The Direct Line From The Red Scare to Red Hats
Florida's embracing McCarthy era politics in their updated state social studies standards–it's the normalization of today's sociopolitical reality.
This week, the Florida Department of Education released proposed changes to the state’s Social Studies Standards for public schools. Among them are a massive update to the anti-communism education K-12 students will receive.
The new standards rebrand a period of sociopolitical panic as an era of national strength. This makes sense: today’s regime grows its power through paternalism, and thus, looking to another era of manufactured fear as a model serves them well. McCarthyism was a period of American history which also twisted language to create “us”–rich white Christian cishet able-bodied men–vs. “them”–anyone outside these narrow and imagined ideals–fomented by the government.
Florida standards now demand respect for McCarthyism, just as the current sexually-obsessed politicians today demand it. It’s an insult to call it the Red Scare. To them, there was no scare. There was a guidebook.
These standards call out by name several works of historical importance as dangerous because these works challenge not only history but the authority of that same “us.” Howard Zinn and James W. Loewen are a danger to students because they’re “Marxist.”
We’ve seen the Marxist argument in education since the rise of public school attacks in 2021. Anything not “us” is “them,” and anything “them” is Marxism.
One of my favorite graphics to share during presentations about the rise of book bans in the early years of this decade named Marxism as the underlying reason why “Critical Race Theory,” “Comprehensive Sexuality Education,” and “Social Emotional Learning” books were so dangerous and necessary to remove from library shelves as quickly as possible.
The right has play-tested its language in the years since, moving from “Critical Race Theory” to the more mainstream “DEI” label. The same goes for “Comprehensive Sexuality Education” now being rebranded as gender ideology. But Marxism is still what they insist underpins the contemporary American education system in their minds. It’s a threat to “us,”–the ultra wealthy class–as it tells the stories and experiences from “them”–our underlings.
In many this is downright funny. If Marxism had any role in American public education, students would be far more radical than they are. As it is, we see nonstop news and fresh studies claiming today’s students are phone-addicted and illiterate–some true, some exaggerated to continue ridiculing our under-resourced public schools. If Marxism were the thrust of American public education, we’d have a lot more students in the streets demanding better not only for themselves, but for their peers, their educators, their librarians, their parents, and everyone else working hard and getting nowhere. Following the “right” path and finding it leads to a steep cliff of little more than student debt, jobs that don’t cover the cost of living, unaffordable healthcare, and more.
But of course, this “Marxism is at the core of public education” push is mostly sad. For years, this rhetoric has spread throughout the right and infiltrated discourse on public schools and public libraries. It’s precisely why books on these so-called Marxist topics are being banned left and right. It’s exactly why public libraries and public schools are targets: they work for the good of “them.”^
Florida’s new standards don’t stop there, though.
Prominent writers whose works are crucial to understanding American history, American culture, and American literature, are relegated as little more than propagandists.
Langston Hughes, propagandist.
Richard Wright, propagandist.
Jane Fonda, propagandist.
Then there’s Nancy Cunard, who isn’t even an American, lumped in with the US communist propagandists.
It is no coincidence this list is two Black men and two women.
Hughes and Wright are two writers whose work is among the most common to see and discuss on college-level Advanced Placement exams. Their work explores the realities of being Black in America. To render their contributions to literature and to this country’s history more broadly as propaganda is to deny American Black history period.
That’s the point.
Florida updated its Social Studies Standards around Black history in 2023. According to those standards–implemented in the 2024-25 school year–some Black people benefitted from slavery because it taught them valuable skills. Black people perpetrated violence during race massacres, too, among other “creative” interpretations of history as demanded by the right. The kinds of vile private discussions happening among the right are smoothed out, and made glossier for public school lessons.
Florida public educators can’t deviate from these standards or supplement them with their own additional curriculum or context. While they theoretically can expand upon them, teachers are in a state where education is more politicized and heavily monitored than nearly any other state.^^ The chilling effect this has is not only real, it’s encoded in the standards:
Instructional personnel may facilitate discussions and use curricula to address, in an age appropriate manner, how the freedoms of persons have been infringed by sexism, slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, and racial discrimination, including topics relating to the enactment and enforcement of laws resulting in sexism, racial oppression, racial segregation, and racial discrimination, including how recognition of these freedoms have overturned these unjust laws. However, classroom instruction and curriculum may not be used to indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view inconsistent with the principles of this subsection or state academic standards.
“Age appropriate” means whatever the person who lodges a complaint wants it to mean and it means whatever it is the politician making a decision decides it means. So, too, are the terms “indoctrinate” and “persuade.”
Florida’s new Social Studies Standards rebrand of McCarthyism as good aligns so neatly with the state’s engagement with literary censorship. The McCarthy era was one of the most rampant periods of American book censorship, coming on the heels of when the US using Nazi book banning as propaganda to promote patriotism. WE don’t burn books like the Nazis do. WE burn our books in an American way.
During the Red Scare, Senator McCarthy demanded that “un-American” books be banned at all international US libraries. It was a call like one made to Department of Defense Education Activity schools this year, wherein a Trump-penned Executive Order led to the Department of Defense demanding the removal of nearly 600 books from all of those schools worldwide.*
But who are the book burners? “Not me,” replied Senator McCarthy, “I haven’t burned any books.” The President, McCarthy added, must be referring to his own Department of State whose directives, sanctioned by Secretary Dulles, order U.S. libraries abroad to remove all books “by Communists, fellow travelers, et cetera.”
[…]
McCarthy was right; although they acted on his instigation, the book burners were Eisenhower’s men. Yet it would be wrong to blame McCarthy, Eisenhower, and Dulles, absolve all the others. The truth is that the book burning in Bombay and Berlin followed a pattern well established in communities in our 48 states.
–from “The Horrible, Oppressive History of Book Burning in America” at The New Republic
What began as censorship on mainland America became the order of duty abroad in the McCarthy era.
Just a decade and some change before the ramping up of McCarthyism, Nazis burned millions of books deemed “un-German.” At the top of their list? Books about or featuring:
Marxist, communist, pacifist literature
LGBTQ+ books (often labeled “pornography” or “explicit”)
Jewish literature
Any historical writing that did not exalt the German people and culture
“Liberal” and “democratic” themes
Writing about sex or sexuality that wasn’t about advancing the German race.
This was the same time when comics censorship ran rampant. Comics were thought to be contributing to widespread juvenile delinquency, particularly among the demographics most seen as the next generation of “us” (that is, middle and upper class white boys)**
Florida’s new standards are shocking, but they are built upon everything happening right now in the state and the country more broadly: erasure, silence, and government-created propaganda intended to persuade people that truth is itself a tool of propaganda.***
McCarthyism is good because McCarthyism never ended. It’s roared back into the mainstream through normalization of authoritarian extremism; through a government removing information and knowledge from its people; through shoving dehumanizing technology like AI and algorithms that feed on reaction into the lives of its people without permission; and through people unable to think for themselves and who are instead eager to bow to Daddy Government and earn his favor. The Red Scare took its inspiration from Nazi Germany, which took its inspiration from American slavery. We are living a cycle that has never truly stopped but only continued to grow and expand.
McCarthyism is good because McCarthyism normalizes authoritarianism.
It’s been too easy for people to write off what’s happening in Florida. That’s been especially true for people living in so-called “good” “blue” states. But the fact of the matter is that Florida–with its history and legacy as a gerrymandered state with a legacy of voter suppression–has been the blueprint for American politics in the 2020s. What begins there starts to spread to other states and then bubbles up to the federal level.
These new Social Studies Standards aren’t going to stay in Florida. They’ll show up at the federal level, though it might take a year or two. What’s billed as local control never is. It’s a mechanism for the government to dictate what other people can do, learn, and think–actions that can only ever be done for the benefit of the regime. They take control of all that’s local, not the other way around.
The rewrite of history and the demand that McCarthy era politics be respected will spread. The Department of Education’s September 17 announcement of a new Civics Coalition and curriculum, in partnership with a host of far-right groups and the federal propaganda project of America 250, aims to indoctrinate students with a civics education full of lies and disinformation. It comes at a time when US civics knowledge and engagement is already weak, thanks to years of funding cuts.
This new project didn’t come from no where.
It came from Florida’s Civics Excellence Course, a teacher training program in the state that’s aligned with state civics standards . . . and created in part by Hillsdale College, the far-right institution of higher education with close ties to the Heritage Foundation.
We know who is directing the strings in the puppet show.
We know who worships at the altar of McCarthy and grins at the prospect of finishing that work.
What’s old isn’t new again. It never went away in the first place.
Notes:
^As I’ve said for all of these years, this isn’t about getting rid of schools or libraries. It’s about defunding them so that private institutions offering the same services with more control at a higher cost can be created in their wake. That’s why your tax money is being stolen from your public goods and redistributed into vouchers for rich kids to have their private schools–which don’t need to follow these standards nor pull books like The Bluest Eye from shelves–covered on your dime. “Us” never need to lose access to so-called “inappropriate” books. Banning is about “them.”
^^Texas would be on par with Florida were it a state with an annual legislative session, rather than biannual.
*This week, following a lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of several military families, a federal judge ordered that those books be put back on shelves at five of the DODEA schools. My book Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy is among those nearly 600 banned books.
**It was also the same time that Ray Bradbury needed to respond to government-sponsored suppression of thought and literature with his classic Fahrenheit 451. We don’t situate this book in its historical context quite enough when we talk about it.
***There is a reason they love AI so damn much. They can create that propaganda easily and tell people that the truth created by humans is a bunch of lies. The truth is in the plagiarism machine because how could so much information stolen to develop that machine be anything other than factual?