It would appear there are no settled questions, at least not in the public realm. Not so long ago it was generally understood the great debate that populated the latter half of the last century — the clash between capitalism and communism — had been decisively won on the side of freedom in the wake of the good guys winning the Cold War. Shortly thereafter the 1990s brought us a Democratic president in the U.S. declaring “the era of big government was over,” and a Labour prime minister in Britain who believed in free trade.

A few decades later, the specter of socialism has reanimated its ugly self, fueled by a generation well removed from the horrors of its official application. We see this in the gradually increasing influence of the Democratic Socialists, and a number of other far-left social movements taking hold throughout the West. Not to mention the People’s Republic of China which, under the thumb of President Xi Jinping, is rediscovering its Maoist roots.

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At the more micro level, we had all pretty much assumed a few years ago the perennial oil and gas battles in Colorado were over, the anti-oil and gas side having essentially won. Gov. Jared Polis had even declared them over, on his victory tour after the signing of SB-181. But the industry stubbornly held on by a thread, as it turned out people still liked to drive and turn on their lights, and that still required oil and gas, and Colorado still had a bunch of it. Any shed of a semblance of a healthy resource-extraction industry proved intolerable to the environmental left. So the war resumed with a multi-prong offensive during this legislative session, led by the suicide attack of SB-159, which was intended to literally deliver the death blow, by eliminating oil and gas permitting over the next few years.

It also wasn’t all that long ago the advent of charter schools seemed to be the answer to society’s educational prayers. Still public schools, charters offered many of the benefits of competition and private education, without the political encumbrance associated with the logical solution to the delivery of education in the face of the failing public school model. Republicans and Democrats both liked them, inner-city folks liked them, suburbanites liked them — everyone liked them. And why shouldn’t they? Charters offered parents an alternative to government schools, and the chance at an excellent education.

Their overall success in providing quality and choice made them attractive to enough Democrats — including Polis, who liked the model so much he started his own — that few serious efforts were made to curtail or oppose them. Another policy that seemed more or less settled, with only a few noisy outliers here and there.

Well, that changed too. This year, a bill — HB-1363 — was introduced that did pose a serious challenge to the charter model. Most of the stuff in the bill was rather redundant — it called for things already being done in any case — but opened an ominous door to allowing hostile school boards (and teachers unions) to deny or pull a school’s charter.

Fortunately, the concept of charter schools has been so universally recognized as successful for so long, the bill died rather spectacularly in the first committee, on a broadly bipartisan basis. But it is widely assumed there will be further attacks.

The opposition to charter schools largely mirrors that brought against other educational choice options, mostly coming from, unsurprisingly, the teachers’ unions. The arguments, when you boil them down, center largely on, one, the fact charters generally do not require their teachers to join unions and, two, horror at the thought of education being handled by an entity other than the government, which may give precedence to things like teaching history, music, classics and math over painting every subject with the trendy ideological brush of the day. The teachers’ unions are a pretty powerful behemoth, and quite jealous of the government monopoly on education. They can be expected to keep chipping away at any threat to that monopoly, especially ones that demonstrate a record of educational success.

This will be an important issue to watch, both for all who value the cultivation of an educational system that prioritizes the production of literate citizens over political molding, and those of the resurgent far left who value the reverse.

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