Greetings from the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico, NY. I’m staying here for a couple of days for a conference called “Foundations of Democracy: The Arts and Humanities” sponsored by the NYU Brademas Center. I’ll be presenting a paper on childhood and authoritarianism on Friday.
There is a lot of talk in academic spaces right now about democracy, fascism, authoritarianism, racism, resistance, and historical memory. Yesterday, I participated in the Backtalkers Academy, a virtual summer school that runs for nearly a month and gathers scholars, writers, organizers, and public thinkers to wrestle with the crises of this moment: critical race theory, feminism, education, voting rights, anti-Blackness, historical erasure, white backlash, and the machinery of authoritarian rule.
I sat on a panel about reclaiming historical memory, joined by Sarah Lewis and Jason Stanley, and moderated by Tim Wise. And as I listened to the conversation unfold, I kept returning to the site of analysis that too many scholars, pundits, parents, organizers, and democracy-defenders still refuse to take seriously.
The child.
The dominated child. The silenced child. The hit child. Shamed child. Demonized Black child. The caged immigrant child. The obedient white child. The child taught to fear truth and confuse punishment with love. The child taught that power does not have to explain itself. The child taught that cruelty is normal when the right person is doing it.
There’s this wonderful quote from W.E.B. Du Bois that I love. It comes from his 1920 compilation of essays in Darkwater. “In the treatment of the child the world foreshadows its own future and faith. All words and all thinking lead to the child, – to that vast immortality and wide sweep of infinite possibility which the child represents.”
Du Bois got it. More than 100 years ago he was telling us that the child is not outside the crisis of democracy. That child is the rehearsal space. What we do to children, we do to the future.
So, if we want to understand why millions of people bow to an evil tyrant like Donald Trump, why they cheer for ICE raids, why they vote against their own material interests, why they worship billionaires who despise them, why they defend book bans, why they panic at Black history, why they call cruelty “law and order,” why they see cages and deportations and state violence and feel safer rather than horrified, then we have to stop pretending authoritarianism begins at the ballot box or at the courts.
It begins long before that. It begins in childhood. It begins when a child learns that the person with power does not have to be truthful. Or when a child learns that obedience matters more than conscience. Or when a child learns that being hurt by someone who claims to love you is normal.
It begins when a child learns that asking “why?” or talking back is disrespect. When a child learns that adults can humiliate you, hit you, threaten you, silence you, invade your body, deny your reality, and still call themselves good.
That is not just parenting. No. It is all political formation. And that is how you manufacture a people who later mistake domination for leadership. That’s how you get people who crave strongmen. Folks who are more comfortable being ruled than being free. People who can watch Donald Trump lie, bully, mock, threaten, punish, degrade, and destroy, and still see . . . daddy.
Think about it, Y’all.
Donald Trump did not hypnotize America. He activated what had already been installed in people’s nervous system and neural pathways. He did not create the authoritarian personality from scratch. He gave it a musty-ass red hat, a grievance script, a flag to hide behind, and permission to stop pretending.
So we gotta stop thinking about MAGA as simply a political movement. It is a mass trauma response organized around whiteness, obedience, resentment, punishment, and the erotic thrill of watching vulnerable people be made to suffer. Read that sentence again.
It is the adult child of a nation that never learned how to love without domination. And this is why childhood has to be at the center of our analysis.
Because people do not arrive at authoritarianism as blank slates. They are trained into certain relationships with power. They are taught what to fear. Who to obey. Whose suffering counts. Who deserves protection and who deserves punishment. They are taught whether truth and memory matters. They are taught whether cruelty is a warning sign or a family value or heirloom.
This is where childism comes into the conversation. A lot of folks don’t know what childism is. But it is the core of racism, sexism, and all other isms. You don’t get any of these without childism.
Childism is the belief that children are lesser beings who can be controlled, dominated, dismissed, humiliated, and harmed for their own good. It is the everyday ideology that says children do not deserve full dignity because they are not yet adults. It says their bodies belong to adults. Their feelings are inconvenient, their questions are defiance, and their resistance is disrespect. Most importantly, their fear and obedience is proof that discipline is working.
And once a society normalizes domination over children and yielded their obedience, it has already built the emotional infrastructure for authoritarianism.
Think about it, Y’all.
How do we tell children that power is always right and then expect them to grow into adults who challenge fascists? How do we raise children to obey without question and then expect them to defend democracy? How do we teach children that fear equals respect and then act confused when they worship bullies?
How is it codified in law that adults can “appropriately” hit children and call it love, then wonder why they become adults who think state violence is order?
How do you silence children in the home, censor them in the classroom, shame them in the church, police them in the street, lie to them in textbooks, and then expect them to become courageous defenders of truth?
QTNA because that contradiction is killing us! And white supremacy understands this better than many of its critics do. That is why authoritarian movements always go after children.
They go after schools because schools shape memory. They go after books because books create interior freedom. They go after libraries because libraries give children access to worlds their parents, pastors, governors, and presidents cannot fully control. They go after Black history because Black history teaches children how power lies.
They go after gender and sexuality because they want the state, the church, and the patriarchal family to control the body before the child can name or categorize themselves. They go after teachers because teachers can interrupt inherited ignorance. They go after language because if you control what children can say, you control what they can recognize. They go after memory because a child with memory is harder to rule.
I say all this to say, this is not just culture war noise. What we are witnessing is an authoritarian childrearing project going down in America.
The overlords are trying to produce children who cannot recognize cruelty. They are trying to produce children who cannot recognize racism. Who cannot recognize fascism. Can’t recognize censorship because they have been told censorship is protection. They are trying to produce children who cannot recognize propaganda because they have been raised on national mythology.
They are trying to produce children who cannot recognize state violence because they have been taught that punishment is what bad people deserve. They are trying to produce children who cannot recognize authoritarianism because authoritarianism already feels like home.
This is why the attack on historical memory is not a side issue. Destroying memory is how old cruelties get reintroduced as new common sense. This is why they do not want children to know the hard truths about what has happened in America because they wanna repeat that shit.
They do not want children to know about slavery as a system of law, profit, rape, family separation, torture, and child theft. About how Indigenous dispossession as the foundation of American land ownership. About lynching as a public ritual where white families brought children to watch Black people be tortured and murdered. They do not want children to know that white children were not innocent bystanders to racial terror. They were witnesses, participants, apprentices, beneficiaries, and future inheritors of the social order.
Because once children know that, the whole scam starts to fall apart. Once children know that history, they can recognize the pattern. They can see how the old monsters keep changing clothes.
They can see how the slave patrol becomes the police department. How the lynch mob becomes the viral comment section or legislators. How the plantation ledger becomes the prison budget. How the White Citizens’ Council becomes the school board. How the book burner becomes the concerned parent. How the segregationist becomes the anti-CRT activist. And how the border agent becomes the new overseer of national purity.
Memory gives children pattern recognition. Authoritarianism requires pattern blindness. That is why memory must be attacked. That is why the archive must be sanitized. That is why Black history must be treated as dangerous. That is why schools become battlegrounds.
Because the child who can remember is the child who can refuse, and refusal is what authoritarianism cannot tolerate. This is why authoritarianism is not just a state project. We must understand it as a family project. It is also a church project, school project, media project, and parenting project. It is reproduced wherever adults teach children that domination is normal.
Authoritarian rule is not being imposed on a population that has no preparation for it. It is being welcomed by people who have been emotionally trained for it. They will talk about authoritarianism as if it only comes from above, when much of it is co-created below by ordinary adults who teach children that power is truth. We cannot effectively resist authoritarian regimes while raising children in authoritarian ways. And we cannot build a democratic future on anti-democratic foundations.
If we want children to resist fascism and defend truth, they have to know what domination feels like, know how racial myths are planted in ordinary stories, and they have to be allowed to ask dangerous questions. If we want them to protect democracy, they have to experience democracy in the places where they are most vulnerable. Which means that children need to experience dignity before they can defend it.
Childhood is where the future will either liberated or broken in advance. And if we keep overlooking that, then all our talk about democracy is just adult noise echoing over the bodies of children we never learned how to see.
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