America’s public schools, since their creation, have repeatedly become a locus for our nation’s most divisive fights over politics and civil rights, whether the subject be evolution, segregation, sex ed, or school prayer. After all, it is in its classrooms—in social-studies curricula and civics lessons and mandatory-reading lists—that the country wrestles with how to tell its story to new generations, how to teach kids what’s right and wrong, true and false. And the decisions that society makes about what children ought to learn, or ought not to, have the power to shape culture and the future of democracy.

Thus today we see fights over how to discuss racism in schools, with progressives championing lessons that connect the stain of slavery to modern inequities, conservatives demanding instead that children be taught “not to see color,” and plenty of debate somewhere in between. We see fights over whether first-graders should be allowed to check out picture books featuring LGBTQ characters, whether teens should be made to read literature with graphic depictions of sex, whether the Ten Commandments should be posted inside classrooms. The recent wave of activism targeting schools has sometimes seemed unprecedented in its ferocity and scale. But of course, these types of debates are not new. They fit into a long tradition of reactionary movements seeking to shape what children in America learn.  

This article was adapted from Mike Hixenbaugh’s new book, They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms.

Early in the 20th century, Christian fundamentalists waged a crusade to stop the teaching of human evolution in public schools, culminating most famously with 1925’s Scopes “monkey trial,” in which a high-school teacher in Tennessee was charged with violating a new state law banning evolution lessons from classrooms. With the United States on the precipice of entering World War II in the late 1930s and early ’40s, groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Legion waged a successful nationwide campaign against popular social-studies textbooks written by the progressive educator Harold Rugg; they argued that the books—which raised questions about the unequal distribution of wealth in the U.S. and advocated for civil rights for African Americans—were “subversive.” Attempts to force schools to integrate in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s were met with riots and racist protests.

While researching my book on the latest political wars over public education, I came across a 1981 New York Times article that sounded as if it might have been printed this year. It described a coalition of suburban residents who, “armed with sophisticated lobbying techniques,” were fighting to “remove books from libraries” and replace history syllabi with “texts that emphasize the positive side of America’s past.” The article documented efforts by parents’ groups across the country to “cleanse their local schools of materials and teaching methods they consider antifamily, anti-American and anti-God.” Here was a tale of conservative activists waging a national assault on school lessons more than four decades ago, though that earlier generation applied a different label to the threat it perceived than activists do now: secular humanism.

Rooted in 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment thinking, secular humanism, as it was originally understood, refers to a belief system that rejects religion as the basis for morality and emphasizes the need to test dogma with science, to pursue justice by opposing discrimination, and to focus on improving conditions here on Earth rather than looking to the afterlife. But in the 1970s and ’80s, it was redefined by white Christian conservatives—much like the term critical race theory, decades later—as a catchall to describe any lesson or book they found objectionable. If a text mentioned the struggle for women’s rights, it was secular humanist; if it mentioned the racism of the Jim Crow era, it was secular humanist.

[Read: The banned books you haven’t heard about]

Also much as in today’s fights, the battles over secular humanism, which occurred in the years immediately following the civil-rights movement, were a response to evolving social norms around gender, race, and sexuality. And just as the protests for racial justice following the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 incited school-board conflicts in communities with rapidly changing demographics, many of the battles a generation ago emanated from predominantly white but diversifying suburbs, where angry parents formed groups with such names as Young Parents Alert and Guardians of Education. Portraying teachers, textbook writers, and school bureaucrats as liberal foot soldiers in a shadowy scheme to indoctrinate their children, these citizen activists described their cause as one of good versus evil, a framing that stoked passions—and sometimes violence.

The simmering right-wing movement against secular humanism exploded into national view in the spring of 1974, when white fundamentalists launched a political attack on the public school system in Kanawha County, West Virginia. The district had introduced new multicultural textbooks as required by a recent state mandate. Months of protests were led by Alice Moore, a white school-board member and preacher’s wife who argued—while explicitly invoking the dangers of secular humanism—that new language-arts textbooks would teach students “ghetto dialect” instead of “standard American speech.” Picketers carried homemade signs, including one that read I have a “Bible,” I don’t need those dirty books. Angry parents were soon joined by members of the Ku Klux Klan. An elementary school’s entrance was defaced with a swastika. Arsonists attacked schools with firebombs and Molotov cocktails, vandals cut the fuel lines of school buses to keep them from running, and the county board-of-education building was blasted with 15 sticks of dynamite.

The unrest largely died down after six months, but the school board made a concession. All future textbooks in Kanawha County would have to “encourage loyalty to the United States” and “not defame our nation’s founders”—provisions strikingly like those sought by the GOP today. In states such as Texas and Oklahoma, legislators have passed laws requiring that students be taught a “patriotic” version of America’s past and banning texts that depict slavery as central to the nation’s founding.

There are also parallels in the financing of these movements, with support then and now drawn from a large network of conservative think tanks and activist groups. The campaign against secular humanism was backed by national organizations including the Heritage Foundation, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Pat Robertson’s National Legal Foundation, and the antigay, anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. Some of those same organizations remain involved today, joined by dozens of emergent activist groups, such as Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and the 1776 Project PAC.

Some aspects of the right’s new playbook appear to have been copied from history—including its campaign to leverage school-board conflicts to push for a conservative reinterpretation of foundational rights. With help from conservative law firms, parents filed lawsuits in the 1970s and ’80s claiming that secular humanism was itself a religion, and as such should be barred from schools or balanced with Christian perspectives. Others in the movement simultaneously sought to overturn the principle of Church-state separation that was the basis for that argument. Insisting that America’s founding was grounded in biblical principles, activists demanded that educators present Christianity in a favorable light, that children be taught to respect the United States and its military, and that men and women be depicted in “traditional” gender roles in classroom reading assignments.

[Read: The librarians are not okay]

Although many of these demands were denied by local and state education boards, Christian conservative groups scored major victories throughout the 1980s—largely through targeted lawsuits and local pressure campaigns—before the movement’s power and momentum began to wane, in the ’90s. The biggest win from that era may have come in 1984, when Congress passed a law that included an amendment written by Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, prohibiting the use of federal funds for the teaching of secular humanism. Hatch failed to clearly define the concept, however, leaving confused educators to guess at which ideas were or were not allowed in classrooms. As one of Hatch’s aides would later concede, the senator’s amendment was meant mostly as a “symbolic thing.”

A similarly vague warning is being broadcast to educators across the country today, leading many to change the way they teach. A recent survey by Rand found that two-thirds of teachers nationally reported choosing to limit instruction about political and social issues, including racism and LGBTQ topics. Even in states and school districts where Republicans haven’t adopted laws or policies restricting lessons on race, gender, and sexuality, educators say their fear of political attacks has caused them to avoid subjects and lessons that might stir backlash.

Now, in many classrooms, dark chapters of America’s history are being softened or skipped. Some students are being taught a distorted narrative about our nation’s past and present, and books challenging that depiction are being pulled from shelves. All of this is helping shape what a new generation of Americans believes about our country—exactly the effect that anti-secularism activists fought for decades ago.

As it turns out, secular humanism itself may be experiencing something of a rebound as a boogeyman. On a recent reporting trip to Virginia Beach, where I was covering a live taping of a pro-Trump, Christian-nationalist television program, I listened to a young political strategist named Luke Ball bemoan the failure by his parents’ generation to teach children what is good and right. “We replaced Christianity with secular humanism in our classrooms,” Ball said. He then proceeded to blame the philosophy’s insidious influence for much of what the Christian right believes is wrong with the country today—pro-Palestine protests on college campuses, LGBTQ pride flags fluttering outside the White House, drag queens reading to children.

But there was still time to turn things around, Ball said. Conservatives just needed to look to the past and learn from their history.

A few months ago, I had an email exchange with a person who works in the right-wing-media world. He said that crime was “surging,” a claim that just happened to advance the Trumpian narrative that America during the Biden presidency is a dystopia.

I pointed out that the preliminary data showed a dramatic drop in violent crime last year. (Violent crime spiked in the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, during the coronavirus pandemic, and has declined in each year of Joe Biden’s presidency.) During our back-and-forth, my interlocutor at first denied that crime had dropped. He sent me links showing that crime rates in Washington, D.C., were increasing, as though a national drop in crime couldn’t be accompanied by an increase in individual cities. He insisted the data I cited were false, implying they were the product of the liberal media. “Perception is reality,” he told me. “Nobody is buying the narrative that crime is getting better.”

Eventually, after I responded to each of his claims, he reluctantly conceded that crime, rather than surging, was dropping—but ascribed the source of the progress to Republican states. I corrected him on that assertion, too. (Crime has dropped in both red and blue states.) He finally admitted that, yes, crime was decreasing, and in blue states too, but said the drop was inevitable, the result of the pandemic’s end. So he blamed Biden when he thought violent crime was increasing and insisted Biden deserves no credit now that violent crime is decreasing.

[Rogé Karma: The great normalization]

I consider where we ended up a victory, but only a partial and temporary one. His fundamental storyline hasn’t changed. Virtually every day he insists that life in America under Biden is a hellscape and that his reelection would lead to its destruction.

Welcome to MAGA world.

I mention this exchange because it reveals something important about the MAGA mind. Trump and his supporters have a deep investment in promoting fear. At almost every Trump rally, the former president tries to frighten his supporters out of their wits. He did this in 2016 and 2020, and he’s doing it again this year.

“If he wins,” Trump said of Biden during a rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, “our country is going to be destroyed.” Trump also said this of Biden: “He’s a demented tyrant.” After Trump’s victories on Super Tuesday, he told an audience of his supporters, “Our cities are choking to death. Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying.”

Other politicians have been fearmongers, but none has been as relentless and effective as Trump. He has an unparalleled ability to promote feelings of terror among his base, with the goal of translating that terror into votes.

But as I recently argued, Biden has been president for nearly three and a half years, and America has hardly entered a new Dark Age. In some important respects, in fact, the nation, based on empirical evidence, is doing better during the Biden years than it did during the Trump years. And evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, who comprise the most loyal and embittered parts of the Trump base, enjoy perhaps the greatest degree of religious liberty they ever have, and they are among the least persecuted religious communities in history. The number of abortions, of particular concern for evangelical Christians, declined steadily after 1990. At the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, during which there was a decrease of nearly 30 percent, the number of abortions reached its lowest level since Roe v. Wade was decided, in 1973. (During the Trump administration, the number of abortions increased by 8 percent.)

For many Trump supporters, then, fear is not so much the cause of their support for the former president as a justification for it. They use fear to rationalize their backing for Trump. They have a burning need to promote catastrophism, even if it requires cognitive distortion, spreading falsehoods, and peddling conspiracy theories.

But why? What’s driving their ongoing, deepening fealty to Trump?

Part of the explanation is partisan loyalty. Every party rallies around its presidential nominee, even if the nation is flourishing under the stewardship of an incumbent from the other party.

But that reasoning takes us only so far in this case. For one thing, it’s nearly inconceivable to imagine that if any other former president did what Trump has done, Republicans would maintain their devotion to him. Richard Nixon committed only a fraction of Trump’s misdeeds, and the GOP broke with him over the revelation of the “smoking gun” tapes. It was not his liberal critics, but the collapse of support within the Republican Party, that persuaded Nixon to resign.

Beyond that, Trump was not an incumbent this cycle. In 2020, he lost the presidency by 72 electoral votes and 7 million popular votes; Republicans lost control of the Senate, and Democrats maintained their majority in the House. In the past, when a one-term president was defeated and dragged his party down in the process, he was shown the exit. But despite Trump being a loser, Republicans remain enthralled by him. So something unusual is going on here.

Human beings have a natural tendency to organize around tribal affiliations. Some are drawn to what the Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen calls the “need for chaos,” and wish to “burn down” the entire political order in the hopes of gaining status in the process. (My colleague Derek Thompson wrote about Petersen and his work earlier this year.) And social scientists such as Jonathan Haidt point out that mutual outrage bonds people together. Sharing anger can be very pleasurable, and the internet makes doing this orders of magnitude easier.

For several decades now, the Republican base has been unusually susceptible to these predispositions. Grievances had been building, with Republicans feeling as though they were being dishonored and disrespected by elite culture. Those feelings were stoked by figures such as Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, who decivilized politics and turned it into a blood sport. And then came Trump, the most skilled and successful demagogue in American history.

An extraordinary connection between Trump and his base was forged when he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015 and employed his dehumanizing language. Almost every day since then, he has selected targets at which to channel his hate, which appears to be inexhaustible, and ramped up his rhetoric to the point that it now echoes lines from Mein Kampf. In the process, he has fueled the rage of his supporters.

Trump not only validated hate; he made it fashionable. One friend observed to me that Trump makes his supporters feel as if they are embattled warriors making a last stand against the demise of everything they cherish, which is a powerful source of personal meaning and social solidarity. They become heroes in their own mythological narratives.

But it doesn’t stop there. Trump has set himself up both as a Christ figure persecuted for the sake of his followers and as their avenging angel. At a speech last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said, “In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.”

“You’re not selling ‘Morning in America’ from Mar-a-Lago,” Steve Bannon, one of the MAGA movement’s architects, told The New York Times’ Charles Homans. “You need a different tempo. He needed to reiterate to his followers, ‘This is [expletive] revenge.’”

Malice, enmity, resentments: These are the emotions driving many Trump supporters. They’re why they not only accept but delight in the savagery and brutishness of Trump’s politics. They’re why you hear chants of “Fuck Joe Biden” at Trump rallies. His base constantly searches for new targets, new reasons to be indignant. It activates the pleasure center of their brain. It’s a compulsion loop.

Which brings me back to the exchange I described at the beginning of this essay. My interlocutor was clearly rooting against good news; though he would deny it, the implication of his response was that he wanted crime to get worse. Not because he was rooting for innocent people to die, though that would be the effect. What appeared to animate him—as it has for the entire Biden presidency—is the awareness that good news for America means bad news for MAGA world. Worse yet, good news would be celebrated by people—Biden, Democrats, Never Trumpers—he has grown to hate. But hate is an unattractive emotion to celebrate; it benefits from a polite veneer.

[Read: You should go to a Trump rally]

In this case, the finishing coat is fear, the insistence that if Biden is president, all that Trump’s supporters hold dear will die. This isn’t true, but it doesn’t matter to them that it’s not true. The veneer also makes it easier for Trump supporters—evangelical Christians, “constitutional conservatives,” champions of law and order, and “family values” voters among them—to justify their support for a man who embodies almost everything they once loathed.

Even as Donald Trump’s politics has become more savage, his threats aimed at opponents more ominous, and his humiliation of others more frequent—he has become ever more revered by his supporters.

I imagine that even some of the Republican Party’s harshest liberal critics could not have anticipated a decade and a half ago that the GOP would be led by a man who referred to a violent mob that stormed the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power as “political prisoners,” “hostages,” and “patriots.” It’s been an astonishing moral inversion, a sickening descent. And it’s not done.