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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
We turn now to someone who has a deep understanding of the stakes of the Trump administration’s assault on education and history. In his latest book, Yale University philosophy professor Jason Stanley details how educational institutions and the teaching of history have become key battlegrounds in authoritarian countries, as the Trump administration, through a dizzying series of executive orders and actions, attempts to dismantle higher education in the United States by redefining discrimination in schools, fighting so-called woke ideology, attacking diversity, equity and inclusion programs, gutting the Department of Education, and threatening funding for research and higher education.
We’re joined here in New York by Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale. His latest book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, also author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.
Welcome back to Democracy Now! I mean, since your books, you’ve been writing a lot, and you’ve been speaking a lot on these issues. If you can take on what’s happening right now to the major threat to higher education, whether we’re talking about the freezing of funding for pediatric cancer research throughout the United States in some of the most elite scientific departments at universities, or whether we’re talking about erasing DEI? Give us the context for this.
JASON STANLEY: Well, first of all, there are no liberal arts colleges in authoritarian countries. So, if you’re transitioning to authoritarianism, you have to target colleges and universities, as well as education. As Vladimir Putin recently said, wars are won by teachers.
Now, let’s be clear: The United States has the world’s greatest system of higher education. Everyone in the world who can sends their kids to our colleges and universities, if they can be accepted to those universities. Every professor in the world would leave their university, if their personal situation would allow, to come to a U.S. university, if they got an offer.
What the Trump administration is trying to do is take this system down. They have various reasons for — they have various excuses, not reasons. They say universities are packed with Democrats. Well, look, math and physics departments are packed with Democrats. The vast majority of mathematicians and physicists are, in fact, not Trump supporters. So, the idea is, presumably, to stock your local physics department, to stock the top medical schools with Trump supporters, just because they’re Trump supporters. This takes down the United States as a leading research place. It takes down one of the things that we do, unquestionably, the best in the world, which is higher ed.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how exactly you see history being rewritten by the current administration, and the impacts it has on your university and others.
JASON STANLEY: Right. So, they’re targeting — they say they’re targeting critical race theory. Critical race theory is the study of the practices that keep racial inequalities present, that are hangovers from Jim Crow, the institution — and, for example, things like mortgage redlining, school segregation, housing segregation, policing practices, that were formed when cities were intentionally segregated. So, they’re targeting Black history, they’re targeting minority history, and they’re trying to replace it explicitly with patriotic education.
Now, just imagine your cartoon vision of an authoritarian country. Imagine 1984. It’s a country — George Orwell’s book. It’s a country where students pledge allegiance to the flag every day. It’s a country where, instead of knowledge and learning, they are taught to be — they’re indoctrinated.
Now, this will be done, supposedly, under the banner of classical education. The idea is we’re going to restore classical education to end “wokeness.” But let’s look at classical education. Classical education is an education that is found — whose foundational elements are the works of the ancient philosophers and ancient history, like Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle. Plato advocated removing children from their family at birth. In Plato’s Symposium, it’s normal to have relations between older male professors and their younger male students. So, the idea that classical education is there to promote Christianity and the nuclear family is simply just delusional. And it’s — as usual with this attack on schools and higher education, it’s merely an ideological facade for replacing critical inquiry with, you know, saluting the flag.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about this moment. We’re talking to you on Friday. You’re both a German citizen and a U.S. citizen. You’re the son of Holocaust survivors. You don’t throw around these words “fascism,” “Nazism” easily. You know exactly the effects. We’re moving into a weekend, an election in Germany. If you can talk about Vice President JD Vance recently meeting with the far-right party Alternative for Germany, AfD, leader Alice Weidel? Billionaire Elon Musk sent a message to the AfD’s election campaign launch party back in January, in which he says there is too much of a focus on past guilt. I want to play that.
ELON MUSK: The German people are — are sort of really, really, an ancient nation, goes back thousands of years. You know, I was even — I, you know, sort of read Julius Caesar’s account of, like, first encountering the — the German tribes in the Gallic campaigns. And he was like, “Wow! It’s very impressive. These are — these are very, very powerful warriors.” So, like, you know, I think there’s, like, frankly, too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. People — you know, children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents or even, let alone their parents, their great-grandparents, maybe even.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Elon Musk addressing the AfD on a huge video screen. And, of course, as we just said, Vance just met with the AfD leader. The election is Sunday. Talk about the significance of this.
JASON STANLEY: So, in discussions of, for example, Black education, Germany is held up as a model of facing its past. And Germany’s sort of democracy has been based upon this education system of facing the past. That was always somewhat fictional. We have to remember that 80 years ago, Germany — we’re talking about 80 years ago. We’re not talking about the 19th century. So, Germany had various ways of facing its past and various ways of evading facing its past. But across the world, it was taken as a model. So, if you take down Germany’s education system, then you take down the world model for doing this.
Now, let’s be clear: German people of my generation, their grandparents were Nazis. We know now that the Wehrmacht, the German soldiers who fought the ordinary Germans — we know now, through research, that they participated in mass slaughter. Seven of my great-uncles were murdered by the Wehrmacht, and all of their children. My mother and her sister are the only survivors of their family, of their generation.
So, this education, flawed as it was, is being targeted now. AfD is running on a platform of glorifying German soldiers in World War I and World War II. That comment of Musk, the German nations were great fighters, that links into AfD’s rhetoric and propaganda of reversing, of erasing the past, saying, “Well, we should be proud of our German soldiers in World War I and World War II.”
Now, this was always going to be the case. If you attack Black history in the United States, if you blur the history of slavery, if you say that slavery was part of what made America great, we don’t need to be ashamed of it, that is, of course, going to result in the erasure of Jewish history in Germany. And, you know, Jewish Americans, my fellow Jewish Americans, who supported this, in the case of erasing Black history, this is just coming back to bite them.
Musk is not American. He has no — he’s not from America. He has no commitment to Holocaust history being remembered. This kind of facing your past, as Germany shows, is essential to democracy. It’s essential to German democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, the Nazi Party was founded in Munich 100 years ago this week. On February 27th, 1925, Adolf Hitler delivered a speech to 3,000 people in a Munich beer hall, just out of prison for his role in a failed coup. He was relaunching the party and cementing his role as its unquestioned leader. But also out of Munich, Hans and Sophie Scholl, that brother and sister, who attended the University of Munich. They weren’t even Jewish. They were Christians who felt that the world and Germans had to know, so that they could never deny what was happening with the Holocaust, and released those six pamphlets, among them, the one that said, “We will not be silent.” They would be caught, captured, tried and beheaded, along with their professor and others. So, if you can talk about what resistance means?
JASON STANLEY: So, let’s be also clear that the attack on universities is due to the fact that universities are centers for defending democracy. Students have always been, since World War II, the antiwar protesters. They protested Vietnam. Last year, they protested the war on Gaza. They are — they protested the Iraq War. So, you have to target universities, because, as Bangladesh showed, that the students can overturn, are the main enemies of authoritarianism. Die Weiße Rose, Die Weiße Rose, The White Rose, they showed that students — they were students, and they showed how students provide the center of resistance. And that is also a central reason why authoritarians attack universities.
AMY GOODMAN: So, as you look at what’s happening in this country right now, when we talk about the erasing of history, do you see a preemptive acquiescence that is taking place? And as you heard our last discussion, what do you think university presidents should be doing? We quoted the president of Mount Holyoke, but actually very few presidents have spoken out right now.
JASON STANLEY: That’s right. It used to be that our presidents were supposed to speak out in favor of democratic values. Now university presidents are being told, “Oh, you have to preserve your institutions.” Guess what: Universities are core democratic institutions. Preserving your institutions means speaking out for core democratic values. If you’re not speaking out for core democratic values, you’re not protecting your institutions, which are core institutions of democracy. So, you might have an institution that has the same name, that’s still called Yale University, but it is no longer that institution.
AMY GOODMAN: Jason Stanley, I want to thank you for being with us, author and professor of philosophy at Yale University. His new book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, also author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. And we’ll link to your articles that you have written in response to what’s happening right now in this country.
Coming up next, the head of The Lever, David Sirota, on what the Democrats are doing to resist what is taking place, or what they’re not doing. Stay with us.
