Notoriously liberal San Francisco voters have discovered that even they have limits when it comes to progressivism gone wild. Voters decided overwhelmingly last week to recall three school board members after the board devoted too much of its time to addressing non-urgent progressive causes while parents were demanding solutions to get kids safely back into classrooms.

The whopping margins of disapproval — 72% to 79% favored recalling the three board members — sent a sharp message that voters have had enough. All seven members of the school board are Democrats but only three were eligible for recall. San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who will appoint replacements for the ousted members, said voters "have delivered a clear message" that the school board needs to reorder its priorities.

Parents and teachers reacted with increasing outrage during the pandemic as students struggled with remote learning while the school board focused on whether to rename 44 schools that honored traditional American heroes and prominent figures. The board was consumed with whether Abraham Lincoln's name should be scrubbed from a school because, while working to end slavery, he also ordered executions of Native Americans. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson also were on the renaming list along with Francis Scott Key and Paul Revere.

At the time, Breed labeled the school board's skewed priorities "offensive." The San Francisco Chronicle editorialized that school board members had "largely quit the education business and rebranded themselves as amateur historians." By the time the board decided to abandon the renaming idea last April, public outrage was already at the boiling point.

This is hardly the first time progressives have failed to keep pace with the national mood. They mistook widespread public outrage over police killings of unarmed Black people as a mandate to defund and dismantle local police forces. They got the wrong idea that a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill should be delayed in Congress until it also encompassed trillions of dollars more in social spending that never stood a chance of passage.

At a time when President Joe Biden was struggling in polls and trying to tamp down inflationary spending, progressives demanded he spend more and veer further to the extreme left. They helped drag down Biden's public support and gave Republicans a trove of campaign fodder to exploit in this year's midterm elections.

Americans are fine with tearing down monuments and renaming schools that honor Confederate traitors. But when it comes to yanking down tributes to long-honored historic figures who also had checkered pasts, the nation simply isn't ready to go that far.

If San Francisco voters are tired of it, progressives should take that as a warning sign to recalibrate and reassess where the rest of a far-less liberal nation stands. Righteous as they certainly believe their cause to be, it's destined to failure if the nation's priorities lie elsewhere.

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