The humble republican civic ethic that guided the political development of the United States for generations seems to have fallen out of favor among our opinion-makers. The mechanisms the Founders put in place as a bulwark against tyranny are increasingly derided by the West’s most fortunate children as impediments to achieving their preferred ends and, in their minds, a just society. But the changes they seek are radical, whether they know it or not. If they are not careful, they may get what they’re asking for.
Maybe these quasi-revolutionaries think they are the leading edge of some new paradigm for American political life, but they are only the latest in a series of fanatics who have tried to take a sledgehammer to the republic’s legal and intellectual foundations. The danger this wave of authoritarianism poses is exceptional not because its champions are uniquely skilled or their philosophy especially appealing. They are dangerous because the forces that could once be counted on to oppose their paranoid, reactionary politics seem to have lost the will to resist.
A catastrophe may be approaching, but it is not inevitable. The appeal of radical identity politics is limited by its practical shortcomings. Retributive social justice is incompatible with the egalitarianism that is at the foundation of America’s understanding of itself, so advocates for tiered justice and functional caste systems are forever asking Americans to abandon their most cherished conceptions of themselves. The threat of identity politics and retributive justice is contained for now within small groups of activists who attract far more attention than their influence warrants, fostering a perception that these groups are larger than they actually are. But perception has a habit of becoming reality.
Politics is a game of addition, and any successful political coalition will be tempted to ignore its ugliest components if they help win elections. Neither traditional conservatives nor their progressive counterparts should be allowed to take refuge in the meager numbers of the authoritarians in their midst. These elements must be called out, shamed, and relegated to the fringes of American life in as public a manner as possible. Their rejection and the defeat of their ideas cannot be ambiguous.
Classical liberals in both parties who want to purge their movements of Identitarianism may have no idea how to go about it, and those who try may be tempted to use a meat cleaver when what’s called for is a scalpel. The political philosophies associated with hardline social justice militancy deserve to be isolated and marginalized, but the otherwise reasonable and judicious people who might find those ideas attractive should not be so rashly ejected from their political homes. No rational political movement with a sense of self-preservation would engage in a purge of its own members anyway.
So how do you exile a bankrupt idea while keeping most of those who find it alluring inside the tent? Both the progressive left and the conservative right know how to do this. They’ve done it before.
Robert Henry Winborne Welch Jr. was confectioner before he was a conspiracy theorist. An unremarkable anti-Communist with strong anti–New Deal views and a lot of money, he mounted an unsuccessful campaign for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1950. Senator Robert Taft’s loss of the GOP presidential nomination to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and the Republican Party’s failure to unite behind Senator Joseph McCarthy’s paranoid campaign to root out Soviet sympathizers in American society left Welch embittered. He felt that these men and their righteous causes had been “betrayed” by “the Republican political establishment”1—a complaint that has a familiar ring.
In the transcript of an obscure congressional hearing, Welch read about a man named John Birch, an American missionary to China killed by Communist soldiers in 1945. In 1953, he wrote a brief book about Birch, whom he considered America’s first casualty in the Cold War, convinced that this crime had been covered up by Communist agents inside the United States.
Birch’s mother had hoped her son would be remembered as a Christian martyr, but by consenting to Welch’s request to name his new political society after him, she ensured that the name John Birch would forever be associated with right-wing fanaticism instead.
The notion that the American government had conspired to keep the name John Birch from the lips of average Americans while also clumsily forgetting to destroy the congressional transcript to which Welch was privy wasn’t the Birchers’ only daft theory. The candy mogul became convinced that Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was a piece of Soviet propaganda smuggled into the West to undermine capitalism. In fact, the precise oppposite was the case. Boris Pasternak's novel was initially distributed inside the Soviet Union with the help of the CIA to destabilize the regime in Moscow.
Welch thought the Communist advances around the world, such as their victories in China and Cuba, were possible only with the covert aid of American policymakers secretly loyal to the Communist cause. And he saw Communists everywhere.2
According to Welch, Henry Kissinger was a Communist. President Eisenhower engaged in “conscious treason” and was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, were both fellow travelers. Even former Secretary of State George Marshall, architect of the Marshall Plan, which had kept much of Western Europe from falling to Communist insurgencies after World War II, was counted among the left-wing conspirators. In 1961, Welch estimated that Communist agents had infiltrated between 50 and 70 percent of the American government.
William F. Buckley Jr. did not seem to dislike Robert Welch Jr. personally. Not at first, anyway. In their initial correspondence, Buckley always emphasized that they agreed on more than they disagreed on. They shared similar pedigrees and political predispositions. Both men edited political journals (Buckley founded National Review; Welch, American Opinion). Both were deeply suspicious of John Kennedy, who had taken to speaking out about “extremism” on the right and who used Welch’s paranoid accusations as fodder to discredit both the John Birch Society and American conservatism more broadly. Buckley feared Welch’s fringe positions would help Kennedy achieve that objective, but Welch—ever the conspiratorial thinker—insisted that his unfavorable coverage in the press was “communist-inspired.”3
Kennedy’s effort to couple conservatism and Bircherism might have driven even sober-minded conservatives into the arms of their paranoid brethren out of tribal solidarity. But, as Buckley later reflected, Welch’s reckless charges “placed a great weight on the back of responsible conservatives.”
The final straw for Buckley and his acolytes was the attention that the John Birch Society’s campaign to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren attracted. The famously liberal jurist had presided over a string of decisions the Birchers detested: declaring loyalty oaths and school prayer unconstitutional, extending First Amendment protections to overt Communists, and overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine that permitted racial segregation. Welch and the addlebrained theories he promoted became a fixation of the press and political elites. Richard Nixon denounced him in writing. He was spoken of with contempt on the Senate floor. Legislators in Washington were talking about holding hearings. Something had to be done.
“Once they began to appear regularly in the mainstream media, Buckley and others found it difficult to draw distinctions in the public mind between the JBS founder and his organization,” writes the historian Alvin Felzenberg. That distinction had to be made. But how? The society had an estimated one hundred thousand members, a number of whom were wealthy and influential. “Every other person in Phoenix is a member of the John Birch Society,” Senator Barry Goldwater famously quipped. “I’m not talking about commie-haunted apple pickers or cactus drunks; I’m talking about the highest cast of men of affairs.”4
Though he privately agreed that Welch’s paranoia was an albatross around conservative necks, Goldwater publicly praised the society’s members as the “type of people we need in politics.” After all, it was true. Even some on the National Review masthead were society members. If conservatism was to be saved from guilt by association with the John Birch Society, someone was going to have to make a swift and forceful move.
In 1962, Goldwater convened a summit that included Buckley as well as Russell Kirk, the political philosopher and author of The Conservative Mind. The most important item on the agenda was not the 1964 presidential campaign but what was to be done about Welch. Resolved that the John Birch Society had to be dealt with, the meeting’s participants assigned responsibilities. “Goldwater would seek out an opportunity to dissociate himself from the ‘findings’ of the Society’s leader, without, however, casting any aspersions on the Society itself,” Buckley wrote. “I, in National Review and in my other writing, would continue to expose Welch and his thinking to scorn and derision.”
Buckley recognized that the John Birch Society was organized around a fallacy that is common to just about every paranoid crank—“the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence.” Hanlon’s Razor posits that it is a fallacy to presume malice when incompetence suffices for a comprehensive explanation of events. Neither Welch nor the John Birch Society had any use for Hanlon’s Razor.
Opposing this organization was not easy. It was rigidly structured, and its members were disciplined. They mounted withering pressure campaigns against any institution they believed had been too friendly to leftist thought, and they organized successful boycotts of stores that stocked goods made in a Communist country. To isolate the movement but not its members, Buckley’s arguments had to be carefully calibrated.
Buckley’s first shot across Welch’s bow, titled “The Uproar,” opened with an attack on the unscrupulous left and the press, which were “opportuning on the mistaken conclusions of Robert Welch to anathematize the entire American right wing.” It was an appeal to unity across the conservative spectrum, since all conservatives could be counted on to despise the mainstream press. “In professing themselves to be scandalized at the false imputation of pro-communism to a few people, the critics do not hesitate to impute pro-fascism to a lot of people,” Buckley continued. Only after the beaches had been softened did Buckley turn his attention toward Welch. The piece proceeded to savage the founder of the John Birch Society for his unhealthy habit of eschewing a simple explanation for events in favor of absurdly complex and nefarious rationalizations.5
Buckley later confessed that he wished there had been a way to attack the society and its founder “without pleasing the people I cannot stand to please.” The piece received much praise from outside conservative circles, but the reaction inside the conservative tent was far more fractious. Even today, the desire among activists to avoid receiving compromising praise from their political adversaries keeps well-meaning dissenters from speaking out against their supposed “allies.” But Buckley felt a duty to posterity, and there was no going back. The door having been cracked, he moved to thrust it open.
In the following issue of National Review, Buckley adopted a less ideological line of attack on Welch, suggesting that the conspiracy theorist and his society had reached the point of diminishing returns for conservatives. The society’s unfavorable press outweighed the benefits of its organizational competence. Buckley also lined up conservative leaders to echo his attack on Welch, including Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. “Mr. Welch is only one man, and I do not believe his views, far removed from reality and common sense as they are, represent the feelings of most members of the John Birch Society,” Goldwater wrote. Praising the organization but attacking its leadership, he called on Welch to resign from the society he had founded. “We cannot allow the emblem of irresponsibility to attach to the conservative banner,” Goldwater concluded.
Russell Kirk had hoped that the Birchers and Welch would be excommunicated from the conservative movement. That had not happened, though their positions had been weakened. During Buckley’s bid for the mayoralty of New York City in 1965, the Birchers made themselves an issue once again, and the editor of National Review dubbed the Republican candidate for mayor, John V. Lindsay, a “pro-Communist.” Buckley now abandoned caution. No longer would he make utilitarian arguments or draw subtle distinctions between the society and its misguided leadership.
In three columns published in August of that year, Buckley attacked the poisonous delusions in which the John Birch Society, members and leadership alike, seemed to wallow—including the notion that the majority of Supreme Court justices were the agents of a “foreign dictatorship.” “One continues to wonder how it is that the membership of the John Birch Society tolerates such paranoid and unpatriotic drivel,” he wrote.
In response, Buckley received no shortage of hate mail. Near the end of his life, he often reflected on this period, and he appeared to see identity politics as central to the Bircher ethos, though he didn’t put it in those terms. Among the achievements of which he was proudest, he recalled, was “the absolute exclusion of anything anti-Semitic or kooky from the conservative movement.”6
Nothing Lasts Forever
Buckley had succeeded. Welch was isolated and discredited, the society he founded synonymous with addled, conspiratorial thinking. Even today, “Bircher” remains a synonym for a paranoiac. But nothing lasts forever. The conservative movement has again found itself attracted to conspiratorial thinking. Again it is beset by agitators who insist that the “Republican political establishment” has sold the movement out and that its so-called conservative leaders are secretly in league with equivocators, saboteurs, and crypto-liberals. As conspiracies have begun to make a comeback, so, too, have the conspiracy theorists.
Writing for The Daily Caller in 2010, the future Breitbart editor Matt Boyle observed that with the rise of the Tea Party movement, “the John Birch Society is making a comeback.” The society’s president at the time, John McManus, told Boyle that his organization was utterly unrepentant and that it maintained the same beliefs that it had at its founding in 1958.7
That’s largely true. A casual review of the group’s website today includes eye-openers about a government conspiracy to “curtail your freedom of travel” and the revelation that the Islamist terrorist group ISIS “is a charade to help build a New World Order.” But McManus was wrong on at least one count. In a section on the alleged “myths” about the society that persist, the group disavows the idea that “JBS considers public water fluoridation part of a Communist mind-control plot.” There, at least, the organization has matured considerably.
McManus defended Welch’s claim that Eisenhower was a Communist and implied that the threat of Communism had merely evolved into the threat posed by a global world order. “In 1990, President George H. W. Bush stated over and over again his intentions to create the New World Order,” he told Boyle. “We had people calling us up saying, ‘looks like you guys were right all along.’ ”8
In 2009, the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency, the John Birch Society appeared at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference for the first time in decades. “To the extent that the JBS is an advocate for our core ideals, they’re a welcome element of the tea party,” said Tea Party Express spokesman Levi Russell. As in Goldwater’s day, these conservatives wear the epithet “extremist” as a badge of honor. Perhaps they see the John Birch Society as provocative; a group that has all the right enemies. Then, as now, the conservative movement’s reasonable center has undesirable elements descending upon it from the fringes.
Conservatives know that if they criticize their more extreme brethren on the right, they may be praised by center-left political and media elites. But that praise, they fear, reflects a desire to see the conservative movement mortally wounded, not a stronger, more compelling conservative presence in American public life. So those on the right have tended to express criticism of their compatriots only among themselves.
But there is no honor in stifling necessary rebukes merely because unloading the burden of a troubled conscience means, as Buckley put it, “pleasing the people [we] cannot stand to please.” It is incumbent on Republicans to follow the examples of Kirk, Goldwater, and Buckley to expel white racism and paranoia from their ranks. Conspiratorial thinking and prejudice are not justified simply because they irritate Democrats. Responsible Republicans are obliged to stigmatize their own Identitarian social justice advocates until they are again consigned to the shadows. Anyone who believes that conservative values and policies are the best hope for this country will gladly join a fight to prevent their being hijacked by charlatans, no matter how much that internecine conflict might please the left.9
Buckley’s experience with the Birchers demonstrates how this stigmatization can be achieved without sacrificing political influence or alienating irreplaceable elements of the conservative coalition.
Surrounded by Reds
In a way, the John Birch Society came along too late. They were preoccupied with the notion that much of American society had been penetrated by Communists aligned with the Soviet Union, when that charge had become baseless. A decade before Welch founded the society, though, the claim had some merit. Much of the organized labor movement in the United States was once shot through with Communists and Soviet sympathizers. In their equally important effort to rid themselves of authoritarian social justice militants, the progressive left might look at how the labor movement in the United States rid itself of the Communists.
The academic consensus is that the Red Scare of the 1920s and renewed anti-Communist fears in the late 1940s and early 1950s were simply bouts of national hysteria. Some historians maintain that there was, in fact, never any significant Communist infiltration of American institutions. That’s patently false. Maurice Halperin, the chief of the Latin American division of the Office of Strategic Services, was an agent working for the NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB). So, too, was Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Lee, a confidential assistant to the head of the OSS, Major General William “Wild Bill” Donovan. Alger Hiss helped organize the Yalta conference and was involved with the establishment of the United Nations. From the public sector to the journalistic establishment, Soviet agents had thoroughly sunk their hooks into American institutions. But nowhere was Soviet influence more pervasive than within organized labor.10
The global labor movement was an explicit target of Marxist indoctrination. Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky’s 1922 book Marx and the Trade Unions called labor organizations “schools of socialism” in which workers received “elementary class training.” In the brief period in which the young Soviet Union advocated global socialist revolution, Vladimir Lenin insisted that Communists around the world were obliged to “get into the trade unions, to remain in them, and to carry on communist work within them at all costs.” He wrote in detail about the necessity of infiltrating unions, winning the confidence of their members, and removing “reactionary” labor leaders from their posts. The “Profintern,” established by the Kremlin in 1921, was designed to coordinate the actions of Soviet sympathizers inside trade unions around the world.11
By the 1880s, radical socialists in the United States were already effective and well-organized. One of the founders of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, was initially a committed socialist.12 Eugene V. Debs, the perennial presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, founded the American Railway Union. In the early twentieth century, the labor movement in the United States was engaged in a passionate, occasionally violent, intramural debate over whether to pursue its objectives through political avenues or strikes and insurrectionary tactics. The radical Industrial Workers of the World, which advocated the abolition of individual unions and the formation of an amalgamated coalition of laborers, explicitly advocated the “abolition of the wage system.”13
The Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), founded in 1922 by the Native American Communist activist William Foster, was even friendlier toward Bolshevism, debunking the idea of “harmonizing the interests of capital and labor” as “demoralizing nonsense” and insisting that the labor movement’s objective should be “the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a workers’ republic.” Foster’s organization successfully infiltrated independent unions of machinists, painters, textile manufacturers, carpenters, railroad workers, and various other tradespeople.
Some of this work was done at Moscow’s behest. According to the account of the former Communist Benjamin Gitlow, Foster revealed his plan in 1922 at a convention of American Communists in Michigan “called by Moscow.” The TUEL leader revealed that “the Communists were to build up their own organization within the trade union structure [and] hide their identity and establish secret trade union cells in the unions in which the Communists got a foot-hold.” The Kremlin lavishly financed this activity. “When the Communists attempted to take over the United Mine Workers of America, Moscow made an initial contribution of $100,000,” Gitlow wrote, adding another $150,000 later.14
In a report he prepared for Congress in 1949, William H. Chartener—who would later serve as an assistant secretary of commerce—revealed the extent to which the “communists still take pride in their part in establishing” the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). During World War II, however, the Soviet Union and the American labor movement had something of a falling out. John L. Lewis, the former president of the CIO, continued to toe Moscow’s noninterventionist line even after the Nazis tore up the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union. This display of principle angered the Kremlin and resulted in pointed attacks on Lewis in the left-wing press.
“In the years of the United War Effort, the communists were among the foremost supporters of labor-management cooperation and the no-strike policy,” Chartener wrote, noting that the Roosevelt administration and military brass enjoyed good working relations with admitted Communists in organized labor during the war. Chartener emphasized that union members who declined to support the few labor-backed strikes that did occur during the war were condemned as “Stalinist-minded.” Both labor and Lewis lost much of their clout in a widely condemned miner’s strike that crippled national production in 1943 and led to FDR’s temporarily seizing the coal mining industry.15
Communist infiltration of American labor organizations was no figment of Joe McCarthy’s imagination. And yet, as the Iron Curtain descended across Europe and the fear of Soviet penetration of American institutions reasserted itself, efforts to undermine the power of socialists in the labor movement verged on excess, though attempts to deport Communist labor organizers or hold them in contempt of Congress occasionally ran afoul of the courts. Eventually, the anti-Communist fervor that led to the expulsion of Soviet-sympathizers from the labor movement affected innocent persons and institutions, ruining some lives.
Many still regard the fervid anti-Communism of the McCarthy era as a bout of collective madness. Nevertheless, the anti-Communism of that period forced organized labor to choose between continued sympathy to Communism and ridding its ranks of Soviet apologists. Since association with Communists would spell the end of their power, it was no choice at all.
“The Chopping Block”
Antipathy toward the Communist sympathizers in labor’s ranks had been building since the surrender of Nazi Germany, and many unions moved preemptively to isolate and oust them.
In 1946, the CIO passed a resolution attacking the Communists in its midst: “We resent and reject efforts of the Communist Party or other political parties and their adherents to interfere in the affairs of the CIO.” “If communism is an issue in any of your unions,” its new president, Philip Murray, said, “throw it the hell out, and throw out its advocates along with it.” Local CIO affiliates responded with their own resolutions barring “Fascists, Klansmen, and Communists” from union posts.16
These efforts were vehemently resisted by pro-Communist organizations, which maintained a broad constituency among the rank and file. “A leader who denies class division must, sooner or later, deny the necessity of struggle by labor and must come to the conclusion, as Murray does, that the interests of a union can best be served through a policy of servility to employers or, as some choose to call it, ‘labor-management cooperation,’ ” read an attack on Murray’s leadership of the CIO in the Communist-affiliated Daily Worker.17
The confrontation with Communism came to a head after a series of crippling strikes in 1946 contributed to a Republican takeover of both houses of Congress. The following year, Congress passed the Labor Management Relations Act, better known as “Taft-Hartley,” over President Harry Truman’s veto.
The act prohibited a variety of previously protected labor activities, including jurisdictional strikes. It outlawed mandatory union membership, certain political activities, and union donations to political campaigns. Most importantly, the law compelled the National Labor Relations Board to forego the provision of aid and support to any union that had not submitted signed affidavits from its leaders attesting that they were not members of the Communist Party and did not support Communist activities in America.
Some, including both Lewis and Murray, refused to sign affidavits despite their general hostility toward the Communist cause. The majority of union leaders, though, quietly complied with this new demand, and anti-Communist elements took the opportunity to force socialists in the labor movement out into the open.
The anti-Communist Walter Reuther, narrowly elected president of the CIO’s United Automobile Workers (UAW) in 1946, won a resounding reelection victory in 1947 and removed left-wing elements from the union’s executive committee in the process. Upon securing his role as leader of the UAW, he pledged to dismiss all Communist officers in his union. Through clever legislative maneuvers in the summer of 1947, Joseph Curran shattered Communist influence over the National Maritime Union. And in August of that year, Murray ousted the overtly Communist editor of the CIO’s newsletter. “Before the CIO convention in November 1948,” Chartener recalled, “the executive council revoked the charter of the New York City CIO council for ‘slavish adherence’ to the communist line.”18
The end of the influence of Soviet sympathizers over organized labor was in sight by 1948, when FDR’s sometime vice president and the former editor of the New Republic Henry Wallace challenged Truman for the presidency from the left. Particularly critical of Truman’s staunchly anti-Communist foreign policy, Wallace was plagued by the accusation that he harbored Soviet sympathies and that his Progressive Party was a Communist-controlled apparatus. Were it not for Wallace’s campaign, labor’s break with Communism might not have been as total as it was.
The president’s advisors knew he needed the help of organized labor to win reelection and reverse Republican gains in Congress. In 1940 and 1944, Communists had helped FDR win reelection, knocking on doors and rallying to the president and the Democrats. But labor needed Truman, too. The CIO’s Murray, like a host of other labor leaders, was no fan of FDR’s successor, but he reasoned that Wallace’s candidacy threatened to split the Democratic vote. If Truman lost, Taft-Hartley would never be repealed.19
Murray publicly backed Truman’s anti-Soviet foreign policy, compelling those who agreed with Wallace’s attacks to reveal themselves. “In August, the CIO formally endorsed Truman for reelection,” writes the historian Gary Donaldson. “The purged communists in organized labor were forced into the waiting arms of Henry Wallace, where they all went down to defeat together.”20
Communism’s excommunication from the organized labor movement in America provoked a grudge that socialists continued to nurse even a half-century later. “Rather than conducting a principled defense of their right to be part of the labor movement,” read an editorial in a 1990 issue of Socialist Worker, “CP leaders acquiesced to the attacks, hoping to curry favor. In reality, they merely offered themselves up to the chopping block.”21
Today's Democrats are increasingly dependent upon the energy and enthusiasm that Identitarian social justice advocates provide for their candidates and causes. They are the party’s activist base, and Democrats cannot afford to lose them. Skillful political navigators on the left have been attempting to decouple identity politics from Democratic politics, but the effort will not succeed until Democratic lawmakers of stature join the fight. This crusade cannot be the province of academics and essay writers alone. Liberals in good standing must communicate in clear terms why the social justice left’s brand of politics is not only a dead-end but also a threat to the egalitarian system they profess to love.
Bringing Civics Back
F. A. Hayek said that the prefix “social” destroys the meaning of every word to which it is attached. Perhaps he overstated his case, as “social studies” used to refer to the exploration of political history, geography, and rudimentary civics. But today social studies is being redefined and deprioritized. The country is suffering as a result.
In 1993–94, students in grade school spent approximately 9.5 percent of the school week in social studies classes. By 2003–04, that figure had declined to 7.6 percent. In 2007–08, it was down to 7.1 percent. Those are the most recent numbers available from the Department of Education, but they are unlikely to have improved in the past decade.22
Following the implementation of the No Child Left Behind education reform law in 2007, the Center for Education Policy found that 36 percent of the departments it surveyed were cutting back on social studies education. With budgetary constraints came hard decisions. Social studies was once regarded as a core subject along with arithmetic, language arts, and the sciences. However, when education became a matter of triage due to test-driven pressures, social studies was deemed a low priority.23
Studies have shown that students who receive a modest civic education are more likely to vote, to dedicate their time to their communities and charities, to engage with their local, state, and federal elected representatives, and to understand and appreciate the American system of government. A lack of civic education leaves students confused about their government and susceptible to cynical and propagandist revisionism.
Americans are losing touch with the country’s core values. Thirty-seven percent of Americans polled in 2017 could not name a single right enshrined in the First Amendment. One-third of those polled were unable to name one of the three branches of the federal government.24 A Cato Institute poll of 2,300 people that same year found that a majority of respondents believe “it would be hard to ban hate speech because people can’t agree what speech is hateful,” not because a ban would be antithetical to the First Amendment. Nevertheless, 46 percent of respondents expressed support for a law that would make it illegal to say negative things about African-Americans; 41 percent said the same about Jews, 40 percent about immigrants, and 39 percent about Hispanics.25
The American republic cannot survive if its citizens do not know what they must preserve or why it’s worth the effort. American schools must restore civic education to its proper place.
This is not a partisan issue. “Today more than ever, the social studies are not a luxury, but a necessity,” Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, wrote in 2011.26 But the discipline of social studies has been subsumed under the broader rubric of diversity studies and multiculturalism. Whatever their value, such studies cannot replace civics and political history. Social studies have become an exploration of demography, identity, the problem of stereotyping, and the virtues of pluralism. There are no more absolutes; no more narrow-minded value judgments. Perhaps children should explore those ideas, but they do not suffice for a civic education.
Duncan’s successor, Betsy DeVos, has a more hands-off philosophy when it comes to government, but she too has expressed support for civic education. The Department of Education has enormous influence on schools’ priorities. The study of American history and government should be chief among those priorities.
Conservatives are correct to be mindful of the unintended consequences of excessive legislation, but it would also be prudent for legislators to study the prospect of tying federal funding of public education to the completion of a certain number of hours per week dedicated to civic education. It was not that long ago that an average of between 2.7 and 3 hours per week was standard, and that’s not much to ask. Math, science, and other core courses are critical, but the nation cannot afford to make the study of the legacy bequeathed to us by the Founders an ancillary exercise.
Lessons Learned
Civic education has the potential to impart not just an understanding of the unique American system of government but also respect for what it took to build it. But civic education is not a panacea. All the patriotic civics instruction that American schoolchildren received in the first half of the twentieth century did not prevent fringe elements from achieving an unhealthy level of influence in both political parties.
The successful effort to expel those elements from mainstream American politics targeted not persons but ideas—ideas that clever leaders convinced their movements were obstacles to their common objectives. Those who went on the offense against the Communists in labor and the Birchers in the GOP weren’t hostile and condescending as much as sympathetic. Whether these problematic ideas are sound is surely debatable, they conceded; you have every right to believe them, but they are making the work of our movement more difficult.
The point of these efforts wasn’t to divide their respective coalitions into small cliques defined by ideological conformity. Quite the opposite. The goal was to secure power. In the near-term, the goal of this stigmatization was, in part, to make conservatism or organized labor more attractive to moderate, non-ideological voters. Ultimately, though, the point was to render these movements an indispensable part of any winning political coalition. And it worked.
Radicalism occasionally tempts the politically engaged, but it is not an irresistible force of history. In the United States, the radicals are almost always a vocal minority. Identitarianism and vindictive social justice are radical philosophies, antithetical to the American idea. But rank-and-file social justice advocates must be handled with sympathy and care. They are not anti-American insurgents; they are our neighbors with valid concerns about the future of the country. They have been led astray.
These productive and engaged Americans must be convinced that the ideology they find so attractive is a blind alley. It’s possible. It has been done before. And it’s a pressing project that must begin today, before it is too late.