A crusade and the crowd of the dead: Understanding the logic of the U.S. right’s attacks on public education

Abstract

Recognizing that the American right, and specifically the Christian right, has achieved disproportionate power over shaping the landscape of education policy and political culture, the following engages in a twofold analysis of schooling in the United States. We consider the structural transformations that are being enacted as a result of the proliferation of (Christian) public charters and other privatization efforts as well as reactionary undertakings that have purposefully targeted the daily life of schools from administration to curriculum and pedagogy since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (for example: disruptions at school board meetings, threatening school officials, anti-LGBTQ and anti-anti-racism hysteria, among others). We put these minoritarian interjections in conversation with Elias Canetti’s “crowd of the dead” and consider the effects of this political activity in producing civic and social death while seeking to destabilize public institutions and institutional arrangements that should safeguard against the manufacturing of (civic) death.