Jason Stanley, Yale professor and best-selling author of How Fascism Works, presents a kaleidoscopic, fact-based retort to the authoritarian right’s work to instill fascist culture in the United States. As he argues with clarity, it is their goal to make us forget what fascism looks like, feels like, and does to a nation. Most troubling of all, today’s authoritarian right-wing leaders look to be learning from the worst monsters of our past. For this event, he will be in conversation with Ethan Kleinberg, Professor of History and Letters at Wesleyan University.
Combining historical research with an in-depth analysis of our political landscape, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future issues a warning for America and the world: the worst authoritarian movements of today, and of the past, found a soft target in a place we may least suspect: our schools. As Hitler himself once said, “he alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.” As Stanley shows, modern-day authoritarian right-wing leaders have largely reached the same conclusion: If you want to roll back the clock on civil rights, equity, and inclusion, a great place to start is in our schools.
Hearts and minds are won early in life — and Erasing History shows that governments are currently ill-prepared to do the work of uprooting the fascist policies being foisted upon our children through school boards, in courtrooms, and in the boardrooms of the companies trusted to train our teachers and create the materials they’ll share with their students.
Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of six books, including How Propaganda Works. Stanley serves on the board of the Prison Policy Initiative and writes frequently about propaganda, free speech, mass incarceration, democracy, and authoritarianism for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and many other periodicals.
Ethan Kleinberg is the Class of 1958 Distinguished Professor of History and Letters at Wesleyan University and Editor-in-Chief of History and Theory. He is the author of Generation Existential: Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-61 (Cornell University Press, 2006); Haunting History: for a deconstructive approach to the past (Stanford University Press, 2017); and Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought (Stanford University Press, October 2021). He is co-author of the “Theses on Theory and History” with Joan Wallach Scott and Gary Wilder and they are completing a monograph titled History: Three Inquiries in the Politics of Knowledge for the University of Chicago Press Trios series. His current book length project is The Surge: Temporal Anarchy and the Pursuit of Dynamic History.
