Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. By Jason Stanley. Atria One Step Publishing, 2024; 256 pp.
Jason Stanley is a well-regarded philosopher of language, but you would never realize it from this rambling and incoherent book. Stanley rightly says that control of public education is an essential characteristic of fascism. By “fascism,” I should add, he includes Nazism. He also notes that fascists wanted to restrict the curriculum so that the students would not study left-wing views, except as targets for attack. It follows from this, according to him, that if you want to exclude left-wing views from the curriculum, you are probably a Nazi.
To resist fascism, he thinks, we must have public education that teaches the “correct views.” I’ll discuss some of these views later, but the point I’d like to draw your attention to now is, to reiterate, that we must have public schools. It’s ironic that he thus agrees with the fascists that the government must ensure that there are public schools—we might call this, “Gleichschaltung from the left.”
If this is what he thinks, it is to be expected that, if you oppose public schools—“a universally accessible and excellent public school system”—he believes that you are in league with the fascists, in that you wish to block a necessary condition for resistance to fascism. And guess who is opposed to public education? It is that dreadful sect of extremists, the libertarians—in brief, us. Here is what he says about libertarianism:
The political philosophy that feels this threat [to a society dominated by a class hierarchy] most acutely—and that unites hostility toward public education with support for class hierarchy—is a certain form of right-wing libertarianism, an ideology that sees free markets as the wellspring of human freedom. These kinds of libertarians oppose government regulation and virtually all forms of public goods, including public education.
When Stanley talks about “public goods,” he means goods provided by the government, not the economist’s sense of “public goods.” In sum, fascists want strong government; libertarians want weak government, or no government at all; therefore, libertarians are pro-fascist. And if you think that perhaps this “logic” is questionable, you should remember, as Stanley frequently reminds us, that he teaches philosophy at an “elite” university.
I mentioned earlier that Stanley thinks that public schools must inculcate the “correct” values in order to resist fascism, and one of the most important of these values is a critical stance toward the “traditional” family. Schools “must” teach students to be critical of gender roles and stereotypes and to be sympathetic to the plight of LGBTQ students. If you ask, “Why must schools teach sex education at all?” you are obviously in league with the fascists.
You might suspect me of exaggerating—as if I would do such a thing—but Stanley’s obsession with challenging the traditional family suggests that he would benefit from psychiatric help. He asks who is responsible for Putin’s fascism, and his answer is that it is none other than Allan Carlson—a defender of the traditional family whose political views are the soul of moderation, as anyone who knows him will attest. He says about Carlson:
One contemporary observer who has been particularly outspoken about gender roles and falling fertility rates is Allan Carlson, a retired right-wing historian at the far-right Hillsdale College in Michigan, who spent much of his career fixated on fertility loss as the cause of Western civilization’s decline. As the journalist Masha Gessen has documented, Carlson was an influential voice in the development of contemporary Russian fascism.
Stanley does not tell his readers that Carlson also supported the “family friendly” policies of the New Deal.
Opponents of the left-wing indoctrination that Stanley favors often call for a return to the classics and to the Enlightenment values of Western civilization. Surely Stanley will exempt these people from his relentless pursuit of fascists—but of course he does not. The Nazis also favored an emphasis on the classics, so unless you are one of these people who favor teaching the classics the “correct” way, which is to show that the classics can teach us to be critical of gender roles, they are indeed fascists. And, while there is good to be found in the Enlightenment, there is also much racism as well, so we need to be suspicious of it.
To steer clear of fascism, it is essential to avoid mentioning anything that does not fit in with the account Stanley wishes to push. He wants to stress the evils of American racism and the guilt of the South’s “enslavers,” and thus teachers should not mention that slavery existed in Africa and that American slaves had been put on the market by African “enslavers.” He says: “This narrative not only excuses the atrocities committed by Europeans in Africa but also serves to downplay any hardships faced by the descendants of enslaved people.” Stanley is ever alert to stoke the “anti-fascist” memory hole.
I’ll conclude with a comment that is breathtaking in its naivete. The right has warned against Marxist takeovers of elite universities, but, Stanley says, these takeovers cannot be real.
Though I am not a Marxist myself, I feel comfortable saying that no Marxist would support the mission and role of elite universities, nor would Marxists be particularly inclined to teach at one. Contempt of these institutions for their role in promoting and maintaining class hierarchies is itself a Marxist position.
Did it never occur to our benighted author that a Marxist might want to teach at an elite university in order to change its mission? But of one thing we can be clear—Stanley is eager to maintain his own position at an elite university.
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