It's the last day of school in an unnamed Texas town in 1976. As the last bell rings at Robert E. Lee High, teacher Ginny Stroud admonishes her students to remember that the summer's bicentennial celebrations are really all about "the fact that a bunch of slave-owning aristocratic white males didn't want to pay their taxes."
The movie is "Dazed and Confused" (1993). I don't know if the line was improvised by Kim Krizan, who plays Ginny, or written by Richard Linklater, the movie's director. I do know that the movie is a superb effort to recreate a particular time and place, and given his light touch throughout, Linklater probably doesn't care whether we think of Ginny as a naive young woman striking a cynical pose for her students or as a subversive agent trying to indoctrinate youth. Ginny is meant to be taken, like everyone else in the movie, as a creature of her time and place. The audience isn't asked to agree or disagree with her proposition; I'm not sure we're even asked to take it seriously.
Still, the scene has been on my mind in light of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's new essay "We Have Been Subverted," published in the Free Press June 4. Regarding recent anti-Israel/anti-U.S. protests "with fear and trembling," Hirsi Ali draws on a 1983 lecture by Soviet defector and ex-KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov in which he outlines the stages of subversion, a relatively cheap and quiet method of warfare that seeks to undermine a system from within. The stages of subversion are demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization.
Writing in Harper's in 1964, Richard Hofstadter found exemplars of the paranoid style in American politics "in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders' conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers' conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens' Councils and Black Muslims."
I would love to dismiss Hirsi Ali's essay as the latest exemplar of the paranoid style, but there is nothing paranoid in her description of our progress through demoralization, the stage of subversion aimed at religion, education, media, and culture. "In each realm," she writes, "the old ways of thinking, the old heroes, are discredited. Those who believed in them come to doubt themselves and their ability to discern reality itself."
Over the last 60 years historians, teachers, and people who work in museums have made laudable efforts to expand the study of history to include people not given enough attention in earlier American historiography. No one I know is opposed to efforts to seek out and tell the stories of women, African Americans, American Indians, or anyone else left out of the American narrative found in textbooks from the 1950s. Likewise, dark places from our history are getting the attention they deserve. (The most recent issue of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly is devoted to lynching.)
But just as ideologues and activists have exploited the tradition of tolerance in our liberal institutions (universities, for example) to establish practices and orthodoxies that are intolerant and illiberal, activists have exploited the liberality of American historians to promote a version of American history that is anti-American.
"Think of the cynicism and selective truth-telling young Americans encounter in most classrooms," Hirsi Ali writes. "*You know Jefferson owned slaves, right? You know Columbus killed millions?... [N]ever mind that Jefferson set us on the path to emancipation, or that Columbus knew nothing about epidemiology."
Doubt and self-loathing insinuate themselves gradually. There's no centralized conspiracy; innocent people become agents of subversion unconsciously. Hirsi Ali doesn't think the local high school history teacher is trying to bring on a Bolshevik revolution. He "has simply been told to replace the focus on 1776 with something from The 1619 Project. So he gets with the times."
Hearing recent claims about the "radical indoctrination" of children by way of the history curriculum, a reasonable person might wonder if "indoctrination" is not a bugbear or a talking point to ensure certain politicians' continued presence on cable news. A quick look at 1619 Project lesson plans offered by the Pulitzer Center suggests the freakout was justified.
In "Examining the Legacy of Slavery in Mass Incarceration," a lesson plan tagged for use at the middle school, high school, college, and adult learner levels, students undertake a "guided reading" of "Mass Incarceration," an essay by Bryan Stevenson that appeared in the Aug. 18, 2019, issue of The New York Times Magazine--the opening salvo of the 1619 Project.
Here's a discussion prompt from the lesson plan, published on March 20, 2020:
"Stevenson writes that "too many Americans are willing spectators to horrifying acts, as long as we're assured they're in the interest of maintaining order." What does order look like to you? Who is responsible for maintaining order? What 'horrifying acts' have been committed in the name of maintaining order?"
So the idea here is to get students, as early as middle school, to question the idea of maintaining order? Or to sow doubts about the idea that order is a good thing?
The second of four proposed "extension activities" (extending beyond the initial classroom discussion, I believe), reads thus:
"The appetite for harsh punishment has echoed across the decades," Stevenson writes. "Nixon's war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentencing, three-strikes laws, children tried as adults, 'broken windows' policing--these policies were not as expressly racialized as the Black Codes, but their implementation has been essentially the same."
While the connection to antebellum slavery is tenuous, Stevenson's list merits consideration in any course on recent United States history. I hope that consideration would include a reading of "Broken Windows," a 1982 essay by two liberal sociologists concerned with the well-being of city dwellers, as well as a discussion of the career of the nation's leading opponent of mandatory minimum sentencing, Arkansas' own G. Thomas Eisele.
There is nothing wrong, at least in a college-level course, with taking a look at some policies and asking how they affected Black people. But the "lesson plan" is so plainly intent on forcing the students' conclusions that we can't call it a history lesson. In the study of history, we do not begin with conclusions.
The "Mass Incarceration" lesson plan is one of two 1619 Project lesson plans that I could find marked for use by students in grade school, so the good news is that the indoctrination effort is not comprehensive. At least not from this particular source.