of catching up, even politically.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.