In This Presidential Election, Educators Can’t Be Neutral
This article was originally published on Daily Kos.
By Alan Singer
On Sunday night October 27, Donald Trump began the final phase of his Presidential campaign with a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The opening act feature a “comedian” who greeted the MAGA audience with a stream of racist, anti-Latino and Palestinian, and antisemitic “jokes.” On February 20, 1939, the German American Bund organized a pro-Nazi rally at an earlier Madison Square Garden. Both rallies claimed to represent true American patriotism.
I am a teacher educator at Hofstra University, and I work with social studies teachers in the New York metropolitan area. The established principle is that social studies teachers should remain neutral about electoral politics, presenting information, asking questions, and promoting discussion without stating opinions that would unfairly influence student positions and definitely not tell students which candidate they are supporting. Lessons traditionally focus on the electoral college, the importance of contested “purple” states, an in-depth examination of issues, evaluating party platforms, and discussing what leadership qualities we look for in a President. In my teaching methods class, in a mock lesson with incoming freshman, and in a demonstration lesson at a local high school on how to involve students in a discussion of election issues and the candidates, I never offered my opinions about the issues in the election or the candidates.
I now think I made a mistake. I still don’t think secondary school teachers and university professors should say who they plan on voting for, but we shouldn’t be neutral when it comes to defending democracy, due process, and civil liberties. These are the values of a democratic society and secondary school and university educators need to present and defend them as the standard with which to measure candidates. It remains up to students to decide who they support and why, but it is up to us to provide information and a standard for analysis so they can understand which candidate or candidates support the preservation of democracy in the United States and which candidate or candidates are threats to its future. If we are neutral about democracy, we risk losing it.
Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in Tyranny of the Minority (Crown, 2024) argue the Republican Party uses undemocratic features of the United States Constitution to seriously threaten the survival of democracy in the United States. Part of its effort is to racialize politics. Republican voters buy into ideas promoted by Donald Trump that the major problems in the United States are an invasion by non-white undocumented immigrants from the South with criminal genes who eat people’s pets; the disappearance of the “traditional American way of life” because of this invasion; and the Great Replacement, a plot by Democrats, urban elites, and Jews to replace the true white Christian Americans with a polyglot from around the world that they will control. Donald Trump still claims without evidence, and a majority of Republican voters believe, that the 2020 election was stolen, and that it is acceptable to use force to reestablish their version of America. Trump calls the insurgents at the Capitol building who tried to disrupt the peaceful transition of power in 2021 “patriots” and promises to consider pardons for convicted felons who participated in the uprising. Educators become complicit with the demise of democracy if we ignore these threats.
In an earlier book, How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018), Levitsky and Ziblatt argued that democracy is severely at-risk when mutual tolerance, forbearance, and respect for the rule of law are eroded; citizens lose faith in institutions such as the electoral system, the judiciary, and the media; political parties refuse to accept electoral defeat and the peaceful transfer of power; political divisions become so deep that compromise becomes impossible; and charismatic demagogues reject democratic norms and institutions. All of these criteria for the death of democracy describe the behavior of Donald Trump, his Republican Party syncopates, their wealthy supporters, and many of their disaffected voters. Again, educators become complicit with the demise of democracy if we ignore these threats.
In a recently published book by Bob Woodward, War (Simon and Schuster, 2024), Retired General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when Donald Trump was President, argued “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump. Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.” Milley’s claims about Donald Trump cannot safely be ignored if democracy is to be preserved in the United States.
The language Donald Trump uses to describes his enemies and targets at campaign rallies is eerily similar to the language Adolf Hitler used to rally his supporters and condemn his opponents in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Trump describes his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin” and threatens to use the military to imprison them once he is elected. In Nazi Germany, Hitler called his democratic, socialist, and communist opponents sub-humans (Untermenschen), degenerates (Entartete), undesirables (Unerwünschte), and enemies of the state (Staatsfeinde). Dachau and Sachsenhausen, among the earliest concentration camps that the Nazi regime set up in Germany, were initially for political prisoners.
Trump spreads unfounded accusations that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were stealing and eating people’s pets, Venezuelan gangs had taken over a Colorado city, genetically criminal undocumented immigrants were spreading disease, and were “poisoning the blood of our country.” Hitler attacked Jews as lice and blamed them for transmitting typhus. He wanted them removed from the body politic to preserve the “purity of our blood.” Trump’s racism and nativism cannot safely be ignored if democracy is to be preserved in the United States.
The Anti-Defamation League warns students, educators, and citizens, “You can’t be neutral when someone is being disrespectful or using bigoted language. If you do, you look like you are siding with the bigotry or you’re too weak or unskilled to face the person spewing it.”
After World War II, Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller famously wrote about Nazi Germany, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.
Educators at all levels need to heed these warnings.
Alan Singer is a historian and teacher educator at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York. His most recent books are Social Studies for Secondary Schools, 5th edition (Routledge, 2024) and Class-Conscious Coal Miners (SUNY Press, 2024). Blogs, tweets, essays, interviews, and e-blasts present his views and not those of Hofstra University.