Attacks on US education and historical truth mirror global authoritarianism.
The systematic political assault on education and historical truth is a cornerstone of authoritarian takeover.
In this WhoWhatWhy podcast Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley unveils the alarming parallels between current US political trends and the rise of authoritarianism globally.
Stanley’s new book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, dissects the attacks on schools, universities, and factual narratives. These are not isolated incidents, he argues, but part of a coordinated strategy to reshape public perceptions of history and consolidate power.
He draws connections between book bans, curriculum restrictions, and the vilification of educators to tactics employed in countries like Hungary, Russia, and India. In short, the manipulation of our history threatens our future.
He examines the creation of mythical pasts, from Hindu nationalism in India to the whitewashing of American history, as tools for building authoritarian support. Stanley also highlights the irony of Ivy League-educated politicians leading anti-intellectual movements while maintaining elite connections.
He offers a stark reminder: Liberal arts education is incompatible with authoritarian regimes. Particularly unsettling is Stanley’s analysis of how American “exceptionalism” and long-standing educational narratives may have primed the nation for fascist ideologies.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host Jeff Schechtman. We’ve all heard the saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but what happens when powerful forces actively work to erase, distort, or rewrite that past?
Today, we’re joined by my guest, Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale and author of the new book Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. We live in a time when education has become a political battleground, when book bans are on the rise, and when competing narratives of history threaten our shared understanding of reality.
From Florida’s restrictions on teaching about race and gender to the ongoing debates about critical race theory, we’re witnessing a concerted effort to reshape how Americans understand their history and their identity. Stanley argues that these are not isolated incidents, but part of a broader global pattern of authoritarian movements seeking to undermine democracy at its foundations. He draws parallels between current trends in the United States and tactics used by authoritarian regimes in countries like Hungary, Russia, and India, where control over historical narrative has been a key tool in consolidating authoritarian power.
With debates raging over the very nature of American democracy, Stanley’s analysis provides a crucial framework for understanding the high stakes of these conflicts. He posits that the attacks on education and historical truth are not just about school curricula, but about shaping a populace that can then become susceptible to authoritarian control. All of this is a sobering yet essential perspective on the challenges we face as we consider and examine how the manipulation of collective memory, from whitewashing of racial justice to the mythologizing of national greatness, serves to consolidate power and undermine democratic norms.
In short, the manipulation of our history threatens our future. Jason Stanley is the author of six books including How Fascism Works and How Propaganda Works. He is a member of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School and serves on the advisory board of the Prison Policy Initiative. He writes frequently about authoritarianism, democracy, propaganda, free speech, and mass incarceration, and it is my pleasure to welcome Jason Stanley here to the program to talk about Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Jason, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Jason Stanley: Thank you. It’s great to be in discussion with you, Jeff.
Jeff: Talk first about this nexus in a broad sense between controlling historical narrative and political control.
Jason: So it’s an old point, right? Due to Orwell, for instance, “He who controls the past controls the future,” but we’re seeing right now– so we know how authoritarians target the courts. We know that authoritarians target journalists and the free press, but as Vladimir Putin recently said, “Wars are won by teachers.” Authoritarians equally target education systems.
And so I began with just that as a puzzle. This needs to be unpacked conceptually. Why is history so threatening to authoritarians? Why do the very same people who say there is voter fraud, who raise hysteria about non-existent voter fraud in order to cut down minority voting, why do these very same people also attack schools and universities?
And so, history in a democracy is meant to shatter stereotypes of our fellow citizens, and authoritarianism thrives off these stereotypes. The authoritarian offers themselves as the protector of their people. This is a point about tyrants Plato makes 2,300 years ago. He says, “The tyrant sows, creates suspicion and fear among the people, and then offers himself as the protector.” Those are the words he uses in direct translation.
So tyrants always offer themselves as the single protector. It’s probably the best mark, most predictable mark of a tyrant. And in order to do this, they need fear, they need stereotypes. And if you know, for example, Black history, if you understand structural racism, if you understand why so many Black Americans didn’t inherit houses from their parents. If you understand the role of mass incarceration in America in addressing social problems, then you won’t have stereotypes of, say, your Black fellow citizens, that they’re criminal and dangerous.
If you know facts about immigration and you know, for example, that immigrants help the economy, or indeed, if you think for a moment about the incoherence of claiming that they’re criminals and lazy and yet, somehow, get together to vote en masse in elections, then you’re not going to have stereotypes about immigrants.
If you know about the history of the country, you’re not going to have stereotypes about immigrants, but tyrants need fear and stereotypes so they can offer themselves as the protector from crime, be it real or imagined, and any other social ills. So they need to erase the kind of history that would pierce these stereotypes and undermine them.
So tyrants across the world erase LGBTQ perspectives and then present LGBTQ relationships and LGBTQ people as existential threats to families and offer themselves as protectors. Tyrants say that schools and universities are run by Marxists and promise to smash them. They make teachers and professors into, as JD Vance recently said, the enemy.
And finally, universities, at least since World War II, have been the sites of resistance to totalitarianism and tyranny. So we just saw in Bangladesh students overthrow an autocratic tyrant who then fled the country. In America, anti-war protests from the 1960s to last year’s protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, these anti-war protests come from universities and professors pierce the historical narratives that authoritarians rely on to justify their rule.
Jeff: In addition to erasing history, the other part of the equation that you talk about is creating this mythical past, this fantasy of some kind of past that didn’t really exist but represented, at least in the minds of the potential tyrants, a better time.
Jason: Yes. So the examples I look at in my book in detail are, for example, Hindu nationalism in India, which is horrifically violent and the Hindu nationalists represent India as having a pure Hindu past. And they represent the large Muslim population of India, around 200 million people, as invaders and colonists who have brought India to humiliation and have ruined the greatness of India and its purity and innocence.
Russia is another example. Vladimir Putin, as I said, he said “wars are won by teachers,” and the textbooks are under constant revision. In the Russian textbooks, there’s no independent history of Ukraine. Ukraine is represented as just– there’s just Russia and Ukraine is represented as another place filled with Russians. And there’s no history of Russian aggression in Ukraine. So the history of genocide, of [the] Holodomor, where millions of Ukrainians were starved by Stalin is erased.
And Russia’s violent invasions of neighboring countries such as Georgia and Ukraine are represented as sort of heroic adventures to save, to protect ethnic Russians who are seeking an independence movement to essentially join Russia.
So this kind of erasure of history, national innocence, national purity and national greatness is central to fascism. And Hitler in Mein Kampf is incredibly clear about this. Hitler says he spends a lot of time on the topic of education and he says, “In the education system, it’s important to represent ourselves, the Third Reich, as the descendants of Greece and Rome and glorify the great men of our past as the greatest men in history to create a sense of love of nation.”
So this is the kind of template, you create this idea that your nation is great, your nation is based on this incredible past, and it’s being threatened, and you need a tyrant. You need this authoritarian figure to protect you.
Jeff: And talk about how that plays out in terms of the American debate with this mythical past of Christian white nationalism.
Jason: Oh, yes. In America, it plays out in the same way. So it’s particularly worrisome in America because it really looks like the education system that’s already in place smooths the way for fascist politics. So think about Hitler’s remark that you need an education system that glorifies the Aryan race. Like he says– Hitler in the National Socialist education, Germany was represented as sort of the successor of Rome. And it was suggested that really the great Roman leaders were German. And then it was sort of suggested the ancient Greeks were German too. And so this was reading whiteness backwards, this supposedly glorious history of whiteness to justify Hitler’s claim that only the Aryans have created civilization. And we find something disturbingly similar in the case of US education, well before the present. We find veneration of the founders and a link– Hitler says, “This is a way to get people to recognize the greatness of Aryans.”
Well, it’s a way to get people to believe in the greatness of the white Christian men who founded the nation. And then what you do is you– and we, too, represent our founders as the successors of Greece and Rome. And so we too are doing this thing of projecting whiteness backwards and representing ourselves as the great white empire. And this is the hypocritical goal of the Christian right to push what they call “classical education,” which isn’t classical at all, with the goal of suggesting that it’s white civilization ending in Christian nationalism.
Jeff: And how does the notion of American exceptionalism and even the notion of the shining city on the hill, how does that relate to this story?
Jason: Well, the small literature on Nazi education talks about how the education was already German exceptionalist. So the Nazis just had to insert various ridiculous things like Jews had betrayed Germany in World War I. We can assume that if Trump wins, textbooks will say the 2020 election was stolen.
So we already have a system that bizarrely says that– and I’m a patriotic American, but the idea that there’s a greatest country in world history is totally absurd. And if you walk down any American street my entire life, you’ll find incredible poverty of the sort that you don’t find it in, say, Canada, which is an equally diverse country. [chuckles]
So the idea that our country is somehow blessed by God is a pernicious myth. And that goes along with the whitewashing of our past. When our textbooks extol the founders as the greatest men in history, they leave out that they were enslavers and many had murderous [and] genocidal attitudes towards our indigenous population.
One of the main history books used in the United States, [The] American Pageant, claims that when Columbus arrived in the Americas, there were only one million indigenous people living in North America. There were around 10 times that many, and there were 70 to 80 million indigenous people living in the Americas at the time. So this wild underestimation paves the way for whitewashing genocide and creating this idea of an exceptional nation born in innocence and greatness.
Jeff: When we talk about that American founding mythology that you’re talking about, for many years, that was the accepted narrative. That was the single democratic narrative that the country believed in. It wasn’t really until later, until more contemporary times, that we began to understand what really happened. For so long, we bought into this narrative of America’s founding mythology, and that really became the single narrative upon which democracy was built on. And over time, that narrative changes.
Jason: Well, we didn’t have a democracy until 1965. We’re a very young democracy. The Voting Rights Act made us into the very flawed democracy that we have right now. And of course, many Republicans are saying we were never meant to be a democracy, which is, of course, false.
So the single national narrative went along, not with democracy, but with its opposite, with Jim Crow. In the entire American South, Black Americans were not allowed to vote. [chuckles] Interracial marriage was illegal. [chuckles] So that’s not a democracy. Everyone has to vote in a democracy, and their votes have to count, and their perspectives have to be heard, so we were not a democracy. And what kept us being not a democracy, what kept us being a herrenvolk democracy, a racial hierarchy, a racial authoritarian country, was these myths.
And once you started to pierce these myths, once you started to challenge these myths, well, that came along with Black Americans getting the vote, and getting a perspective, and having their perspective heard. Because democracy is not just about voting. Democracy is a system where we all play a role in the formation of the laws that govern us. And in order for that to happen, everyone’s voice has to be heard. And their voice is not just heard through voting. Their voice is heard through their perspectives being commonly known.
And that means that other perspectives, perspectives of my fellow citizens who are not me and different from me in various respects, their perspectives will influence how I vote. So America is a very young democracy, and the exceptionalist narrative justified its anti-democratic structure, and the progressive history we saw in the ’70s and subsequently was a result of bringing Black Americans into the body of politics.
Jeff: Come back to this idea of education and the ways in which equality and progressive ideas have really come out of universities and out of education, and why that’s so critical, as you outlined at the very beginning.
Jason: Universities are supposed to challenge dominant narratives. And the universities, especially before World War II, were often places where dominant narratives were justified, and that still happens, of course. So universities were the source of entirely false histories of the United States, of Reconstruction. But since World War II, there is much more latitude.
I mean you had universities outside the Ivy League challenging the dominant narrative, say that Black Americans were not ready for citizenship, and that’s why the vote was taken from them. It was justified to take the vote from them in the South. That was a narrative created in Ivy League universities like Columbia. But since the war, since essentially the Red Scare and the time after that, universities have been the places where this kind of critical inquiry takes place.
Look, you don’t have liberal arts colleges in authoritarian societies. Everyone needs to reflect on that. [The] New College of Florida, as it was before DeSantis took it down and just absolutely destroyed it as a viable educational institution, wouldn’t exist in an authoritarian society. And Florida is now an autocracy, moving into autocracy, and they don’t have New College of Florida. There’s no Williams College in China. [chuckles] There’s no Amherst in Russia. [chuckles] There’s no University of Massachusetts in Amherst local.
So that just needs to be explained. It just needs to be explained that there’s no such thing as a liberal arts college in an authoritarian society. So when people are trying to take down liberal arts colleges, they’re telling you what kind of society they want. They want a China. They want a Russia. They want a country where there are no liberal arts colleges. [chuckles] And that’s why they say, “We just want job training.”
So if people don’t understand the connection between critical humanities and democracy, they need to reflect about that fact. So [with] universities, their goal in a democracy is to pierce these national myths. It’s not to advance the national myths as universities have sometimes done in the past and continue to do like Hillsdale College.
But the goal is to incorporate everyone’s perspective and tell the histories that haven’t yet been told. That’s how breakthroughs in history happened. That’s how breakthroughs and inquiry happen. And you say, “Look, here’s a perspective that hasn’t been taught. People haven’t written about this perspective.” That’s how inquiry works. So authoritarian societies need there to be one perspective, this lauding the greatness and innocence of the nation. So universities are often their first targets.
Jeff: And yet it is so interesting that some of the loudest voices on the MAGA right right now are graduates and came out of these liberal arts colleges.
Jason: Yes. Ron DeSantis went to Yale and Harvard, Tom Cotton went to Harvard-Harvard, Elise Stefanik went to Harvard. And also, let me say, JD Vance, who’s a Yale Law grad, is loved at Yale. His photo is placed in Yale Law School on the wall, so you see it when you come in. He’s one of their proudest graduates. And his wife, of course, went to Yale Law School. That’s where they met.
Their kids are not going to be educated through PragerU videos. Their kids are bound for Yale because everyone at Yale loves JD Vance. He’s the man. [chuckles] So this whole thing is bizarre because you have these people who are not just the elite of the elite of the elite. They’re also loved by the very institutions they’re denouncing.
And I haven’t quite solved that puzzle. I don’t know why when I hear JD Vance denounce professors, and then I walk through, and the most powerful professors at Yale who went to elite schools their whole life speak so warmly about JD Vance and his family as if they’re– He’s a Yale man and they just– So I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know.
Ron DeSantis is– Ted Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard. I went to the State University of New York in Stony Brook and paid my own way through college. I’ve been at Yale for 12 years. I taught at Rutgers before this. And there’s a kind of internal thing at Yale of the elite, and all these politicians are part of that internal elite. My photo is not on the walls of Yale, JD Vance’s is.
Jeff: And yet he said recently the professors are the enemy.
Jason: Right. It’s like a bizarre situation because all the people I mentioned; Ted Cruz, JD Vance, Ron DeSantis, they’ve been in Ivy League schools their whole lives. Josh Hawley, Stanford and Yale Law School. So they really are viewed within these institutions as belonging to these institutions and their families as belonging to these institutions. They are the elite. And I just don’t get it. It’s also not the case that their attitudes towards universities changes the fact that their photos are on the walls of Yale.
Jeff: And yet their attitudes and the way they see the world are profoundly different than the world they came out of.
Jason: And their kids are going to go to Yale. Their kids are going to go to Yale and Princeton and Harvard, [chuckles] and they’re going to go with great joy. And these institutions will love them. [chuckles] It’s all about power, I suspect, and these institutions are about power. And these people like Cruz and Ron DeSantis are just like super elites who control the world, and they’re used to power.
And so, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton love these people. And it’s just like some kind of weird game. As I said, I don’t entirely understand why when I walk into Yale Law School, there’s a big photo of JD Vance and the old school Yale faculty speak with such warmth about him and his family, and yet, he’s out there blasting these institutions. It’s a mystery to me. I wish I had a better sense.
My sense is that Ted Cruz, JD Vance, Tom Cotton, these are folks who belong to the elite. Of course, [with] JD Vance, Peter Thiel is his mentor. He’s backed by billionaires. He comes from Yale. It’s fake populism. JD Vance’s book is all about how poor whites are lazy and they don’t understand there’s great opportunities, and they could get to Yale only if they work hard.
So it’s completely inconsistent with his current demagoguery [chuckles] on the trail. And when I talk about his demagoguery, people at Yale roll their eyes and say, well, “He wants to win an election.” So I don’t get it myself, but I can tell you this: all these people who are railing against the university, the Ivy League universities, are not just products of Ivy League universities, they’re [also] loved by these universities.
Jeff: We see it also in other aspects of education, even in elementary schools and high schools, the book banning that we see going on in libraries, the attacks on education are coming everywhere.
Jason: Coming everywhere and that’s very common as the country moves into authoritarianism. We are rapidly moving into authoritarianism. We have a Supreme Court that’s just appointed by the would-be autocrat, and we’ll do whatever it takes to get him into power and keep him in power, and fulfill the agenda of his supporters with abortion, cutting regulation, preventing student debt from being alleviated by the government to keep people in a kind of servitude.
So we already have the courts gone that way. And education, as I said, you just have to repeat yourself, repeat to understand that you just have to remember always, there are no liberal arts colleges in authoritarian societies. Authoritarian societies need this constant pervasive fear. And so that’s what you have. That’s what these laws against critical race theory and LGBTQ perspectives and book banning and attacks, vilification of public-school teachers and libraries are doing.
They are creating this aura of fear. I was looking the other day at Tennessee’s online reporting system for reporting professors in the University in the Tennessee system who teach concepts like intersectionality, structural racism, and white privilege. They haven’t yet decided on the punishments, but I think they decided it wouldn’t be criminal charges. Also LGBTQ perspectives. This is universities.
So you’re training students to turn in their professors to fill in online reports, to turn in the professors and get them in trouble. And the atmosphere of fear is pervasive. Barnard College recently issued guidelines saying professors have to– If they’re talking about geopolitical issues in class, have to represent both perspectives. So I suppose if you teach the Holocaust, you have to teach the Nazi perspective. So it’s because there’s an atmosphere of pervasive fear. And authoritarianism requires and thrives off an atmosphere of pervasive fear
Jeff: In addition to the historical narrative, and this gets back to the people that we were just talking about in these positions of power, that raw power is really the goal as much as it is even authoritarianism.
Jason: Yes. In this kind of kleptocratic autocracy that America is veering into, which will enrich Jared Kushner, the friends and family of the autocrat, and now, that people have seen, you can pull this off in America, we’re going to see an endless series of just kleptocratic would-be autocrats who cynically use populism to cut taxes for the billionaire class.
So power and connection to the autocrat becomes the dominant mode of society. So the billionaire class, they hope that they can get a leg up on the competition by being early supporters of the would-be autocrat. This is just how it works in Russia, for example, and how it started working until the autocrat eventually imposes very strong– shows who’s boss.
But this is what we’re seeing right now is this rush by institutions like universities to make sure that they’re prepared for, as the country lurches into autocracy, to retain their connections to power rather than defend democratic practices and defend against democratic backsliding. So power becomes the coin when you have these kleptocratic autocrats like Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orbán who are using the state to enrich themselves.
Jeff: And finally, I guess the question is what happens in that framework when they’re out of power?
Jason: Well, you see that in Israel now with Netanyahu. They make sure that they’re not out of power because they usually go to prison if they’re out of power because of all the massive corruption they’ve been engaged in. So they have to stay in power.
Jeff: Jason Stanley, his book is Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Jason, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Jason: Thanks so much for the discussion.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast, I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
