Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
Review by Alan Singer
Although it was published prior to the 2024 Presidential election, Erasing History serves well as Jason Stanley’s response to the patriotic history being promoted by the Trump 2.0 administration. Stanley was a Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, but he recently announced that he accepted an appointment to the University of Toronto in Canada because of the deteriorating political situation in the United States. His previous books include How Propaganda Works (2015) and How Fascism Works (2018).
In the Preface to the book, Stanley argues “One lesson the past century has taught us that authoritarian regimes often find history profoundly threatening. At every opportunity, these regimes find ways of erasing or concealing history in order to consolidate their power.” Democracy, on the other hand, “requires recognition of a shared reality that consists of multiple perspective” so that “citizens learn to regard one another as equal contributors to a national narrative . . . Erasing history helps authoritarians because doing so allows them to misrepresent it as a single story,” their preferred story.
Social studies teachers are crucial players in the battle to protect democracy because we insist that students examine multiple perspectives and reach conclusions based on evidence and discussion (xi-x). Russia Premier Vladimir Putin recognizes the danger teachers pose to authoritarian regimes and has declared “Wars are won by teachers.” Under Putin, and now under Trump, history classes are supposed to stress patriotism and textbooks are rewritten to whitewash the past (Illyushina, 2024).
Stanley acknowledges that every educational system must decide what is important to know and be able to explain why because a school curriculum cannot include all knowledge. What authoritarian regimes do is erase from the curriculum evidence that people can struggle for change and social justice so that people are willing to accept an unsatisfactory status quo as the only possible circumstance. That is why China’s government outlawed teaching about the 1989 pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests and Florida wants to block discussion of reasons for the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. “By removing the history of uprisings against the current status quo from the curriculum (or never allowing that history to be taught in the first place) authoritarians leave students with the impression that the status quo has never been and cannot be challenged (xx-xxi).”
Chapters include “How to Create an Autocracy”; “Colonizing the Mind”;” “The Nationalist Project”; “From Supremacism to Fascism”; “Anti-education”; and “Reclaiming History.” Throughout the book, Stanley draws comparisons between past nativist and racist movements in the United States, the Nazi ascendency in Germany, and MAGA authoritarianism in the United States today.
Attacks on universities are a key component of the fascist agenda to erase history and undermine democracy. In contemporary Russia, India, Hungary, and Turkey rightwing politicians and autocratic leaders have sought to destroy academic independence by branding faculty as enemies of the state and trying to mandate a preferred curriculum. A Fox New host quota by Stanley bemoaned that “Our universities have become lunatic incubators, which the federal government funds” (21). Stanley argues that there are similar trends in government attacks in these countries on K-12 education. He quotes W.E.B. DuBois that “Education for colonial people must inevitably mean unrest and revolt; education therefore had to be limited and used to inculcate obedience and servility” (25).
Stanly explains how curriculum and textbooks are used in “colonizing the mind.” As a high school teacher in the 1980s I taught an advanced United States history class using Bailey and Kennedy’s The American Pageant: A History of the Republic, 7th edition (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1983). Stanley includes a quote from the introduction legitimizing colonialism and genocide that I must have completely overlook and did not challenge. It is a statement that well summarizes major components of Trump’s “patriotic history.”
“The American Republic, which is still relatively young when compared with the Old World, was from the outset richly favored. It started from scratch on a vast and virgin continent, which was so sparsely populated by Indians that they could be eliminated or shouldered aside. Such a magnificent opportunity for great democratic experiment may never come again” (2).
However, it did not start from “scratch,” its early institutions and its white people were Europeans, and it definitely was not a “virgin” continent as the sentence acknowledges. What a “magnificent opportunity” to conduct a “great democratic experiment” by exterminating the indigenous population and importing a workforce of enslaved Africans. Hopefully it “may never come again.”
Stanley argues that a movement in the United States to stem the trend towards authoritarianism must reclaim history. That is why social studies teachers, whatever their political views, but because of their commitments to dialogue, evidence, critical thinking, and developing active citizens for a democratic society, are in the crucible of the battle for the hearts and minds of America’s future leaders and defining the kind of country this will become. We are the threat to authoritarianism.
For the book jacket, Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md) wrote Stanley that “shows how everything from the antisemitic Great Replacement Theory to the vilification of gay people and feminists to the promotion of myths of national purity and historical innocence all work to demolish democratic agency and freedom.” Stanley “leaves us with the sense that those who fight for the past can save the future.”
This is both a readable and invaluable book for teachers who are concerned about the impact of the Trump administration of the future of education in this country and the survival of democracy in America.
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