“Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future,” a Book Talk w/Jason Stanley

In the United States, democracy is under attack by an authoritarian movement that has found fertile ground among the country’s conservative politicians and voters, but similar movements have found homes in the hearts and minds of people around the globe. To understand the shape, form, and stakes of this assault, we must go back to extract lessons from our past.

In authoritarian countries, critical examination of those nations’ history and traditions is discouraged if not an outright danger to those who do it. And it is no accident that local and global institutions of education have become a battleground, where learning and efforts to upend a hierarchal status quo can be put to end by coercion and threats of violence. Democracies entrust schools and universities to preserve a common memory of positive change, generated by protests, social movements, and rebellions. The authoritarian right must erase this history, and, along with it, the very practice of critical inquiry that has so often been the engine of future progress.

In Erasing History⁴, Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the authoritarian right’s attacks on education, identifies their key tactics and funders, and traces their intellectual roots. He illustrates how fears of a fascist future have metastasized, from hypothetical threat to present reality, and that hearts and minds are won in our schools and universities—places that democratic societies across the world are now ill-prepared to defend against the fascist assault currently underway.

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Before coming to Yale, he was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He has authored seven books including "How Propaganda Works⁵," and "How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them⁶" (Penguin Random House, 2018) which have been translated into over twenty languages.