California has long played the role of the nation’s testing ground for social justice policies — from banning gas-powered vehicles to serving as a sanctuary state for transgender youth — and recent developments show that even the state’s reliably liberal voters have limits on how much wokeness they’re willing to tolerate.

Just this week, the San Francisco Unified School District proposed closing the racial performance gap by letting struggling students skip class, miss homework deadlines, and retake tests until they pass. The school board’s ill-fated “Grading for Equity” plan was summarily quashed in less than 48 hours after outraged parents berated the proposal on social media.

The idea has been around for a few years, and versions of it are being used around the state. According to The Voice of San Francisco, the nonprofit that broke the story this week, San Francisco’s approach would have been based on the San Leandro Unified School District, where a student with a score as low as 80 can attain an A and as low as 21 can pass with a D.

One could say that the state of California functions as a giant public opinion survey mechanism to measure the viability of policy proposals for the Democratic Party. It sends a strong message that the public is more moderate than the party’s vaunted brain trust of experts and consultants.

There are a number of recent examples that point to this conclusion. In 2020, at the peak of the nation’s so-called racial reckoning, California voters rejected affirmative action in a referendum, repudiating party leadership on race-consciousness that The New York Times described as being “close to gospel within the Democratic Party.”

The city’s school district has a fraught relationship with the city’s residents. The San Francisco Unified School District was forced to reinstate two academically competitive programmes that had been eliminated in an effort to promote racial equity by eliminating competition. In one such case, the school district scrapped a lottery admissions system at the elite Lowell High School and subsequently restored merit-based admissions.

In 2022, San Francisco residents voted to recall three members of the very same school board after officials recommended renaming 44 public schools, including those named after President Abraham Lincoln and prominent Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and also moved to end competitive admissions at the same Lowell High School that attracts high-achieving Asian students.

Still, the list of nostrums and bromides proposed or tried out in the Golden State in the past few years is truly astounding, an omnium-gatherum of millenarian hopes and dreams for a progressive society. How else to describe San Francisco’s Guaranteed Income for Trans People Program (GIFT) that paid low-income transgender residents $1,200 a month and provided “gender-affirming” medicine.

San Francisco’s outlandish reparations proposal, which defies comprehension, included lump-sum payments of $5 million to every eligible black resident, guaranteed annual incomes of $97,000, and homes in San Francisco for just $1 a family.

San Francisco, then, represents a critical mass of state and local social justice mandates, and the residents clearly can’t absorb all of them at once. The school district’s superintendent, Maria Su, acknowledged as much in a public statement about the Grading for Equity pilot project. “I have decided not to pursue this strategy for next year to ensure we have time to meaningfully engage the community,” suggesting she believes that school officials can sway the public on their grading scheme.

Once a California policy catches on, it becomes a candidate to spread to other blue states. Such is the outsized influence of California that snickering at the Golden State is no laughing matter. When California sneezes, America often catches a cold.