When I listened to President Trump’s State of the Union speech on the evening of February 5, 2019, I wondered if he, like many presidents before him, would bring up the idea that America is “a light to the nations.” And sure enough, right at the end, he did by stating, “We must keep America first in our hearts. We must keep freedom alive in our souls. And we must always keep faith in America's destiny -- that one Nation, under God, must be the hope and the promise and the light and the glory among all the nations of the world! Thank you. God Bless You, God Bless America, and good night!”

I’ve long been fascinated by the endurance of this image of America, of America a shining light to the nations of the world. The image was given durable form in the Statue of Liberty with her torch, welcoming the refugees, the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”  Many American presidents have invoked the image, Ronald Reagan famously, but also John F. Kennedy and more recently Barack Obama, though their notions of what makes (or could make) America exceptional have differed (a topic for another day, perhaps). Some uses of this phrase are boastful, a way of patting ourselves on the back.  Others are aspirational, setting out an ideal we must strive to make reality. But all suggest that America is special, with a unique God-given destiny.

The same day that Trump was going to give his Presidential speech, I’d been teaching John Milton’s “Areopagitica” to my students at Barnard College. Published in 1644 when Milton was trying to persuade England’s Parliament not to enact an ordinance restricting what books could be printed, “Areopagitica” is from a different time and a different country, but it is a foundational text in America.  Arguing for freedom of the press, liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state, Milton’s influence on America’s founding fathers was profound.  We see it in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which enshrined religious liberty and a free press. 

My students were excited by Milton’s notion of the book as a living thing (“Books are not absolutely dead things”), but also by his insistence that each of us needs to actively read and judge for ourselves. Though good and evil (truth and falsehood) may be “nearly inseparable,” Milton says, it is our duty (indeed, we are called by God) to distinguish between them, difficult though that might be. My class of smart, young women and men was struck by how powerful Milton’s words are and remarked on how what he had written more than 350 years ago is still relevant. Milton would be appalled, were he still alive, by a president who calls the media “the enemy of the people,” as well as by slogans like “Fake News” and “Alternate Facts.” These labels don’t just undermine the credibility (and thus freedom) of the press. They deny that there is such a thing as “truth,” that there is a distinction between “truth” and “lies” (intentional untruths, passed off as truths). Without that distinction, there can be no rule of law or justice.

Then we came to a passage towards the end of “Areopagitica” that I read aloud. Here, Milton suddenly praised England as a nation, chosen by God, to spread the light of the Reformation: “…The favor and the love of Heaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us. Why else was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her as out of Sion should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of reformation to all Europe?...Now once again by all concurrence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy and devout men, …God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, even to the reforming of reformation itself. What does he then but reveal himself to his servants, and, as his manner is, first to his Englishmen?” 

Milton the patriot appropriated the prophet Isaiah’s vision of the restored Israel in the end times to imagine a glorious identity for England. It was England, not biblical Israel, that was God’s special nation, a light to the world. But what about those “dark” nations? For Milton, they were Catholic countries that did not yet have what he saw as the “light” of Protestantism. Suddenly, one of my students exclaimed, “That’s the Manifest Destiny ideology of nineteenth-century America!”  Suddenly, we not only saw the thread connecting past and present, seventeenth-century England and nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America, but we could begin to talk about the troubling aspects of exceptionalism, of what was originally intended as a hopeful vision.  

I went home and waited for the President’s address, and there at the end it was—America’s destiny. I thought about the dissonance between this final vision of a hopeful America, a light to the world, and the plea of at the center of the speech for a strong wall, to keep undesirable “caravans” of immigrants out, immigrants who are not “white.” I wonder if those immigrants are, especially for those who want to build the border wall, the contemporary counterpart of Milton’s darkened European continent?

Teaching my course on The Enlightenment for junior English majors at Barnard, I couldn’t resist sharing something with my class. We’d been talking about Milton’s Areopagitica, a famous treatise defending freedom of the press—a cardinal principle of our democracy enshrined in the First Amendment. Freedom of the press has been under attack during the presidency of Donald Trump. He has attacked the media’s reports as “fake news” and called the press “the enemy of the people.”  Something unimaginable to me and so many others; something authoritarian dictators do.  But now we had something else to worry about—not just a sweeping attack on the press, but an attack on teachers and education. 

So, I brought into class the “Perspective” piece by Valerie Straus in the Washington Post about the bizarre comments Donald Trump, Jr., made at his father’s rally in El Paso, Texas.  Trump senior rallied his troops in defense of “the Wall”; his son provided back-up support. Here stood President Trump defending erecting walls, tightening our borders, while his son launched a brief but sharp attack on teachers, the very people who are dedicated to opening and expanding student’s minds. He encouraged the young people at the rally to protect themselves from teachers, who supposedly carry an invasive (not native?) “socialist” (that is, progressive) ideology. In essence, the closing off of America and the American mind as twin enterprises.

But what also strikes me is how Trump Junior’s comments included an ironic inversion of the motto from The Enlightenment. At the start of the semester, my women students read Immanuel Kant’s famous essay, “What is the Enlightenment,” written in 1784.  “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is a man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own reason’! that is the motto of enlightenment.” 

And then Donald Trump, Jr., boldly, proudly declared to his audience, “You know what I love? I love seeing some young conservatives [the hope of the future?] because I know it’s not easy (Crowd applauds and shouts.) Keep up that fight [it is a culture war? A war for the soul of America?]. Bring it to your schools. You don’t have to be indoctrinated by these loser teachers that are trying to sell you on socialism from birth. You don’t have to do it. Because you can think for yourselves. They can’t.”

“Loser teachers”? Was he distinguishing between liberal/socialist and conservative/capitalist teachers? Or was he suggesting that teachers generally are losers? (socialists, committed to diversity and “inclusion,” socio-economic change), echoing his father’s pronouncement of love for “the uneducated”? Does the fact that our teachers are poorly paid, striking for better conditions, make them losers?

 I’d be surprised if Donald Trump Jr. ever read (or even heard of) Kant, but here he was, echoing The Enlightenment philosopher… Dare to be bold, dare to use your reason… Only Trump Jr. was basically saying, stand up to educators! Dare to not be educated! As if that would be a feat of bravery or maturity.

It was The Enlightenment (beginning in the seventeenth century, but stretching through the eighteenth, and culminating in the American and French Revolutions) that brought us “liberalism.” Liberalism, despite its well-known problems and shortcomings, taught the importance of educating the individual, that education was essential to the health of the nation, and to democracy, which was imagined as the best system of government.  It led to the development of a public education system.  My students were appalled to see educators, teachers, vilified… as indoctrinators.  As Valerie Strauss’s editorial pointed out, it has always been authoritarian leaders who attack the schools, crack down on professors and teachers. I think of how in Germany during the 1930s, Jews were not allowed to teach, ousted from universities, presumed as dangerous.  And now, it’s not just authoritarian regimes around the world. Right-wing parties and leaders in democracies in Europe and South America, are attacking teachers as dangerous, left-wing enemies of the nation.  They typically label these “bad” educators “socialist,” or Marxist--people who would undermine capitalism and the nation.  I wonder if, once again, there’s an anti-Semitic subtext?

How could it be a matter of pride not to be educated in the schools, especially the public schools and universities? Trump’s recent proposed budget for 2020 cuts $7.1 billion from Education (third year in a row of cuts), including 121% for the Education Department. It has often been noted that a large segment of Trump’s core are white people, particularly white Christian male evangelicals, who have not attended college. The appointment of Betsey DeVos as Secretary of Education is symptomatic of the current suspicion of our education and teachers. She never attended public schools or a state university and sent her children to private schools. We have a president who won’t let his college grades be made public (much as he’s withheld his tax returns), and who according to Rex Tillerson, former U.S. Secretary of State, “doesn’t like to read.” He wants a wall to stop supposedly dangerous criminals from entering America, but most immigrants want not just safety, but economic and educational opportunities for their children. And here were Trump father and son urging conservative youth to feel pride, to take the “fight” (?) to the schools (exactly how?) as if they’d accomplish something wonderful by refusing to go to those colleges where teachers supposedly indoctrinate their students with socialism, acceptance of cultural and racial diversity, multiculturalism, and so on, all things that are imagined as undermining America’s national identity.

I’ve just finished reading the wonderful memoir by Tara Westover, “Educated,” which couldn’t be more timely.  It’s a powerful story of a young woman who grew up in a Mormon household, with a dominating father who did not allow his children to go to school, fearing they’d be indoctrinated by Satan.  Sound familiar? I wish these young people who attended the Trump rally in El Paso would read this book, which is about her becoming “educated,” about education as her salvation, but of course, most of them probably won’t.

I identify so strongly with Tara Westover, since for me too, education, and especially higher education, was liberating; a way for me to discover myself, to find and make a place in the world. A liberal education, opened my mind and my heart and encouraged me to dedicate my own life to doing the same for my students.  I had a difficult childhood growing up in an unusual household, with a domineering father, too, but he encouraged me to learn, and yes, to become a teacher.  “The world will always need teachers,” he’d say as I went off at age 17 to Indiana University. My apocalyptically-minded father was always prophesying end-times disaster, but I don’t think he ever expected that his beloved America would become a nation that didn’t value education, that we would have leaders encouraging teachers to carry guns while fearing their power to transform young minds.