That Used to be True (part 4) Modern Era
This is the last of a 4-part series that discusses elements of the high school curriculum that were true enough when I taught (2005-2015) but aren’t true any longer.
Mid-century economy. In the post-World War II United States, big public and private projects were considered challenging but routine. We built the St. Lawrence Seaway; the interstate highway system; the Apollo program to put a man on the Moon; created AMTRAK, a national rail passenger network and Conrail to consolidate, operate, and return to profitability the remnants of six bankrupt rail lines; and constructed massive projects such as the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, and Washington Dulles Airport.
Under LBJ’s Great Society, the nation also set ambitious goals for alleviating poverty and hunger, improving education, and creating “safe, sanitary, and affordable:” housing. The Medicare and Medicaid programs brought affordable healthcare to millions of the elderly, poor, and disabled.
While some of those “Great Society” programs were poorly conceived and some, such as urban renewal and urban highway construction, had huge negative consequences, in sum they created a brief national commitment to improving the lives of the less fortunate. Such ambitious agendas would be unthinkable now. The money doesn’t exist and the belief that such projects are feasible and proper has evaporated. More fundamentally, the country appears to lack the vision and self-confidence to undertake “big” projects. Forty years of disinvestment and “government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem” propaganda has created a constrained vision and budget environment where our national parks accumulate a $12B maintenance backlog and the nation’s bridges, water systems, railroad stations, airline terminals, and highways become increasingly obsolete and unsafe. Increasingly, our grand projects reflect the whims of a new generation of Robber barons, who decide what the priorities of our space program will be and which roads will be free to drive on.
Supreme Court. The 2008 curriculum framework for US/VA history contains howlers such as the following.
The decisions of the United States Supreme Court have expanded individual rights in the years since Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954).
The civil rights movement of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s provided a model that other groups have used to extend civil rights and promote equal justice.
The United States Supreme Court protects the individual rights enumerated in the Constitution of the United States.
The United States Supreme Court identifies a constitutional basis for a right to privacy that is protected from government interference.
The saddest thing is that even as recently as my last year teaching (2015), it was still possible to stand in front of a classroom and make these statements. There were certainly cracks, even by then, such as the court’s absurd 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, where the Court said that, since there was no more racism, we didn’t need the Voting Rights Act any longer
Earlier, the court had abandoned two longtime principles (judicial restraint and deciding on the narrowest possible grounds) in the 2010 Citizens United decision and the plain meaning of the words in the 2008 Heller decision. But it remained a closely divided 5-4 court, where several justices occasionally crossed over and voted with the liberals.
But it is only with the advent of the 6-3 Trump majority that the Court began the wholesale rollback of rights. Now, the Court makes no pretense of following a judicial philosophy, feeling fully entitled to ignore Founders intent, plain meaning of the words, precedent, or any other principle.
Most foreboding was the 6-3 vote to repeal Roe v. Wade, the first time the court ever took away an explicit Constitutional right that had been widely relied on. Other decisions that alarmed some people continued the Court’s recent practice of privileging evangelical Christians at the expense of other religions and restricted the scope of the so-called “Miranda” protections against abusive police questioning. Of even more concern was the broad signal by the Court that they’re not finished. Roe was decided on the basis of a constitutional right to privacy and the court signaled that it may be back to deal with gay marriage and other rights that are derived from a right to privacy. In 2024, the Court ignored precedent, checks and balances, and the law itself by inventing a form of Presidential immunity from almost all criminal charges, a “right” that no prior president or constitutional scholar had believed exists.
This didn’t happen by accident. For years, the typical Supreme Court nominee was a distinguished jurist well into middle years who had been rated “highly qualified” by the American Bar Association, who agreed with the general philosophy of the president. This meant that they seldom stayed on the court for 25 years or more, were highly professional, and avoided ideological decisions. But after several Republican appointees compiled surprisingly moderate records, the party decided on a rigid purity test and appointed many people with no judicial record at all but who were highly ideological and relatively young so that, once appointed, they might sit on the bench for 40 years or more. The result is a court with not only a wide 6-3 majority, but one where ideology seems to be the driving principle. Perhaps its most extreme decision (so far) was the invention, against all precedent, of near-total presidential immunity from criminal charges. This violated every principle the “conservative” justices claim to observe: precedent, plain meaning of the words, Founders intent, original text, etc.
Defense spending. Throughout most of the Cold War, and especially from the Vietnam War onward, there was significant controversy about the defense budget. A standard analysis was how many schools could be built or how many other social priorities could be served by the cost of some military system (e.g., the cost of one B-1 bomber, a day of operations in Iraq, etc.).
Indeed, until 9/11, the defense budget was in a significant post-Cold-War decline for nearly a decade. However, that situation was reversed with the 9/11 attacks and Global War on Terror. In the decade after 9/11, military spending increased 50% while all other spending went up only 13.5%.
But the remarkable thing about record defense spending is that the debates that once accompanied defense spending requests have been silenced. Now, defense spending is almost not discussed at all. Even after the final drawdown of troops in Afghanistan, there was no serious suggestion that defense spending should be reduced.
In fact, the nation is long overdue for a major debate on priorities. proposals to spend $700 billion over a decade for transportation or a variety of other priorities receive intense scrutiny and demands for dollar for dollar spending reductions, while requests for the same amount of defense spending in a single year are adopted in the blink of an eye.
“Land of the free.’ The basic elements of freedom and liberty were dismantled in a remarkably short series of crime. After complaining for years about “Lawfare’ and Democrats supposedly “weaponizing” the Department of Justice, Trump’s administration has conducted a Master Clas in weaponizing. Criticizing a judge Trump likes is probably a crime. But a judge ruling against Trump is probably committing a crime and should be rebuked. These ridiculous comments earned Trump a rare rebuke from the Chief Justice.
Some things are scarier. He has used the threat of retaliation to bring most businessmen into docile obedience. He cut off millions in federal funding and demanded changes in admissions, curriculum, and governance.
In summary, when I look at the description of the United States that prevailed when I taught, it’s almost like the Virginia curriculum is describing a different country. And yet, with the signals being given by the Supreme Court that they’re just getting warmed up and the Republican assault on our democracy, it seems likely we will see even more things we thought were true erased.