Between now and May 5th, the Florida legislature will vote to codify Governor Ron DeSantis’ proposal to end funding for college diversity programs and abolish gender and ethnic studies degrees. If Floridians and Americans of good conscience fail to defeat it, DeSantis’s crusade to undermine racial equity and social justice in Florida and, ultimately, the United States, will gain dangerous momentum.  

DeSantis, who taught high school history before turning to politics, has built a political platform that exhibits significant historical awareness. It’s not a leap for many students of history to draw a parallel between the DeSantis-led attack on education and Cold War Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade that demonized left-leaning and New Deal-like politics for decades. What’s more: both figures started their campaigns by targeting educational institutions first, muzzling educators in order to foment fear in the classroom and suppress critical thought among youth. In the long tapestry of history, McCarthy and DeSantis are cut from the same cloth – and the consequences of history repeating itself are dire.

DeSantis’ primary goal is to ban education about racism, sexism, and homophobia in order to secure their futures as systems of repression in the United States. His thoughts on slavery and structural racism are laid bare in his autobiography, where he exonerates the Founding Fathers for failing to abolish slavery in the Constitution. In 2022 alone, his administration signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill into law, banning public school districts from holding classroom discussions on sexual orientation or gender identity, and passed the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, seeking to kill discussions of race and ethnicity in the college classroom. 

The far right has historically attacked education in similar ways. Most may associate McCarthyism with Congressional witch hunts targeting the State Department and Hollywood, but a central focus of McCarthyism was the crusade against teachers. After World War II, legislators in several states started official investigations of major universities, and hundreds of teachers and professors lost their jobs. There was a brief respite in the late 1940s, but a wave of repression resumed again in the 1950s when the federal government began prosecuting members of the Communist Party. In No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, historian Ellen Schrecker recounts with great detail the dismissal of many professors during the Cold War, effectively curtailing the academic freedom not just of alleged Communist Party members, but of all scholars in all disciplines across higher education. 

DeSantis most recently set his sights on New School, a small public liberal arts school, aiming to transform it into a beacon of conservatism. In January, the Republican governor dismissed six of the college’s 13 trustees and forced out the college’s president, replacing all with conservative allies. If this is beginning to sound familiar, it’s for good reason – it’s right out of McCarthy’s playbook. The Yale Divinity School fired Teachers Union president Jerome Davis in 1936 because of his trade union activities. Edwin Berry Burgum was an Associate Professor of English at New York University, when he was dismissed from his job in 1953 after being accused of teaching Communism. Davis and Burgum were among over 600 teachers who lost their jobs due to McCarthyism.  

There are contemporary counterparts to DeSantis’ policy initiatives. CRT Forward, a research project and interactive map launched by the UCLA School of Law, has identified over 550 anti-CRT efforts across the nation. These efforts are at the local, state, and national level and no state has gone untouched. Figureheads like McCarthy and DeSantis will come and go, but the movements and institutions that support them will continue. Some have called this soft autocracy.  Legal scholars are calling it autocratic legalism, marshaling the law to foster authoritarianism.

Although DeSantisism and McCarthyism are similar, there is a significant difference that makes DeSantisism more dangerous. The Red Scare targeted all progressives and socialists irrespective of race. While it did have dire impacts on the Civil Rights Movement and the Black left, it did not specifically target Black scholars and activists. DeSantis’ crusade is a racial purge, targeting Black scholars and Black history. It is hard to say what’s to come if DeSantisism advances further, but history suggests that racial purges such as this are followed by widespread repression that extends beyond specific institutions like higher education. In a nation with a history of slavery, colonialism, and segregation, that is almost certain to be the case, unless DeSantisism is stopped.

History is nothing if not a teacher. And its message is loud and clear: like McCarthyism, DeSantisism is a cancer that will metastasize throughout the whole nation, unless we stop it now.  The racial purges, the blacklists, and the autocratic deployment of the law will become mainstays of life in the United States. It’s not hyperbole – seven decades after Red Scare’s purges, 86 House Democrats just voted overwhelmingly to condemn socialism, a sign of McCarthyism’s lasting legacy. 

Before we know it, it won’t only be our teachers who are afraid to speak in what is already a devastating reality for students and educators in Florida – teachers are afraid to mention race or the year 1619 for fear of being called Critical Race Theory advocates – but our elected officials and journalists will be silenced and muzzled as well. DeSantisism will destroy what is left of the civil rights reforms of the last century, reforms that uplifted not just Black people but all marginalized people in the U.S., including poor and working class whites. Institutions of higher education are the front lines of this battle to stop the rise of authoritarianism. They must take a stand now to end the purges and blacklists, and insist on the centrality of race conscious education as a tool to dismantle authoritarianism in the United States. 

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