An Authoritarian Impulse
Conservative Assaults on Trans Kids, Teachers, and the Teaching of Race Are Part of a Decades-Long Effort
In Florida, students walked out of class earlier this week to protest legislation that would ban discussion of LGBTQ+ topics that conservative legislators say are inappropriate for younger students.
The bill, called the Parental Rights in Education bill (HB 1557), “would effectively ban teachers from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms for young students,” according to CNN. The bill is opposed by many in the LGBTQ+ community, because it “would lead to further stigmatization of gay, lesbian and transgender children, causing more bullying and suicides within an already marginalized community.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis has not said if he will sign what critics are calling the “Don’t Say Gay bill,” which was approved by both houses of the state legislature this week, and it is unclear whether the bill would even be enforceable. But that should not stop us from being concerned, because it part of a larger cultural assault in conservative-led states to impose limits on citizenship and redefine what it means to be American.
Lawmakers approved legislation banning teachers from discussing much of the nation’s racial history, that would create an election police force, and would penalize companies that transport immigrants. Florida is one of 23 states, reports Ron Brownstein in The Atlantic, that over the last two years “have advanced a torrent of socially conservative legislation" that includes
laws limiting access to abortion, restricting voting rights, banning transgender girls from participating in high-school or college sports, barring transition medical treatment for transgender minors, censoring how teachers can talk about current or historical racial and gender inequities, removing licensing requirements to publicly carry firearms, increasing penalties for public protesters, and immunizing drivers who hit and injure protesters.
The LGBTQ+ community has been a chief target of these bills, an indication that conservatives see gay and trans individuals as threats. In Texas, for isntance, officials are pushing to declare some transitioning methods to child abuse, and there have been efforts to keep trans athletes from competing, and other assaults on the rights of LBGTQ+ individuals around the country.
A bill in Arizona, an editorial in The Washington Post reports,
would require permission from parents for a student to join any club “involving sexuality, gender or gender identity.” An effort in Tennessee would ban schools from using materials that “promote, normalize, support, or address … (LGBT) lifestyles or issues.” In Oklahoma, legislators are considering at least five separate bills that would restrict conversations about sexuality in educational settings, including a proposal to bar public school libraries from displaying books about “the study of sex, sexual preferences, sexual activity, sexual perversion, sex-based classifications, sexual identity, or gender identity or books that are of a sexual nature.”
Supporters in each state make the argument that their particular bill is needed to defend children, though as the Post says, that’s bogus. The bills are “rooted in the anachronistic belief that discussions about gender and sexuality somehow endanger children.” It is the same argument made to support bills that purport to band “critical race theory” from schools and mandate hagiography and enforced patriotism.
We should not view these bills as singular events, as individual to their states. They are part of what Anna Eskamani, a Democratic state representative in Florida, describes as “an onslaught.”
“It’s so intense,” she told Brownstein, “and every direction you turn, you have another culture war to fight back against.”
Brownstein argues that this conservative assault is an attempt “to unravel ‘the rights revolution’ of the past 60 years, in which both the Supreme Court and Congress have generally expanded the range of basic rights and liberties available nationwide.” He adds that “the cumulative aim” of conservative lawmakers is to “return the U.S. to a pre-1960s world in which those basic rights and liberties vary much more from state to state.”
Brownstein’s assessment is a dark one, and yet I think he is downplaying what we are witnessing. He is right to view the various bills and executive orders through a single lens, but this is about more than a rollback. Its roots are much deeper. It is part of a historical, conservative crusade to proscribe a narrow definition of American on the population and to exclude from it the non-White and non-Christian. This Whiteness has long been contested space, always defined in opposition to out groups and expanded only as a defense mechanism against the potential of Black political power.
The crusade begins by targeting Blacks, Jews, and Catholics, but moves from the direct appeal race and religious hatred to focus instead on evolution and science, inter-racial and later same-sex marriage, the growth of individual rights and group rights for Blacks, women, gays and lesbians, and so on.
These assaults are usually couched in the language of liberty and freedom, or the protection of an unprotected class. “My body, my choice” and opposition to government coercion have become rallying cries during Covid, used to oppose vaccines and public health measures designed to safeguard everyone. Parental choice, parents’ rights, and the defense of tradition and “American culture” — which always is presented as White and under siege — are the rationales for many of the school-based bills and the more widespread attacks on minority groups. “Liberty” and “freedom” are words robbed of their meaning, recast within this rightwing authoritarian mindset as us-them signifiers. It is always “freedom from,” with the “from” referring to any effort at inclusiveness.
This can be seen as a “telling symptom of fascist politics,” which “aims to separate a population into an ‘us’ and ‘them,’” writes the philosopher Jason Stanley in How Fascism Works (p. xvi1).
Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present. They rewrite the population’s shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism, attacking university and educations systems that might challenge their ideas. (pp. xvi-xvii)
This creates a “state of unreality,” he writes, and allows “conspiracy theories and fake news (to) replace reasoned debate.”
I don’t think I’m overstating the case here, though some might say my use of the word “fascism” is hyperbolic. I don’t think so. We are witnessing a broad-scale rollback in red states, that has led to violence — assassinations of abortion doctors, physical assaults of gays, lesbians, and trans individuals, mass murders in churches and synagogues, the Charlottesville rally, the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The current run of state bills is not happening in a vacuum. It is occurring against this backdrop and is tied to a history of proto-fascist and authoritarian-leaning behavior on the right. We saw it during the Reagan years dressed up in an “aw shucks” grandfatherly sweater and during the Bush years when a divisive conservativism was rebranded as compassionate. The Reagan and Bush presidencies sowed division to consolidate power, and then recast their efforts as a kind of friendly paternalism. Ronald Reagan, we must remember, is the president who attacked the government most loudly, yet expanded its police powers as part of the war on drugs — ostensibly in the name of protecting children and families, which is how the current assaults are framed by conservative governors like DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas.
The goal these bills, taken together, is not protection of children, but of privilege. Efforts like the “Don’t say gay” bill or bans on CRT are about controlling what teachers teach and what kids learn, about imposing a set of acceptable narratives and removing critical thinking from the classroom. These conservative “culture war” obsessions are connected to attacks on unions, voting rights and the nation’s central cities, with the sense that there is no public good, that vaccines are a choice, that the sick deserve to die, and that police violence is acceptable and even necessary. All of these efforts are about defining who counts and who doesn’t, who gets to be seen and heard and who does not, and not about “age-appropriate discussions.”
Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist, spent much of his writing life focused on memory and how communist regimes sought to control memory through erasure, through a ham-handed editing of the stories told, which in turn left only the stories that could be told. Inn his novels, photographs would be retouched to remove problematic individuals, dates and places would be shifted, historic events rendered forgotten. Facts were made fungible and people invisible. This allowed for control of the narrative, which became whatever it was the autocrats in control needed it to be at the particular moment. In the United States, we have just witnessed the damage that this kind of effort can create — the delayed action against Covid was a direct result of the attacks on science and fact. Trump and his allies spent much of his four years in office erasing inconvenient truths and rewriting the national narrative to suit his warped vision of America. This new narrative spoke to his followers, and to many who saw themselves being left behind by demographic and technological change, fueling the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Trump, however, is not the only one who deserves blame. There is a through-line that connects Trump to Reagan, Reagan to Barry Goldwater (or the idea of Goldwater), Goldwater to the John Birchers to Joseph McCarthy and the No-Nothings and all the way back. The reactionary streak that defines the supporters of all of these politicians and movements — feelings of dislocation, of lost status, fear of change, of sex, of demographic transformation — is not a bug, but a feature of the American political landscape. Trump is no more an anomaly than the Birchers, though the virulence of his supporters and the unabashed assaults on people and narratives deemed inconvenient by conservative policymakers and the Trumpists and Tea-Partiers proclaiming “Let’s Go Brandon,” praising dictators, and overrunning the Capitol building indicate a level of boldness that should be of concern. These seemingly unrelated bills — and targets — are not unrelated at all, but part of a longer tradition that connects American exceptionalism, conservative religious doctrine, extreme capitalism, and bigotry and that sees state power as a useful tool of control — as long as it only gets used against those deemed outside a narrowly define Americaness.
The use of words like “fascism” and “authoritarianism” may seem extreme. After all, we have not descended into either “fascism” or “authoritarianism,” at least not yet. But we are sliding in that direction on a slope that is only growing slipper as each threat arises.