BY JENNIFER RUTH

Legislative acts against the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) are blatant and egregious violations of academic freedom, as academic freedom has been defined by the AAUP from its inception in 1915. How did we get to this moment in which the state’s attempted interference in education rivals the McCarthy Era in its authoritarianism?

The African American Policy Forum (AAPF) hosted a CRT Summer School this past week. University of Cincinnati law professor and member of both the AAUP’s Committee A and its HBI and Scholars of Color committee Emily Houh spoke at the opening plenary session on Thursday. “As America becomes more visibly non-white, the notion of the ‘public good’ shrinks and fades, and democracy becomes less viable,” she said.  “And one of the places where we see this most clearly is in the context of public education.” As demographics shift, commitment to democracy and democratic public education wanes.

Founding CRT theorist and law professor Derrick Bell explained that gains are made when interests converge. Brown v. Board of Education, for example, had as much to do with the Cold War as it did with racial justice. How do you recruit decolonizing countries away from the Soviets by trumpeting yourself as the land of the free when you are in fact the land of apartheid? In his article “Diversity and Academic Freedom,” written in 1993, Bell wrote:

The decision in Brown v. Board of Education – whatever its advocates or the Supreme Court intended – provided immediate credibility to America’s struggle with Communist countries to win the hearts and minds of emerging third-world peoples. In effect, the Brown decision reflected the conclusion by policy makers that for foreign policy reasons as well as domestic concerns, the country could no longer afford the segregation compromise made three quarters of a century before as an accommodation to the general belief in white superiority.

I thought of the Cold-War context of Brown v. Board when Tucker Carlson hosted his Fox News show from Viktor Orban’s Hungary during the first week of August. If America had to look more like the democracy it said it was during the Cold War, does it — or some portion of it — care less about looking democratic when that democracy looks “more visibly non-white”? It is clear that some significant portion of the right is willing to abandon the Cold War logic of democracy vs. authoritarianism, from which its party has derived so much power for decades, in favor of courting authoritarians and authoritarianism. Why? Conservative New York Times writer Ross Douthat attempted to answer this question in “Why Hungary Inspires So Much Fear and Fascination.” In an astonishing piece, in which Douthat sympathizes with the right-wing infatuation with authoritarianism, Douthat explains that when the “cultural forces” (that is, the increasingly multiracial population) are against you, you may need to move from the cultural terrain of words and use the power of the state.

One answer, common to old-fashioned libertarians, is that you can’t vote against cultural forces: You just have to fight the battle of ideas, at whatever disadvantage, with a Substack if your media colleagues force you out, or from suburban Texas if you feel uncomfortable in the groves of academe.

For others, though, this seems like a naïve form of cultural surrender — like telling a purged screenwriter during the Hollywood Blacklist, ‘Hey, just go start your own movie studio.’ Which is part of how a figure like Orban becomes appealing to American conservatives. It’s not just his anti-immigration stance or his moral traditionalism. It’s that his interventions in Hungarian cultural life, the attacks on liberal academic centers and the spending on conservative ideological projects, are seen as examples of how political power might curb progressivism’s influence.

How political power might curb progressivism’s influence . . .  By “political power,” Douthat means the state. If voting can be suppressed, if universities can be shut down (see Orban’s closure of the Central European University), if certain teachings can be prohibited by law, then maybe the present progressive trends can be reversed. Note, too, the sleight of hand when Douthat invokes the McCarthy Era. The attempt by Republicans to criminalize teaching about race and America’s racial history is the exact same move as the criminalization of communism in the late 40s and early 50s. And yet it is the victims of the Red Scare with which Douthat identifies today’s conservatives. This is an incredible act of gaslighting. The figure most associated with the hypocritical compromising of democratic principles in the name of democracy can still somehow be the rhetorical bad guy even though what is on offer is precisely the compromising of democratic principles.

When democracy no longer looks the way they want it to, some people are throwing in with the authoritarians. Please consider supporting the AAPF’s #truthbetold campaign. More information can be found here.

Jennifer Ruth, Professor of Film Studies at Portland State University, is a contributing editor to the blog and was the faculty editor of the Journal of Academic Freedom from 2016 to 2017. She is the author of Novel Professions (Ohio State University Press, 2006) and, with Michael Bérubé, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments (Palgrave, 2015).