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Why have schools become so central in America’s culture wars? Jonathan Zimmerman on a continued history of conflict over “nothing less than the definition of the nation itself.” “This is a tremendous teachable moment, and I’m afraid we won’t leverage it.” Burning Bright Why have schools become so central in America’s culture wars? Jonathan Zimmerman on a continued history of conflict over “nothing less than the definition of the nation itself.” Some of the most intense political battles in America this year are taking place at school board meetings. Across the country, these meetings have become forums for intense debates, often among huge crowds, over whether to impose school mask mandates with the Delta variant of COVID-19 surging and how to teach the history of racism in the U.S. Those issues are already shaping local elections, where [Republicans are channeling anger]( over mandatory masking and “[critical race theory]( Last week, the Associated Press [reported]( that a “loose network of conservative groups with ties to major Republican donors and party-aligned think tanks is quietly lending firepower” in these conflicts, which have occasionally resulted even in brawling and arrests. All this comes amid nationwide arguments over the idea that “woke” left-wing extremism is capturing American education, including at colleges and universities, and the issue of transgender-girl student athletes participating in girls’ sports. How are all these phenomena connected? Jonathan Zimmerman, an education historian at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the 2002 book [Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools]( says schools are “the central public institution” where Americans “deliberate and decide what we want to communicate to our young people about who we are.” So he’s not surprised schools are such a locus of today’s culture wars. To Zimmerman, Donald Trump’s presidency intensified the fight over national identity in the U.S., not least over how it should be taught to students, which is part of why “the history wars”—the battles over how to understand America’s past—are “flaring as never before.” New narratives about the country, like The New York Times’ 1619 Project, aren’t just attempting to include marginalized voices in a traditional telling of America’s story, Zimmerman says; they’re attempting to question the story itself: “A lot of this new curricula reflects a fundamental challenge to the idea of America as a land of freedom and liberty.” At the same time, certain aspects of the education culture wars seem less contentious to him now than they have in the country’s recent history—particularly issues related to religious belief, such as teaching evolution or admitting school prayer. ——— Graham Vyse: Are schools now the central battleground in the U.S. culture wars? Jonathan Zimmerman: They’re absolutely central. Sharp conflict over schooling is nothing new in America, but we’re at a new moment in the structure and content of that conflict. [Back in 2002]( I thought the religion wars had no solution and the history wars had the wrong one. The religion wars—over school prayer, evolution, and sex education inflected by religion—were insoluble, because they involved mutually incompatible claims. Either sex outside straight marriage is a sin or it isn’t. Either Christ died for our sins or he didn’t. Either we share DNA with other creatures or we don’t. We did manage to solve the history wars, meanwhile, but I thought we solved them in the wrong way—just by adding new groups to the old story of America’s past. For a lot of our history, our textbooks were only about white men. Starting in the 1920s, and then really picking up during the civil rights era, we added more groups into the same story. Adding those groups was terrific, but we weren’t asking what adding they did to the broader story. Today, the history wars are flaring as never before, because there’s a real debate over the story itself. That’s what The 1619 Project is about—not just a demand for inclusion. More from Jonathan Zimmerman at The Signal: “Is anyone ‘teaching’ critical race theory in elementary and secondary schools? No. At the same time, it’s fair to say some of the ideas promulgated by critical race theory have entered these schools in some places—not under the banner of critical race theory but often under the banner of something called anti-racism. If your policy is that we have to dismantle systemic racism, you’re making a fairly profound claim about the United States—that it continues to be marked by systemic racism. It’s only in the past few years that we’ve seen school districts come up with policies like that. They’re fundamentally new, and they’re a challenge to the traditional account of U.S. history, which said that we had slavery and Jim Crow but are moving beyond all that.” “‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ Obama loved that quote from Martin Luther King Jr. so much that he had it sewn into a rug in the Oval Office. … For most of U.S. history, including during the Obama administration, liberals retained a kind of tenuous consensus on that arc of history metaphor: We’re not going to deny all the awful stuff, and it continues. But because America is America, we can fight against it and progressively (to use a loaded adverb) get closer to our founding ideals. That idea is under a certain kind of challenge, and Republicans are correct in their perception of that.” “There’s always going to be variation depending on the history and culture of a country, but one reason these culture wars are a little more powerful in America is that Americans have a stronger sense of their own exceptionalism in the world. They’re more likely to think of themselves as being at the forefront of that arc of history. Now, polling shows a decline in the number of Americans who say we’re the greatest country on earth—it’s still a majority, but not what it used to be. Still, Americans have generally had more invested in their own place in history, so a lot of these questions have been more emotional and contested.” ——— Hearts and Minds With populism on the rise globally, can liberal democracy compete with authoritarian propaganda? Ruth Ben-Ghiat on the democratic challenges of political branding. (Originally published 2021 | 07.05) With the rise of populism around the world, there’s been an increasing concern across the West about the tropes of authoritarianism creeping into, and possibly even threatening the political idioms of liberal democracy—not least in the United States during the presidency of Donald Trump. Like his Russian counterpart President Vladimir Putin, Trump projected himself as a strongman figure—originally as a celebrity businessman, ultimately as what was once called “the leader of the free world.” Trump himself seems to have had little doubt about the role this image—or the role of imagery generally, from the bright-red “Make America Great Again” hats, to the spectacular rallies, to surrounding himself with super-glamorous women—played in his political success. Trump had long been a kind of brand; Trumpism was a new kind, manifestly capable of disrupting conventional American politics to the point of crisis. To what extent has this recent history showed strongman imagery and other authoritarian projections to be an ongoing political danger for liberal democracy? Does it have a branding problem? [Ruth Ben-Ghiat]( a professor of history and Italian Studies at New York University, is the author of [Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present](. Illiberal imagery, Ben-Ghiat says, is emotionally compelling imagery—an increasingly important political asset in a time of change and uncertainty globally. Political moderation, as essential as it is to the sustenance of any liberal-democratic order, doesn’t lend itself to such an asset. Extremism, whether from the right or the left, does. Through cults of personality built around individual leaders, or negative messaging about certain groups in a population, authoritarian movements offer supporters a sense of camaraderie that’s difficult for proponents of liberal democracy to counter—difficult, but not, for Ben-Ghiat, impossible: “The way in for liberal democracy is to find messaging and imagery that is about what we share—and that makes people dream.” ——— ——— [The Signal]( is a new, independent digital publication exploring vital questions in democratic life and the human world—and sustained entirely by readers like you. To support The Signal and for full access: We recently resolved a broken-link issue with our opt-out function. If you’ve received this in error, our apologies—you can immediately unsubscribe below. Thank you. © 2021 The Signal The Signal | 717 N St. NW, Ste. One, Washington, DC 20011 [Unsubscribe {EMAIL}]( [Constant Contact Data Notice]( Sent by newsletters@thesgnl.email