By Jahlil Rush
For years, Charles Siler was a poster child for American conservatism. The son of Evangelical Christians, Siler enlisted in the military and later attended George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, a bastion of conservative thinking.
After graduating from college, Siler moved to Arizona and joined the Goldwater Institute, a conservative, libertarian-leaning political think tank, where he became a lobbyist.
Like most conservatives, he believed the path to societal betterment was via free markets and not government spending.
“I saw government agencies as little more than hives of self-serving bureaucrats looking for ways to increase their budgets by robbing more and more money from taxpayers, all the while standing in the way of innovation and success,” Siler wrote in a blog post.
But, while working for the Goldwater Institute, Siler had an epiphany that would transform him into a liberal crusader. Siler says he came to the realization that conservative policies, like school privatization, were not well received by a majority of Americans, and that they failed to deliver on their promised improvements.
“Pro-privatization groups fight with incredible vigor to block any efforts to collect data on privatization programs,” Siler said. “When data was available, I could see myself that the programs I was selling rarely seemed to produce academic benefits for students, even as they increased inequity.”
Siler knows whereof he speaks. He worked closely with conservative figures like Clint Bolick, a former Goldwater Institute operative who played a key role in pushing the narrative that Critical Race Theory was being taught in schools; Bolick is now an Associate Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court.
“Critical race theory is just the latest vehicle for the right-wing grievance industrial complex,” said Siler. “When I was working at the Goldwater Institute one of the biggest challenges that I faced was how do we take these really unpopular ideas and frame them as broadly popular. This is where the culture wars really come into play… as a smokescreen to advance their political goals.”
Siler’s political transformation came to fruition when he reunited with Dawn Penich-Thacker, his former boss from the military and co-founder of Save Our Schools Arizona, a non-profit organization that advocates for public schools. At the time of their reunion, in 2017, Siler and Penich-Thacker found themselves on opposite sides of a panel debating school vouchers in Arizona schools.
“That encounter marked the resumption of my friendship with Dawn,” Siler said. “It also forced me to engage in a much more critical examination of school privatization than I’d ever done before.”
Siler saw his encounter as a chance to reevaluate school-privatization policies after listening to how passionately she talked about how charter schools were negatively impacting families.
When Arizona state legislators added a universal school-voucher measure to the ballot in 2018, Siler teamed up with Save Our Schools, during the midterm elections, to help defeat the voucher measure. The 2018 attempt failed to pass the state’s legislature. Republican Sen. Paul Boyer blamed the 2018 failure on the public’s fear of imposing a permanent limit on how many vouchers could be provided in the future.
In February 2022, the Arizona Senate voted to expand the state’s school voucher program through Senate Bill 1657. The bill is now pending in the Arizona House.
But there is one way in which Siler has held true to his Goldwater pedigree. Siler noted that one way in which conservatives are better than Democrats is in strategizing. He credits Republicans for their ability to hone in on specific issues that matter to the conservative base. Siler cites recent nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court, leading to a 6-3 conservative majority, as well as President Donald Trump appointing nearly three quarters of current sitting federal judges.
“The right has a laser focus on its objectives,” Siler said, much more so than Democrats. “They have very local, economic concerns that align a lot with very progressive people. But they do a lot of these issues through a lens that is filled with bigotry and bias.”
Another big difference between Democrats and Republicans is how they use funding, said Siler. While Republicans have more money, they are also smarter about the way they invest it, seeding small political entities that make a big impact.
Jaynie Parrish, Executive Director of the Navajo County Democrats, shared a similar sentiment. She argued that the local Democratic party would have gotten much more bang for its buck if it had invested directly in groups like hers, which helped turn Arizona purple in 2020.
“Give us more money to hire people, let us manage it,” said Parrish, noting that Native communities are “frustrated” because the Democrats aren’t sufficiently trusting, and capitalizing on, the network Native Democrats have established.
Charlie Fisher, executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party, makes a case that the Democratic party is a big party that serves a broad range of interests.
“The Democratic Party truly is a coalition,” said Fisher. “We really are a big tent,” which makes coordination more difficult.
Siler warns that the Democrats risk losing the war on messaging, and sites public education as an example. He notes that for the past 20 years Democrats have been praised for their positions on issues like education.
But in a November 2021 released Morning Consult poll, the Democratic lead on education decreased to 7 points from 20 points in January 2021. And a Wall Street Journal poll, this March, showed the Democrats lead on education at just 5 points.
“So the culture wars stuff is a way to motivate people to have animus and hostility towards their public schools, so that they start actively looking for a way out, or for a way to get into the system by being elected to their school boards, and then destroying the public schools from within,” Siler said.
As for Siler, his goal now is to use the same legal strategies that have been so successful for conservatives in the interest of progressive causes.