In Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future (One Signal Publishers/Atria Books, 2024), author Jason Stanley examines fascism and education. Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University and the author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.
Stanley is one of four American professors, all experts on fascism, who have announced publicly they are leaving the country so they can work from a safe place. Stanley is moving to the University of Toronto.
Erasing History went to press just prior to the election of Donald Trump to his second term. It’s safe to say that much Stanley decried on the American scene last year has now only become more malignant.
Stanley focuses on the United States but also addresses contemporary fascist movements around the world, which feature some distinct similarities. One is animosity toward higher education, now a key feature of the second Trump administration.
Stanley writes that “American fascist politicians target American universities by describing them as anti-American, just as Russia’s fascist politicians attack Russia’s universities by calling them anti-Russian, India’s fascist politicians target Indian universities by calling them anti-Indian, and Hungary’s fascist politicians attack Hungarian universities by calling them anti-Hungarian.”
Harvard University has, somewhat incredibly, stepped up to the role of standing up to the fascist attack. Trump is threatening to withdraw $2 billion in funding from the school. The reason? Harvard will not accept his regime’s goal of influence over course offerings, personnel decisions and the treatment of students. Columbia University, on the other hand, buckled.
What constitutes the fascist ideology of education? Stanley offers five main themes:
- National greatness
- National purity
- National innocence
- Strict gender roles
- Vilification of the left
“The purpose of fascist education,” Stanley summarizes, “is to advance a narrative in which the nation and its dominant group are understood as both superior and innocent.”
So much of fascist ideology is racist. Stanley quotes Black essayist W.E.B. Du Bois from his 1935 work Black Reconstruction in America. Back then, Du Bois found white students learning about the nature of slavery and Reconstruction were made uncomfortable, so he posed the question: “[Are] reasons of courtesy and philanthropy sufficient for denying Truth?” Clearly, his answer was “No.”
Stanley adds: “The story of the fight to preserve the innocence of white American children and justify American racial hierarchies is U.S. history. These efforts, once imagined to be a relic of the past, have come alive again, fueling the ascendant fascist political movements that inspired this book.”
“To resist the slide into cruelty,” Stanley writes, “is perhaps the most important educational goal of a people. What forms of education could be appropriate for such an endeavor? In some ways we have already begun to create them: critical race theory, women and gender studies, queer theory, labor history, disability studies, and other bodies of scholarship that show how social movements can succeed in breaking down obstacles to equality and liberation.
“Such approaches stand to create a lifelong disposition toward civic compassion, and the agency to act on it. Ironically, it may be that the tentative successes of these endeavors have helped to trigger the authoritarian backlash I have described throughout this book. It wouldn’t be the first time that a successful progressive educational movement has provoked a violent countermovement.”
Public schools, writes Stanley, “are the foundational democratic public good.” It is “perfectly logical” that they are under attack by anti-democratic forces.
There are telling analogies between Nazi and American fascist ideology. “In Nazi ideology,” Stanley writes, “it was Jewish people who were behind the plot to replace German’s Aryan population with non-Aryans (both the 2022 Buffalo supermarket killer and the Tree of Life synagogue killer believed Jews were behind white replacement).
“We have a great deal of historical evidence, both from European fascism and, more recently, from mass killings, that targeting a group of people as internal enemies responsible for replacing the nation with immigrants is dangerous to them (as well as to those supposedly doing the replacing, the ‘replacers’).
“In the United States, Donald Trump has consistently made Great Replacement Theory a theme of his presidential campaigns and his administration, blaming the plot not on Jews, but on his political opponents and Democrats more generally.
“According to this ideology, his political opposition, the Democrats, are secret Marxists who seek to open the borders to non-white immigration, thereby displacing the white race numerically, culturally and politically, using the results to place themselves in perpetual power. This is precisely what Hitler claimed about the Jews.”
The Trump administration, in the cases of Columbia and Harvard, is using its economic leverage to force universities to take a repressive position against protests against the war on Gaza, saying they are antisemitic, that Jews are being targeted for their ethnicity. Stanley, who is Jewish, has an entirely different view of antisemitism in the present moment, which he shared with journalist Michel Martin in an interview on PBS this spring.
Stanley told Martin, “What are the most toxic antisemitic tropes? Well, [one of them is] ‘Jews control the institutions.’ [The government’s position] is absolutely reinforcing this. Any young American is going to think, ‘Remember what happened when they took down the world’s greatest university system on behalf of Jewish safety?’
“This will go down in history books, the history of this era will say that Jewish people were the sledgehammer for fascism…It’s the first time in my life as an American that I’ve been fearful of our status as equal Americans. Not because of the protests on campus, which had a lot of Jewish students in them, but because we are suddenly at the center of U.S. politics.
“It’s never good to be in the crosshairs for us. And we are being used to destroy democracy. The history books are going to be harsh unless we Jewish Americans can say this should not be done in our name.”
Stanley proves in Erasing History to be a deep thinking and steadfast intellectual. In the concluding paragraph, he writes: “What is needed to stave off the impending collapse of the information space required for a democracy are honest and fearless teachers and investigative journalists. That’s why authoritarians target both.”
Nicely done. Really enjoyed reading it.