Abandon the False Narratives: Jason Stanley
October 24th, 2024
”Democracy is about freedom and equality.”
We discuss the purpose of fascist education, the political nature of universities in defending democracy, and the dangers of America’s powerful exceptionalist narrative.
Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and the author of seven books. His most recent is Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.
Your civic action toolkit recommendations from Jason are:
Stand up in solidarity with those who are political targets
Understand other people’s perspectives because that gives them the voice in a democracy
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Jason Stanley
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Jason Stanley '24 Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like myself the resources once reserved for big business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful. All lowercase. And if you want to support Future Hindsight, you can join the Civics Club on Patreon. Go to Patreon.com/futurehindsight now.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:33] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast on a mission to spark civic action. I'm your host, Mila Atmos. I'm a global citizen based in New York City, and I'm deeply curious about the way our society works. So each week I bring you conversations to cut through the confusion around today's most important civic issues and share clear, actionable ways for us to build a brighter future together. After all, democracy is not a spectator sport. Tomorrow starts right now.
As we get closer to the election, we're experiencing outrage at a suffocating pace. Election interference! Abortion rights! CRT! Wokeness! It feels like we're in a game of whack a mole, and we're too busy to take stock of the philosophical underpinnings behind the strategy and the end goals.
Our guest is Jason Stanley. He's the Jacob Urowsky Professor of philosophy at Yale University and the author of seven books. His most recent is Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Jason joined us in the last election cycle in 2022, with a conversation about how fascism is already all around us. We're thrilled to have him back with us today.
Welcome, Jason. Thank you for joining us.
Jason Stanley: [00:01:54] Thank you so much, Mila. It's great to be in conversation with you again.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:00] I feel like we need to start with American exceptionalism, which is a powerful myth that positions the United States as the shining city upon a hill, the greatest country in the world, as the champion of democracy, and a country that can do no wrong. What's missing in this picture? What is the history that is being erased?
Jason Stanley: [00:02:21] Well, in that particular history, what's being erased is the basis of the United States as a country founded in specifically on indigenous genocide and expansion westward, which was the central basis for indigenous genocide, and, of course, slavery. So our country is based on two of the great world historical crimes, and it's also based on the recovery from that, trying to overcome that legacy. But you don't overcome that legacy by erasing it. If you try to erase that aspect of our past, you're creating a complete myth that then justifies a kind of behavior. You know, if a country has only ever done right and only ever been the force for good, well, that will justify that country doing things in its own interests that it might confuse with doing things for the greater good of humanity.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:23] Yeah, that's well put. So let's talk about the role of education in perpetuating this myth. You argue that education builds political culture. So what kind of culture flows from this idea of American exceptionalism? You just alluded to that. And how does it show up in our education system?
Jason Stanley: [00:03:41] So the United States has a very powerful exceptionalist narrative. When you look at like the the small literature on Nazi education, people talk about how in German education, before the rise of National Socialism was already German Exceptionalists, so it was easier for the Nazis to represent Germany as the greatest nation in all history, and the Third Reich as the successor of Rome and Greece. That's what the Nazis did. They represented themselves as the successor civilization of Rome and Greece, and they represented the great, you know, civilization essentially, as the result of this, they basically read whiteness backwards. They represented ancient Greek civilization as really Germans, and then they represented the great emperors of Rome as really the German ones, ones who are German. So they were reading whiteness backwards. And that's kind of what you have here, the idea that the founders are the inheritors of Greece and Rome, and these great Christian men created this great nation that then was bound to be, you know, essentially anointed by God. It gives people the feeling, which is dangerous in the current moment, that the United States cannot collapse into a kind of kleptocratic autocracy like of the sort that we see in so many other countries. People think that our institutions will protect us. We're supposedly the greatest democracy in human history, which is a bizarre claim for a country that only was a democracy since the Voting Rights Act in 1965. So this
exceptionalist narrative prevents us from recognizing the dangers we face. And also it leans straightforwardly into this ability that demagogues have of making us feel that we've lost our nation. So, you know, we need to make America great again. So if we are the greatest nation the world has ever known, then it's very easy to make people feel the nation is in crisis when it's not obviously the greatest on the nation rankings that come out every year from USA today or US News and World Report. So it sets up this narrative that the nation is under threat, the nation's greatness is under threat, and that like, sends you right into the demagoguery of a would-be tyrant.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:15] Mhm. Well, so connect the dots with how this is being taught in schools and what really is the purpose of a fascist education, or the kind of education that fascists want to have.
Jason Stanley: [00:06:27] So the purpose is to make the fascist politics much more effective. So if you present the history as the deeds or the nation's history as the deeds of great men of the dominant group, then you represent the greatness of the nation as defined by that identity, in this case, white Christian men. And this is very explicit in Hitler's remarks on education in Mein Kampf, he says the purpose of an education is to make people venerate, students venerate the great men of the race, and associate them with the greatness of the nation. Well, that's already the education system we have in the United States. Now, if you do that, you can represent immigration, changing the character of the nation as a threat to the greatness of the nation. If the greatness of the nation is due to the exploits of these great white Christian men, plus Martin Luther King, because he, you know, solved racism, so there's no racism anymore. That was ironic.
Mila Atmos: [00:07:30] Yes, yes. Thank you. Jason Stanley: [00:07:33] Just in case.
Mila Atmos: [00:07:34] Yes, yes. I got it. Thanks.Jason Stanley: [00:07:36] So that then you can make people feel that immigration is going to destroy the nation. Also, you erase the history of social movements for change, because autocracy and authoritarianism in one party states require citizens to think that
they lack agency. So by removing the history of labor movements, by removing the history of movements for women's equality, for abortion rights, for LGBTQ equality. What that does is it makes citizens feel they have no power, because history is just the exploits of great men. I mean, the most obvious erasure of all is the erasure of women from history. Like this kind of education, women don't have a role in history. It's as if women never were agents. They were just taken care of by the great men. And so they should be at home making babies.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:31] Yeah. So let's talk about the kind of education that would actually support a liberal democracy. And I'm also interested, as you talk about that, in what way that kind of education is different from a fascist education and how it is in a way, actually, almost overtly anti-fascist.
Jason Stanley: [00:08:53] Yes. So I perhaps neglected to say the principal, one of the principal reasons for a fascist education is to allow stereotypes to fester between groups, because this goes back all the way to Plato's Republic, written 2300 years ago. He describes a tyrant as someone who runs for office by exploiting stereotypes of the people and making the dominant group fear an internal enemy, and making sort of splitting the population up, and making them fear each other. And then Plato says, "and then he represents himself as the protector of the people." So when you find someone running for office, spreading all sorts of fear about other citizens, and then saying, "I am your protector" -- that's a tyrant, almost definitionally. And so a fascist education removes everything but the perspectives of the dominant group, and thereby allows stereotypes of non-dominant groups to remain like, if you don't know the history of Black Americans, then you might look at American cities with poor Black neighborhoods surrounded by militarized police and think, wow, the stereotypes of Black Americans are true. But if you know about redlining, if you know about structural racism, the things they're saying are illegal to teach, even in universities, then if you know about those things, then you understand what's going on and you're not susceptible to those stereotypes. And so fascist education wants to cut out LGBTQ perspectives, wants to cut out the perspectives of any non-dominant group. So the members of the dominant group are afraid constantly of these stereotypes. So what a democratic education does is it reclaims those perspectives. Democracy is a system where we are each involved in the formation of the laws that govern us. If we're filled with stereotypes about others, then we're going to want laws that respond to those stereotypes. But if we grow up
learning all the perspectives of everyone in our country, then our own vote is going to be informed by those perspectives, and we're not going to be susceptible to the main tactic of the tyrant that is so old that it traces back to. It goes right back to Plato, which is that the tyrant says crime is running rampant, your children are under threat, everything is declining, and you need me to save you. I am your protector. So that is exactly what a tyrant is. They spread fear, fear of each other. And a democratic education protects us from that fear. With a democratic education, we're just not susceptible to that kind of demagoguery.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:42] Yeah. To your point earlier, that it also makes women equal. You know, that's one of the big fears is that a democratic education really makes for an egalitarian society. And that's one of the reasons you have abortion bans, right? Because women are not equal, right?
Jason Stanley: [00:11:58] Well, women's freedoms are... It's both equality and freedom. The easiest way you can restrict freedom is go after the freedom of 50% of the population. That takes out a large chunk of freedom from your society, like from the get go. So a fascist education represents women as having no agency. History is just what men do. But agency is freedom. So then you have no freedom. So the role is women are just supposed to be there to create babies. Fascism is centrally, its central narratives are great replacement theory, that the dominant group is going to be replaced by other groups and natalism that women need to have more babies. And so, you know, obviously there is no threat of population decline, despite what The New York Times op ed page tells us, there is no threat of population decline. The solution is on the southern border. If you really care about that.
Mila Atmos: [00:12:53] Yes.
Jason Stanley: [00:12:53] If that's really what.
Mila Atmos: [00:12:54] They don't.
Jason Stanley: [00:12:55] They don't at all. Because it's all about white babies.Mila Atmos: [00:12:57] Right, right. Yeah. Well, one of the things that is, of course, central to your book and is in the title of your book is "Erasure of History." And we talked about a tyrant. And last time you were on the show, we talked about January 6th. And it feels to me that our current discourse, or lack thereof, is an example of how the work to erase the insurrection from our memory has been largely successful. The way that the presidential race is being covered, it's as if it's between two normal candidates, which is honestly mind blowing. With all of the talk of project 2025 being so far fetched that even if Trump were elected, he won't be able to roll it out. Or even the simpler idea that, "fascism can't happen here." I don't really know what more proof we need beyond January 6th to say "yes, it can happen here." So what does that say about our political culture? That this kind of erasure is even possible right now?
Jason Stanley: [00:13:58] Well, let's remember that one of our two political parties, the Republican Party, its central narrative is that there's mass voter fraud. And there's no voter fraud. Like study after study after study has shown there to be no voter fraud. 0.00003% or something of, you know, it just doesn't exist. So it's literally like a political party running promising to to protect you from flying pink bunnies that will steal your children. Like that's what's going on. So when you have a political party staffed with Yale and Harvard grads who know absolutely this is all fake. The New York Times did a glowing hagiographic interview with JD Vance, Yale Law School graduate JD Vance, while he was sowing election denialism and talking about putative mass voter fraud. He knows it's all fake. So we have one political party that's basing their entire raison d'etre on something completely fake. No more real than flying pink bunny rabbits stealing your children. So in that environment of total illusory fakery and lying by politicians who know they're lying, they know they're lying about the very central message of their entire campaign. And that's what The New York Times doesn't report on. That one entire political party is just based on not just the lie, but like flat earth-ism.
Mila Atmos: [00:15:37] Yeah. I mean, I think one of the biggest failures in our society today is that the mainstream media reports this as straight news or straight coverage. I mean, it's straight out of 1984, in a way that I think when we read 1984 as like high schoolers, let's say most of us, right, it seemed impossible. And here we are. And it's like we don't really know what to do about it.
Jason Stanley: [00:15:58] Well, I mean, I think first of all, 1984 makes some errors. Like, you don't need to torture someone to get them to accept nonsense.
Mila Atmos: [00:16:06] As it turns out,
Jason Stanley: [00:16:08] They'll accept it readily. Mila Atmos: [00:16:09] We just buy it. We pay for it.Jason Stanley: [00:16:11] You don't have to, like, put them on a, you know. So that was that was wrong by Orwell. I love Orwell, but he just got that wrong. And also we can't think that this is a change. We have let many American states be one party states. Arguably, no southern state has ever been a democracy. They've all been one party, white supremacist states that have kept, you know. When I'm in Europe and giving talks and I tell people that, like what 38% or well over 30% of Mississippi is Black, people don't believe me. Because they're like, but I thought they're all Republicans. And it's dominated. I'm like, yeah, Black Mississippi voters have no power. All we're looking at is the culture of southern states, as it has always been authoritarian one party states, moving to the national level, which has always been a risk and danger. Hitler was deeply affected by the antebellum South and by Jim Crow. What we're seeing is that kind of white Christian nationalist structure moved to the national level. You know, that was always a danger. It's just that now you have something that is very familiar from the world right now, which is an autocratic kleptocrat who's moving into office in order to steal for his family and stay out of prison. You know, saying to Christian nationalists, I'm your guy, right? So it's super familiar from the world, and it happens all the time, as it were. So so one can expect in this environment of deep seated authoritarianism in our past and present. Right. And the complete breakdown of the major news media. The total breakdown.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:49] Yeah.
Jason Stanley: [00:17:50] I think they said, okay, we better get a lot of nevertrumper Republicans. And then as a result, they became right wing normalizing organs who are literally normalizing fascism 24/7.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:03] Right.
Jason Stanley: [00:18:03] And even, like raising panics about natalism. Mila Atmos: [00:18:06] Yeah. Yes, yes. That's right. That's.
Jason Stanley: [00:18:08] Raising panics about lack of babies.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:11] Lack of babies...Mila Atmos: [00:18:17] We'll continue with Jason Stanley in a moment. So stay with us. And when we come back, we'll share this episode's civic spark -- one small step we can all take to be more empowered and ignite collective change.
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And now let's return to my conversation with Jason Stanley.
Mila Atmos: [00:20:13] Well, speaking of the South, you are a scholar of Nazi Germany in many ways, and you noted that unlike post Nazi Germany, where the sins and
dangers of Nazism are being taught in schools, the United States has not engaged in that kind of reckoning after Jim Crow. And, of course, what we just discussed, you could argue that Jim Crow is alive and well today. So what are the takeaways in post Nazi Germany that we can learn from that are relevant for us here in the United States?
Jason Stanley: [00:20:42] Yeah, I mean, it's a bit tricky because Germany now faces the most extreme, far right fascist party in Western Europe.
Mila Atmos: [00:20:52] Yes. The AfD.
Jason Stanley: [00:20:52] The Alternative für Deutschland. So there's. Mila Atmos: [00:20:56] It's coming back.
Jason Stanley: [00:20:57] Yes.
Mila Atmos: [00:20:57] In Germany.Jason Stanley: [00:20:57] It's coming back. Yeah. My ex-wife, in 2017, we were thinking of moving to Germany when we were married. She's African American. She refused. She said we Black people know that 80 years is not that long. So. So I think what we're seeing in Germany is a kind of, we're seeing a very strong resurgence of fascism. I'm going to Germany on Sunday to talk about this. And so we can say maybe that the education system was not the protection we thought it was. However, the AfD, the German Fascist party, its support is based in the East, where you didn't have Holocaust education, where you didn't have the German education system in West Germany, and West Germany has remained very democratic. AfD has not made inroads in West Germany, so I think we can say that the education is to some degree protective. But, you know, as I talk about in my book, there was still a lot of failures in postwar German education. I'm nervous about the "what we can learn from Germans" trope, because the Germans also contained this German supremacy of like, we've apologized better than anyone in the world. We are the world's greatest apologizers, which, if you think about it, is another form of supremacy. So that kind of "we are the most moral people in history," which is like German nationalism now.
Mila Atmos: [00:22:19] Yes. In a different way.
Jason Stanley: [00:22:20] In a different way. Exactly.
Mila Atmos: [00:22:22] It's actually just a very close cousin.Jason Stanley: [00:22:24] Right. It's a very close cousin. Exactly. But, you know, the education system we have that focuses on extolling our greatness is massively dangerous. It's, it's massively dangerous for the future of democracy. We're a very flawed democracy and always have been. We're kind of new democracy since the Voting Rights Act, but we're obviously a very rapidly backsliding democracy. And that's because people don't know our past. You know, what we need to do is make sure people know about cutting back on voting rights, the history of terrifying minority communities. So they're too afraid to show up at the polls. Like DeSantis, who's a Yale and Harvard grad, you know, obviously loved by these institutions, he knows exactly what he's doing. He knows there's no voter fraud, but he has a whole electoral police force that just arrests mostly men, Black voters and puts the videos on social media to intimidate Black voters from appearing at the polls. He's a Jim Crow autocrat. If we don't know these histories, you know, it's no wonder that they're trying to attack critical race theory, i.e., Black history and voting at the same time. Because if you attack the history of of Jim Crow, you attack the history of poll taxes, you attack that history, then people won't know that the rollback of voting rights is a return to that era. Similarly, if Trump appeals to old racist American myths of the sort that led to the end of Reconstruction. So Reconstruction was that brief 12 year, 10 to 12 year period where Black Americans in the South were freely allowed to vote and occupy political offices, and it was ended by the Ku Klux Klan and northern industrialists who thought a labor movement was starting to develop between poor whites and poor Blacks. So they wanted to stop that. But the myth they used was that Black voters were not ready for democracy. They were too corrupt and Black politicians were too corrupt. Well, that's what Trump's been saying. He's been saying Black majority cities or cities with large populations are corrupt, and so you can't trust. That's exactly the old racist line. If you know history, you're not going to be susceptible to that line. So this is again, the point that they're trying to eliminate the history that will allow you to respond to false stereotypes.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:47] Right, right. Well, speaking of false stereotypes, Ron DeSantis, Florida, education... He's, of course, a governor who tried to and I think, successfully. Right. He basically banned the teaching of African American history as an AP class in high schools. And he's also very busy refashioning the new College of Florida, although I think that he completed doing that. I think he refashioned it already. Also, the Republican presidential candidates is also sure to advance the 1776 project to support "patriotic" education if he were to win. So actually, I feel like we're really far along in the US in remaking education or remaking is maybe even wrong because we've been teaching American exceptionalism also for a long time. So how far along the continuum are we?
Jason Stanley: [00:25:37] So this reminds me of reading through the literature on Nazi education, where there were a few progressive reforms in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, and the Nazis vilified and ran against those few progressive reforms, the bulk of the education was already German exceptionalists, so they just had to add a few paranoid things about Jews supposedly betraying Germany in World War I, and they were off and running. That's what we have here. We have an exceptionalist education already in place, and we have a few small efforts to make it more democratic. And then those are being vilified, you know, using some some excesses, as it were, of wokeness or whatever, which of course, will occur in any social movement for change. But they use those excesses as Christopher Rufo, the chief propagandist of this far right movement, has said, use these excesses to tar all progressive education, all education that is not American exceptionalist ultra nationalist as sort of communist, dangerous. And then replace it with just patriotic education. So DeSantis has destroyed the new College of Florida, and this atmosphere of fear that pervades Florida's universities. Florida's professors are not allowed to criticize the governor anymore. They've done away with tenure. So they have tenure review every five years, meaning there's no tenure. There's, you come up for tenure every five years. You come up for retaining your job again every five years. This creates an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. The public school teachers in Florida are under great threat of losing their jobs or being reported by the students they teach professors. It's now moved to the universities. So and this has spread to over 20 states. Indiana and Ohio just passed these bills governing two of the greatest public universities in the world, University of Indiana and Ohio State, where now they're going to be eliminating tenure. They're threatening professors jobs for teaching concepts like white privilege or structural racism, which are
central to American history. So they're destroying our university system and they're destroying our public school system. They're encouraging students to turn in their professors. Like in any authoritarian society, they're creating a culture of authoritarianism. A culture of authoritarianism is when we turn each other in for not toeing ideological lines. This is being justified by supposed Marxism, where Marxism is the idea that if someone says something racist, lots of people complain about them. There are excesses, obviously, of political correctness or wokeness or whatever. But it's nothing like passing laws and banning books and, you know, removing books from libraries and firing teachers en masse and radically redoing curricula to eliminate Black authors and LGBTQ perspectives, like by law. So the level of hypocrisy that we're dealing with is world historical. You know, the right is saying, oh, wokeism is threatening people's jobs. So therefore we have to fire a bunch of teachers and professors, remove a whole bunch of books so people don't have ideological education. So, you know, it's always important to remember there are no liberal arts colleges in authoritarian countries. They don't exist. And what we're doing is we're creating an authoritarian country. And by necessity, that means the destruction of the universities.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:04] Well, you are at a liberal arts college, you work at Yale, you're a professor, so you are really in the middle of it. And even though you are not in Florida and you work for a private institution, you're not untouched. Right. So what's it like to be at an institution of higher learning in this moment?
Jason Stanley: [00:29:22] It's like being in the media, which we've already discussed. The level of what Timothy Snyder calls anticipatory obedience is on steroids. Like everyone is looking to obey in advance. Everyone's trying to predict what a Trump administration will be like, and to already, you know, hire trumpists professors and having issues. All over the South, you find these new hyper well-funded conservative institutes arising where, you know, people talk about, oh, well, we have to have affirmative action for conservatives. You know, we have to hire essentially, um not essentially, affirmative action on steroids for right wing professors, which is what happens in authoritarian countries. So I wonder what this means for biology departments, math departments, physics departments, which also are staffed by virtually the same numbers of Democrats versus Republicans. Are we going to force math departments to hire conservatives because they're not departments don't have Trump supporters. Physics departments don't have Trump supporters. So what is the
system going to look like? If we look at Florida, we see a clue. Ron DeSantis has been stuffing university positions with his supporters and funders. Richard Corcoran, the president of New College. There's just a culture of using these state funded positions to enrich one's political supporters and funders. So this is what corruption looks like. So we're seeing the destruction of our university systems, places like Yale. You're just seeing people like, how can we please Trump, you know, how can we be as apolitical as possible so as not to be in the crosshairs of universities in a democracy are supposed to defend democracy. They're essentially political institutions because they're defending democracy against authoritarianism, but they're giving up in advance. They're already giving up in advance. And so you see this process of anticipatory obedience occurring very rapidly. How can we assign, hire trumpists? How can we get like trumpists who we can control, unquote. But, you know, if that weren't happening, if anticipatory obedience weren't happening at the New York Times, at Yale University, you know, then we wouldn't be facing fascism.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:34] Yeah, well, I don't know. I have a question about being on campus in this moment. And the students who appear to continue to want to be anti- fascists, for example, the protesters against the policy in Gaza, which is an understatement. But what's happening in Gaza, let's say so how do you make sense in the context of our conversation today? Everything that we just discussed, how do you make sense of the student protests and the subsequent crackdowns?
Jason Stanley: [00:32:04] Right. So that's just very straightforward. Fox News in October, immediately after the Hamas terrorist attack, represented universities as hotbeds of pro-hamas of Hamas supporters and anti-American and anti-Semitic. And then that Fox News extreme right narrative was taken up by the New York Times, who thereby made it a centrist narrative that, oh, this is the official story that our Hamas supporter universities are filled with terroristic students and anti-Semitism. It took months for The New York Times to start reporting that Jewish students were involved in the protests. So these are anti-war protests. Students have always had anti-war protests, in this case against genocidal actions by the Israeli government, which is performing these genocidal actions with American weapons and with the support of the United States. So it's a very straightforward thing. If you didn't have these protests, you would wonder what's up with the universities. And there are harsh and brutal crackdowns on them, you know, bringing police onto campus, arresting these students.
And the only reason for this is, first of all, vilify the universities, destroy their reputations, and then get the country used to attacking students. Student protests. And this has been done with the full egging on of the New York Times and the boards of these universities. They are willingly destroying themselves in advance of, of course, an authoritarian one party state where the students would be the natural protesters. So that's what this is about.
Jason Stanley: [00:33:42] The Republicans are not don't care about anti-Semitism. And any rate, one of the largest identity groups in these protests are Jewish students who get erased, who's Judaism gets erased. So all of this is in preparation for an authoritarian one party state. So the useful dupes in the administration, the useful dupes in the media who are just lining up the justifications are just, you know, they're they're Martin Luther King's white moderate, he said. They're more dangerous than the Ku Klux Klan. And that's what we're seeing. This is just a paint by numbers thing from every other country. So India in 2019 had the nonviolent on campus protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which together with the National Registry, makes Muslims into second class citizens in India. These nonviolent protests were represented exactly as the protests here were represented. As violent as. Anti-indian as. Anti-national as. Threats to the nation. Universities were represented as hotbeds of anti-Hindu sentiment, and militarized police cracked down on these demonstrations using tear gas. The same methods we saw last year and some of the central student organizers were arrested and imprisoned. So all of this is paint by numbers authoritarianism. And it's interesting, I guess, as a theoretician, to see the way the corporate media, the New York Times, the administrations and boards of these institutions are complicit in their own self- destruction.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:10] That, to me, is the most flummoxing thing that they appear to not understand what they're doing. Like they're not understanding that they're self destroying. And I'm like, but why do you keep doing this? I don't understand, it's like it's really hard.
Jason Stanley: [00:35:23] They're cowards. So... Mila Atmos: [00:35:24] That's it?
Jason Stanley: [00:35:25] Well some of them are. In this case their pro-Israel sentiment is being exploited to destroy universities. And mostly it's just mass cowardice.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:38] Well, let's combat mass cowardice. We are a civic engagement podcast, so of course we're interested in righting the ship toward a bulletproof democracy. In your book, you quote your father's scholarship on civic compassion. What exactly is civic compassion and how can we practice it?
Jason Stanley: [00:35:55] So you can enter a democracy by deciding that you want to give everyone the same story, same national story. But that doesn't work, as my father recognized, because there are so many different paths through history. You know, if you're from an LGBTQ family, you know, your path is different than other people's paths. Your family looks different. If you're from a Black American family, your history is different than from white American families. So a democracy is about freedom and equality. So freedom requires that we can choose different paths. So this idea of one uniform narrative that we all must follow is actually anti-democratic. The goal of education should be to learn about different paths our citizens take. Different paths women have taken in order to gain their freedoms. Different paths workers have taken against the wealthy elites, and different paths different groups have taken. Exposure to these different paths allows us to see their perspectives. So democracy isn't about all having the same perspective. It's about understanding other people's perspectives, because that's what gives them a voice in your democracy. When you have minority groups, you know, and a dominant group, numerically, the minority groups don't just affect policy through their votes. They also affect policy because members of dominant groups learn about their perspectives and that affects their own votes. So without civic compassion, the basis of which is knowing the perspectives of other people in your society. Without civic compassion, you can't have a democracy. You can't have everybody's voices being heard.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:40] Thank you. Every week on Future Hindsight, I ask my guest to share a civic spark, one small step we can all take to be more empowered and ignite collective change. What's a good way to turn the insights you've shared today into action?
Jason Stanley: [00:37:56] So we're seeing mass attacks on teachers, mass attacks on election workers. These are ordinary citizens who have never been in the spotlight, who are now facing harrowing experiences, from public humiliation to loss of their jobs. Professors have long faced this from the right wing media. That has been erased. So The New York Times represents all the pressure on professors is coming from the left, when in fact 90% of it comes from Turning Point USA, Campus Reform, all these right wing publications that are never spoken of in the mainstream press. So under this culture of fear and being targeted, that's what authoritarianism is. Making everyone feel like they're a potential target. People are afraid of being the next person targeted. So what you've got to do is if someone in your community is being targeted, bake them an apple pie. Don't be afraid. Don't scurry like a cockroach when the light goes on, into the woodwork. Stand up. Have solidarity with people being targeted. Bring them an apple pie, you know. Don't film their house so everyone knows where it is. But maybe film yourself walking towards their house with an apple pie. Put yourself in the spotlight too, as a potential target. If there's a lot of us who are targets, then there's not any one of us who can be singled out.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:21] Oh, wow. I like it. It's like solidarity in action. You're telling us how to do it. Thank you. So, as we are rounding out our conversation here today looking into the future. What makes you hopeful?
Jason Stanley: [00:39:32] What makes me hopeful is that I am a pessimist about history. And I know we've we've always been in this situation. Democracy is. Democracies are very rare. Our system is a deeply flawed democracy at its very best. I mean, you know, democracy is a process and a practice of realizing the ideals of freedom and equality. There's no such thing as a bulletproof democracy. But what I see is that democracy itself has become something that people see needs to be defended. So, you know, it's one of the main poll questions. Who does better on the issue of democracy? That wasn't a poll question in 2008. So that makes me hopeful that people see that democracy is under threat. And both political parties have to say they're, you know... Trump has to say he's the pro-democracy candidate, even though that is manifestly not true. But so I see glimmers of recognition that we have serious problems in this country, in self-identifying as a democracy. And people sort of don't want to give up on that identification.
Mila Atmos: [00:40:42] Yes, I agree that there is a civic awakening in the last nine years, let's say, and that is very hopeful. Thank you very much for joining us on Future Hindsight.
Jason Stanley: [00:40:53] It was really a pleasure. A great discussion.
Mila Atmos: [00:40:55] Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.
Remember, civic action doesn't have to be complicated. It's about small steps that spark progress, like sharing this episode with a friend. Let's recap this week's civic spark and fire up our collective power. Solidarity is everything. Fascism and Authoritarianism rely on fear and alienation of certain individuals and groups. But if you can walk, talk, and act in solidarity with the people being targeted, we can cut down authoritarianism at the knees. As Jason tells us, bake them an apple pie!
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Maria Teresa Kumar. She's the president and CEO of Voto Latino, a civic engagement organization focused on educating and empowering a new generation of Latinx voters, as well as creating a more robust and inclusive democracy.
Maria Teresa Kumar: [00:42:06] We're aiming to register 500,000 folks this election in the key battleground states. If 2020 was any indication, 80% of those people that we register, will vote. They will make the difference. We will also persuade and target low propensity voters that are roughly 3.5 million Latino voters in key battleground states. Oftentimes, what most campaigns don't do. They only want to talk to the people who vote all the time. But because the majority of Latino voters are under the age of 33, they've maybe only voted once. We need to talk to them.
Mila Atmos: [00:42:35] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
And before I go, thanks so much for listening. If you liked this episode, please consider supporting us on Patreon. We're really passionate about bringing pro-democracy values into your headphones. We are an independent podcast. Please support us by joining
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Thank you so much for your support and thanks for tuning in. Until next time, see clearly, act boldly and spark the change you want to see.
The Democracy Group: [00:43:19] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.