Donald Trump is not a traditional conservative. Traditional conservatives respect existing norms, values and institutions. Trump does not. He is America’s first elected autocrat and aspiring dictator. In that role, he views such norms, values and institutions as something to be crushed and rolled over by the MAGA movement’s shock and awe campaign. The rubble of those institutions will be used as fuel and material for Trump and his forces to erect their New MAGA America, which will be a 21st-century version of Jim Crow and a White Christian nationalist herrenvolk fake democracy.
Following the authoritarian model(s) of Viktor Orban’s Hungary and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Trump and his allies and enablers are attempting to take control of the country’s political, social, economic, religious, cultural and scientific reas of public life, government and society. The White Christian nationalists have parallel and intersecting goals which are described as the “Seven Mountains Mandate.” Given their shared authoritarian values, public opinion polls have repeatedly shown that White Christian nationalists are consistently among Donald Trump’s most loyal and enthusiastic supporters.
“The common ground that public education has represented throughout this nation’s history is eroding underneath our feet.”
The campaign to end America’s multiracial pluralistic democracy and to replace it with a form of competitive authoritarianism (or something much worse) will require training and conditioning the thinking, emotions and other behavior of the American people. Through this process, the distinction between private and public will be increasingly erased; MAGA and American neofascism are “whole life systems.” These changes will happen both quickly and over time.
America’s educational system is a central target in this revolutionary antidemocratic project. If Trumpism and the larger neofascist project, as detailed in Project 2025 and Agenda 47 and elsewhere, can turn America’s educational system into a machine for right-wing authoritarian political indoctrination (under the guise of “patriotic education” and “free market values”) then such forces will literally have won the future by influencing the young people of today.
On this, the New York Times Editorial Board warns:
When a political leader wants to move a democracy toward a more authoritarian form of government, he often sets out to undermine independent sources of information and accountability. The leader tries to delegitimize judges, sideline autonomous government agencies and muzzle the media. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has done so over the past quarter-century. To lesser degrees, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey recently have as well.
The weakening of higher education tends to be an important part of this strategy. Academic researchers are supposed to pursue the truth, and budding autocrats recognize that empirical truth can present a threat to their authority. “Wars are won by teachers,” Mr. Putin has said. He and Mr. Erdogan have closed universities. Mr. Modi’s government has arrested dissident scholars, and Mr. Orban has appointed loyal foundations to run universities.
President Trump has not yet gone as far to impede democracy as these other leaders, but it would be naïve to ignore his early moves to mimic their approach. …
Mr. Trump’s multifaceted campaign against higher education is core to this effort to weaken institutions that do not parrot his version of reality.
In an attempt to better understand how America’s educational system is under siege in the Age of Trump, the role of the country’s schools and educational system in the democracy crisis and the historical continuities from the White racial authoritarian regime of Jim Crow (and chattel slavery) against Black Americans to Trumpism, I recently spoke with Derek W. Black. He is the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina and one of the country’s leading experts in education, law and public policy. Derek Black’s essays and other writing have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, The Atlantic and elsewhere. His research has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, NYU Law Review, California Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review and the Vanderbilt Law Review. His new book is “Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy.”
This is the first part of a two-part conversation.
How are you feeling, given the rapid decline of America’s democracy with Trump’s return to power? How are you managing on a day-to-day basis?
My default predisposition is to find silver linings, not overreact and stay calm while others are screaming. I don’t recall ever struggling with that default in the past, but in the last several weeks there have been days when deep feelings of dread set in because I was seeing things I never thought I would live to see and I could not explain them away. Given time, however, I can usually find my way back.
The classroom and educational system are inherently political spaces. Authoritarians and autocrats know this, which is why they target schools and colleges and universities — and educational systems more broadly.
I think this is the space where a lot of our leaders and regular voters are sleepwalking. A pillar of our democracy, our schools, is being targeted in a way that seeds and reinforces autocratic populism, but many people have convinced themselves that this detonation at the highest level is just normal politics. All the while, the common ground that public education has represented throughout this nation’s history is eroding underneath our feet.
“We are running off a critical mass of generational talent right now.”
Anxiety levels are very high right now, higher than they were during Trump’s first administration. It is the first and last thing on people’s minds when they meet. In public spaces, they find it hard to have a serious conversation — probably for fear of losing decorum. Even in private spaces, people have to manage and tamp down the emotions they are experiencing lest it overwhelm their entire life. People still have to put their kids to bed, make lunches, get ready for work and pay the bills.
The personal is the political. Power acts on people. I have several friends who work in higher education who tell me how these attacks by the Trump administration and their forces have driven them to quit. Others have shared how their emotional health is suffering, and it is very difficult for them to do their jobs. Students are suffering great anxiety and uncertainty too. This trauma is by design. How will the Trump years impact our schools and educators (and this generation of students) in the long term?
I can’t predict the future, but what I can tell you is that we are losing some of our best and brightest, and I don’t expect they will come back any time soon. So, the net result is that we are running off a critical mass of generational talent right now. That’s a gap I don’t see us filling. It’s the same thing at the U.S. Department of Education. We have people with decades of experience who are being run out the door. Many of these people are irreplaceable. No future election is going to fix the problem.
What would a system of high-quality education that teaches the meaning of good citizenship in a democracy look like?
Over the last two decades, our infatuation with test scores and standardized curricula has squeezed out civics and the democratic function of schools. People began to take note of the problem around 2016. Even a bipartisan group of US senators started pushing a civics bill. Unfortunately, you can’t just plug civics and democracy into a system based on standardization and expect meaningful results. Sure, we might have more young people able to pass the equivalent of the citizenship test, but does that mean they are prepared to engage with the real problems our democracy faces? I don’t think so. We need to create the time and space in schools for young people to learn to wrestle with hard issues, to debate one another, to learn how to be wrong and change their minds and to come to appreciate those values that have held this democracy together for two and a half centuries.
How and why did civics and social studies education atrophy in America’s schools?
Starting with the No Child Left Behind Act and then the Every Student Succeeds Act, we have mandated annual testing in reading and math. Science gets tested once in elementary, once in middle and once in high school. Those are the tests we hold schools accountable for, so states and schools understandably have ramped up the amount of time and credits devoted to those subjects. Those increases often came at the expense of social studies. Only 10% of instruction time goes to social studies in elementary school. Things are better in higher grades, but still too low. To be clear, this is not just the fault of lawmakers. I saw the Great Recession really change parents’ and young people’s outlook on their education; jobs were tough to land, so they only wanted to take courses with a clear runway into professional jobs. So again, your liberal arts and “perspective” type courses took an enormous hit.
America’s literacy crisis cannot be reasonably separated from America’s democracy crisis. Most Americans read below a 6th-grade level. Authoritarians and other such malign actors take advantage of desperate people who want simple solutions to complex problems.
I have been shouting about this for well over a decade and did a TEDx talk on it in 2018. People’s ability to participate in the political process and hold elected officials accountable is almost entirely dependent on literacy. But basic literacy is not enough. People actually need critical literacy — and critical media literacy. It is not enough to simply be able to decode words at a high school or college level. People have to also be able to evaluate those words, spotting the half-truths, hyperbole, ambiguities, inaccuracies, and values behind those words — and those skills go back to social studies. I actually think that critical media studies may be one of the most important things schools can teach, and of course, basic literacy and foundational knowledge are prerequisites to that type of learning.
But critical literacy needs basic information too. A mere ten percent of instructional time in elementary school goes to social studies — about the same as art and music. Unsurprisingly, national tests show that only one in five students are reaching “proficiency” in civics. Only two percent are “advanced.” Adults’ civic knowledge is no better. Less than half of adults can name all three branches of government. Only a third can pass the U.S. Citizenship test. Similarly, small percentages can “identify the Constitution as the supreme law of the land,” the length of a U.S. Senator’s term in office, or the “number of justices on the Supreme Court.”
In his 2019 annual report, Chief Justice John Roberts offered a sobering account: “We have come to take democracy for granted.” He explained that our democracy is not self-perpetuating but is a “continuing enterprise and conversation” that depends on civic education. The current “generation has an obligation to pass on to the next, not only a fully functioning government responsive to the needs of the people, but the tools to understand and improve it.” Unfortunately, the powers that be are not listening. They are attacking and undermining our education system, making the collapse of democracy all the more likely.
We are literally in a place where people struggle to sort fact from fiction, legal from illegal, democratic from authoritarian. As a result, a president can unilaterally seize control of nearly the entire federal budget, and make arbitrary decisions about what should or should not be funded, and a large chunk of the American public thinks that is good policy. They don’t understand that every single dollar that is being spent has been signed off on by a majority in both houses of Congress and the president. At that point, it became law. If there was some defect in that law, it would have been the role of the judiciary to strike it down. But no one claimed that. To allow the president to wake up one morning and override those duly enacted laws turns the balance of power upon which our democracy rests upside down.
How are America’s schools a battlefield and a target for Trump and the MAGA movement’s and the larger right-wing’s attempts to end multiracial democracy?
I think there are a few different things going on. First, the path to power often lies in eroding trust in institutions. Schools used to be out of bounds.
When Congress and the Obama administration could not agree on the time of day, well over 80% of Congress came together to pass the Every Student Succeeds Act. The same was true of the No Child Left Behind Act. Those laws had plenty of flaws, but they were never partisan affairs. The same things have long happened at the state level. Mike Huckabee, for goodness sake, was the governor who signed off on hundreds of millions of dollars of new annual funding to help equalize funding in Arkansas.
Those things feel like distant memories now. As the most important institution to most families, ideologues now believe that if they erode faith in schools, they can motivate people in ways that had not been possible before. The anti-CRT (critical race theory) movement got supercharged when the Republican National Committee (RNC) decided to use it to drive turnout during the Biden congressional midterms. The irony is that Congress has no control over any of the things that the RNC was complaining about. That manufactured crisis definitely drove people to the polls, but it took a corrosive toll on our schools.
The second thing to understand is that the privatization movement has been trying to break up public education for three decades and has almost nothing to show for it. The bipartisan commitment to public education had effectively immunized it. But after Jan. 6, 2021, the attack shifted. It was no longer just about whether it made sense to spend public dollars on private education. Vouchers got tied up in the culture war and became a litmus test for which side of the culture war a legislator stands on. Republicans who oppose vouchers, and there are a lot of rural Republicans who oppose them, are being driven out of the party.
COVID also helped rest these dynamics. It understandably created a lot of anxiety and frustration. In that context, politicians played with people’s emotions on issues of race and gender to put the attack on public schools over the top. I think there was just a lot of opportunism and exploitation, where people know that what they are saying isn’t true but they wield the language anyway. Very few teachers had even heard of critical race theory, yet they were accused of teaching it. And most of the books being banned had been in schools for decades. A lot of those books were ones that parents grew up on — books written before a single law professor even imagined the term critical race theory.
What do we see and understand more clearly when today’s attempts by the Trump administration and larger White right to control American education are put in a larger historical context?
My new book “Dangerous Learning” paints a straight through line from the criminalization of Black literacy in the 1820s and 30s to Jim Crow to the backlash against civil rights in the 1970s to the anti-CRT craze of the 2020s. Of course, each of those moments is different, and today’s censorship is nowhere near as violent or twisted as yesterday’s, but some version of yesterday’s demons still haunt us.
Literacy and public education have served as freedom’s line for Black people in America for 200 years. They have been fighting for it — while others fight against it — for far too long. That much ought to be relatively clear. I think what is less obvious to many is how deeply and easily reactionary paranoia seems to grip the country and the damage it can do along the way.
Most people don’t know it, but schools for Black people — free and enslaved — operated out in the open in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It wasn’t until the 1820s and 1830s when men like Denmark Vesey, David Walker, and Nat Turner demonstrated the full power of literacy that things changed. Vesey, for instance, was born into slavery, but literally won the lottery in 1799 and used the proceeds to purchase his freedom. He spent the next two decades honing his literacy. He interpreted the Bible for himself and shared it with his community, followed Congressional debates on slavery, drew on the morals in classic literature, and invoked American ideas of liberty embedded in texts like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He leveraged that literacy to inspire what local authorities believed were thousands of Black people to prepare for revolt in 1822. Only a last-minute leak of information thwarted him. At his trial, the role that literacy had played in his life and leadership became clear. That’s when the southern response to Black literacy shifted. After David Walker and Nat Turner took that power of literacy to yet another level, the entire region began criminalizing Black literacy.
The South, however, didn’t just limit Black freedom. It also began censorship of what white people could read, breaking into post offices, looting newspapers and burning them in the town square. Vigilance committees formed across the entire South to ensure that nothing seditious was circulating. State legislatures literally criminalized the possession of things like David Walker’s “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World.”
They were so paranoid that they began reviewing textbooks for northern bias. Just as today’s educators don’t have to teach critical race theory to be fired or see their books ripped from the classroom, yesterday’s schools didn’t have to teach anti-slavery. The South was so paranoid that it went after geography books that supposedly devoted disproportionate attention to northern crops.
Eventually, silence and censorship were not even enough. The South began to fill the void with propaganda, insisting they needed southern authors to write southern books for southern readers from a southern perspective. This mantra completely rebalanced the publishing industry.
As I write in “Dangerous Learning”, the South sealed the nation’s fate on the march to Civil War not when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter but in the 1830s when the South would no longer tolerate open debate and discussion around slavery. At that point, it lost its ability to see straight and began to propagandize itself.
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