I’m not really American, and I couldn’t be prouder of that.

I hope you, my fellow Californians, feel the same way.

Because sometimes there’s no greater compliment than an intended insult.

This time, the backhanded praise came in the results of a Los Angeles Times survey, conducted early this year by the Canadian firm Leger, which examined how Americans feel about California.

Among the findings was that half of American adults believe our state is in decline. The survey made headlines for laying bare how much American conservatives dislike the Golden State. Two-thirds of Republicans surveyed say that the national impact of California has been “net negative.” (We are merely the home of the world’s leading technology and entertainment industries!)

As the kicker, nearly half of Republicans consider California—and Californians by extension—to be “not really American.”

The media reports about the poll treated this label “not really American” as harsh criticism. The L.A. Times dwelled extensively on how such an outcome reflected a terribly divided and polarized country. Two of its columnists, simultaneously taking the bait and taking leave of their senses, proceeded to defend California as being very American.

Why bother? I mean, who in their right mind wants to be “really American” these days?  In this century, our country has become defined by its anti-democratic fascism, rage, and madness. Being considered less than American by other Americans should be considered a badge of honor. Reading the poll, I wanted to print up “Not Really American” T-shirts and hand them out at a big California-themed party.

Disdain from the rest of the country isn’t new, either. In fact, it’s one of the few things that never seems to change here. The first best-selling book about California, The Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction—published in 1855 by a Southern white supremacist named Hinton R. Helper—called California “an ugly cheat” and said, “there is but lank promise in the future.” If only you could see us now, Hinton!

Among California’s partisans, the fact that the state doesn’t really fit in the United States has always been a signal virtue. The journalist Carey McWilliams, perhaps our state’s greatest interpreter, wrote in 1949: “One cannot, as yet, properly place California in the American scheme of things.” He then added: “To understand this tiger all rules must be laid to one side. All the copybook maxims must be forgotten. California is no ordinary state; it is an anomaly, a freak, the great exception among the American states.”

Even Republicans and conservatives, back when they ran the state, once considered California’s singularity a virtue. But in the past two generations, as California has grown more liberal, our distinctiveness has come to be seen as disloyalty.

Not long before his death, the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia declared that California “does not count” as a real American state or as part of the U.S. West. Tellingly, he included this insult in his dissent from the landmark 2015 court decision legalizing same-sex marriage—which makes the justice’s ugly remark just another compliment.

Californians ought to be prepared for many more such compliments. Donald Trump’s backers have published plans for an initiative called Project 2025, which would treat California as an American enemy—because, of course, our values are not really American.

The plans seek not just to overturn California policies, but to punish Californians for having backed them in the first place.

For instance, California’s “un-American” support for women’s rights and reproductive rights would be met with a Trump federal abortion ban at 15 weeks, as well as harsh penalties for Californians and others who continued to provide the services.

Our wise extension of health insurance, including Medicaid, to all our people, regardless of their legal status, would also be targeted.

In addition, we’d lose the power to establish higher-than-American standards for pollution and air quality. Our terribly un-American efforts to fight climate change would be similarly reversed and penalized.

Naturally, we’d pay a price for our not-really-American commitment to gun control. And we’d pay for protecting immigrants from Trump’s promised military-led deportation scheme, which is all but certain to sweep up U.S. citizens too, since half of California’s kids have an immigrant parent.

Trump has also promised to overturn the 14th Amendment’s protection of birthright citizenship, which would take away rights from more than five million naturalized Californians.

In this context, is it any wonder that a majority of our not-really American state is ready to leave before the Americans kick us out? According to another recent poll from the Independent California Institute, 58% of California adults say we’d be better off than we are now if California peacefully became independent—its own country—in the next 10 years.

An even higher number, 68%, say California would be better off if, instead of seceding, the state obtained a special autonomous status within the U.S. that allowed for more control of our land and infrastructure.

All that said, while many Americans seem to hate California, we don’t hate Americans back. The same Independent California Institute poll asked Californians if they felt more Californian or American.

Fifty-one percent said that they felt equally Californian and American. Only 21% said they felt more Californian. Still, 63% said they wouldn’t live anywhere in America other than California, our less-than-fully American home.

For such a loving people, the correct response—when faced with glorious insults about our lack of Americanness—is to lean into the hatred. How? Californians might borrow from FDR who, in countering wealthy critics who saw Depression relief as a communist plot, declared: “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.”

But that might be too American a reference for our state. Instead, let Californians answer the American Ahabs with the love of the Gospel of John, Chapter 15, Verses 18 and 19, when Jesus tells his disciples:

If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

The post I’m Proud to Be Un-American appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This May, an email landed in my inbox. The correspondent, who’d come across my new book on the John Birch Society, wanted to share how members of this far-right anticommunist group won control of his local Parent Teacher Association when he was in kindergarten at San Rafael Elementary.

This was early 1960s Pasadena, California, during the rise of the Birchers. What happened then and there was a story unfolding in many communities around the country.

In one way, the story was similar to the pressures that schools are seeing now. In recent years, parents and activists—who, in many cases, are the ideological inheritors of the Birchers—have succeeded in getting large swathes of the country to vet what is taught and read in classrooms, to decide which students can use which bathrooms, and to determine what gender pronouns teachers can use with their students.

But there is at least one profound difference between today and the 1960s: the ferocity of response to such pressure campaigns. While today’s culture warriors often get their way in the schools, the Birchers ultimately failed to capitalize on opportunities like the one in Pasadena.

Why? The counterattacks were too strong. The so-called guardrails protecting democracy were also resilient. When the Birchers made inroads in the media, libraries, and schools more than a half-century ago, they were often stopped, and pushed to the margins. In this Pasadena case, the letter-writer told me, a grassroots effort, which included his mom (who had no apparent history of political activism before this), came together to win back control of their PTA.

His email reminded me how much of the work countering the Birchers occurred out of sight, by parents opposing what they considered an intrusion on their liberties and on their children’s access to a robust progressive education.

It’s this kind of mass mobilization and resistance that’s needed now to defend such ideals as freedom of expression, pluralism, tolerance, and multiracial democracy in America.

The Birch Society was founded in 1958 by 12 white men, mostly Christian and wealthy, including oil and gas magnate Fred Koch, and ex-candy manufacturer Robert Welch, the group’s leader.

But it only exploded into the American consciousness in 1961, when reporters and political leaders revealed to the public that Welch had formed a secret anticommunist society that saw conspiracies proliferating inside the United States. The Birch Society, which numbered between 60,000 and 100,000 members at its height in the mid-1960s, sought to impose its version of Christian morality on American public life. This included giving parents veto power over sex education, giving students easier access to approved pro-“Americanist” texts, and minimizing teachings that they considered antithetical to traditional morality and culture.

In this local work, the Birch Society, while overwhelmingly male in its national leadership, was powered by grassroots efforts by women who used their status as moms to claim a moral order and impose it on schools and communities. Their methods are reminiscent of those used by today’s Moms for Liberty.

Sometimes, the Birchers could win even by losing, inserting their issues into the public square and pushing the conversation in a direction they wished. But more often, the Birchers and their allies lost their fights to take over PTAs and school boards, and to force libraries to stock shelves with conservative tracts. These defeats were fueled by the concerted mobilization of institutions, individuals, and elected officials devoted to repelling the Birch-backed assault on progressive education.

For instance, when Birch leader Laurence Bunker won a seat as a trustee of his local library in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Bunker’s own Unitarian pastor, apparently chafing at a radical’s ascent atop the library’s administration, decided to challenge him in the next election. He ultimately assembled a coalition that unseated Bunker.

In other cases, institutions and their leaders organized the resistance. When Birchers and members of the American Legion in Paradise, California, charged that a popular government teacher Virginia Franklin had immersed her pupils in communist ideas (she exposed them to the Quaker-led American Friends Service Committee), the community largely rallied behind Franklin. Her principal backed her, the school board cleared her of wrongdoing, the media painted her in a sympathetic light, and the courts later awarded her monetary damages in her lawsuit claiming defamation.

The relatively strong popular conviction that progressive education was a cornerstone of shoring up democracy also helped fend off the Birchers. This kind of education was venerated as a bulwark of democracy and individual rights against the ideas of fascism and communism. Progressive education had seemingly helped the United States survive the Great Depression and win World War II by building a corps of citizens who believed in the power of government to do good, felt devoted to their community, and contributed through military, federal, and volunteer service.

Such a broad-minded education was evinced by American philosopher John Dewey, who promoted his ideas in the early 20th century by establishing the Laboratory School in Chicago and publishing Democracy and Education. To imbue students with the values of democratic citizenship, they would be exposed to a range of ideas and perspectives, learn the importance of social equality and an informed citizenship, and explore both America’s greatest triumphs and its abject failures to live up to its ideals.

Though the Birchers never achieved the revolution in public education they hoped for, they did notch a handful of education-related wins. Notably, in 1962, they arguably secured their greatest victory when they helped elect Max Rafferty as California state superintendent of public instruction. Rafferty had drawn Birchers to his candidacy when he delivered a barnburner of a speech to the school board in the Los Angeles suburb of La Cañada, which borders Pasadena.

Titled “The Passing of the Patriot,” Rafferty’s address charged that the public schools were indoctrinating young minds in the poison of communism. The education system, he complained, was churning out a generation of “booted, side-burned, ducktailed, unwashed, leather-jacketed slobs, whose favorite sport is ravaging little girls and stomping polio victims to death.” Rafferty’s broadsides succeeded in getting voters to turn against the ideals of progressive education in favor of a curriculum that favored pro-American tutorials where students would learn to be “militant for freedom” and “happy in their love of country.”

Such a win showed how, using the banner of parental rights, state power could be deployed to enforce a set of norms and values across public institutions.  And that same playbook—or at least something that reads like the old Birch playbook—has allowed for the rise of an Orwellian regime of bureaucratic censorship today.

But, as emails like the one sent to me this spring demonstrate, organizing, voting, and activism can counter far-right efforts to control public education at the community level.

Championing the idea of progressive education, in the Dewey tradition, is part of the ongoing work of defending democracy. Disinformation, conspiracy theories, climate change denial, and economic and racial inequalities are rampant in the United States, making progressive education more relevant than ever.

It is needed, as well, to counter the declining trust in the nation’s democratic institutions and reject the growing intolerance toward people of color, LGBTQ rights, and immigrants.

This type of education can also help foster citizens who can tackle the country’s biggest problems. As one scholar put it, Dewey’s vision of a progressive education was to “produce an inquiring student who could change America.”

Though it is harder nowadays to use “sunlight” to expose the excesses of education extremists, it’s still possible to expose the radical nature of the project. If the extremism can be surfaced as an attack on the free exchange of ideas and facts, then some parents might be convinced to enter the fray to thwart the successors to the Birch movement.

The post A Mid-Century Playbook for Saving Progressive American Education appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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Whatever you think of his deeds in office, Nixon’s patriotism was undeniable. He was the first president to put an American flag pin in his lapel. In the evenings, he liked to cruise on the Potomac on his presidential yacht, the Sequoia. Nixon insisted on playing the national anthem over the Sequoia’s loud speakers as the yacht anchored off of Washington’s tomb at Mt. Vernon. After a few drinks during the invasion of Cambodia in May 1970, Nixon stood on the yacht’s foredeck, and, as the Start Spangled Banner played in the evening stillness, cried out, “Louder!”

Nixon, who loved spectacles and rooting for the home team (on the White House tapes, you can hear him yelling at the TV during ball games), could be boyishly enthusiastic about his country. When Americans landed on the moon in July 1969, Nixon decided to fly to the middle of the Pacific to board the aircraft carrier that recovered the astronauts. “P was exuberant, really cranked up, like a little kid,” wrote his chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman in his diary, referring to the president. Nixon celebrated the moon landing as a great American triumph, a symbol of American can-do spirit. Of course, as a vote-seeking politician, he also wanted to bask in the reflected glory. His visit to greet astronauts was code-named “Operation Moonglow.”

Nixon, being Nixon, also had a darker side to his patriotism. He was a politician who knew how to exploit resentments, partly because he felt them so freshly. In 1968, and even more so during his 1972 re-election campaign, he ran on respect for the flag. His not-so-subtle message was that the East Coast liberal elites disrespected the country, not only the draft resisters who burned the flag, but the editorialists and columnists who questioned American purpose and honor in “staying the course” in Vietnam. Nixon had been condescended to by these same elites. He believed, with some reason, that the so-called “Georgetown Set”—populated by liberal Ivy Leaguers who read The Washington Post and The New York Times—had vilified him ever since he exposed Alger Hiss, a Harvard-trained lawyer with impeccable establishment credentials working in the State Department, as a Soviet spy in 1948.

Nixon used respect for the flag the way gangs use respect for their colors—to inspire fear and assert dominance. He shamelessly tried to castigate anti-war protesters as somehow un-American—as weak, if not traitorous. In a particularly lurid passage penned by his speechwriter Pat Buchanan, Nixon argued for the invasion of Cambodia (or “incursion,” to use Nixon’s word) by making it a test of American manhood: “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism will threaten free nations and institutions throughout the world.”

Nixon’s proposition might have been valid, but to use this sort of bullyboy rhetoric against antiwar protesters was shameless. A few days after he gave this speech, Nixon was appalled—and felt guilt—when national guardsmen shot and killed four protesters at Kent State University in Ohio. In his memoirs Nixon wrote, “Those few days after Kent State were amongst the darkest of my presidency. I felt utterly dejected.”

Nixon could be falsely heroic and needlessly polarizing in his patriotism—he played the paranoid style in American politics, as Richard Hofstadter put it. But I believe his struggle to remain upbeat in the face of personal and political adversity made him seem more human, fragile even. He often felt aggrieved and put upon, embattled in an unfair fight against those glamorous, spoiled, underhanded Kennedys. He resented birth and entitlement and felt, justifiably, that he had worked his way up, that his victories were hard earned. In law school, he had earned the reputation for having an “iron butt,” for grinding his way past the more privileged kids. On the campaign trail, he overcame his shyness by preparation—by memorizing names and faces—and by his willingness to work hard for other politicians.

Though naturally gloomy, he wanted to be upbeat. He struggled against his dourness by writing notes to himself at night, describing the man he wished to be—“joyful” and “serene.” He rarely was, but he tried. His daughter Julie remembered how he would come though the front door at night with a jaunty little whistle, put a show tune on the record player, and turn on all the lights.

He could not be as happy as he wished to be, not nearly so. But his private efforts were poignant. Right after the Cambodia incursion and Kent State, he stayed up most of the night and suddenly decided to visit the Lincoln Memorial with his valet, Manolo, and the secret service trailing nervously behind. Nixon engaged a few sleepy and agog anti-war protesters, who later, interviewed by reporters, mocked him for talking about football and surfing. Actually, Nixon had mostly tried to talk about the search for meaning in life to these uncomprehending kids. The pre-dawn scene was too bizarre, and the generation gap was too wide, for him to pull it off. He just didn’t have the charisma or grace; he was too stiff and self-conscious.

And yet many Americans identified with Nixon. As Tom Wicker wrote in his biography of Nixon, One of Us, Nixon appealed to the American values of striving, of never giving up, to the hopes of ordinary men and women that by hard work, grit, and faith in their country and themselves, they could accomplish great things. Nixon ultimately was an American tragedy. His paranoid side won out, and by hating his enemies, he guaranteed his own self-destruction. Still, he loved his family; loved his country; kept a personal faith; and when he failed, and failed again – the last time spectacularly – he kept on trying, right to the day he died. In 1968, he had run as the New Nixon, seeking to re-invent the upstart, glowering, demagogic Nixon as a quietly authoritative, mature man. His re-invention was not entirely convincing, but he did win in a close three-man race (against Democrat Hubert Humphrey and independent George Wallace). And if he would need to keep re-inventing himself, what could be more American?

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