Class 45. How One Small Town in Massachusetts Fought Back Against Fascism

Empathy as a weapon in the "arsenal for democracy."

If you are just joining The Freedom Academy, welcome! As a reminder, this post is a standalone “lesson” and you do not need to be caught up to follow along. I’ll reference any previous posts that offer relevant background, and you can always visit the syllabus and catch up at your own leisure. All class posts have an audio recording if you prefer to multitask while listening to me lecture!

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.

— Elon Musk

Last spring, I had the opportunity to speak to the high school class taught by one of The Freedom Academy’s subscribers (hi Kevin B.!). Kevin had reached out to me because he had shared my post about moral disengagement (Class 37) with his students, which describes how people become complicit with democratic erosion.

During the Q and A, one of the students asked me what the most important thing is they can do. As it is often nowadays when I speak to groups, it was hard for me to offer solutions. There are, of course, all the typical civic engagement answers, like protest, vote, get involved with pro-democracy groups (all of which are good, and needed!). But my answer to them was much simpler. It was the antidote to moral disengagement: Empathy.

As I explain in the class lesson, moral disengagement works by providing convenient rationalizations — moral “off ramps” — for engaging in or witnessing harmful or problematic behavior without doing anything about it. Moral disengagement strategies help you avoid feelings of guilt or shame, allowing you to convince yourself that things are not that bad or that you aren’t a bad person for not caring. By contrast, empathy — defined by Merriam-Webster as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another” — is a barrier to easily taking those off-ramps for two reasons. First, it reminds you of your common humanity with another person. Second, that common humanity makes it harder to ignore feelings of guilt or shame for being passive in the face of that person’s suffering (as it should!). It sort of neutralizes the moral disengagement “hacks” your brain might try to pull.

In fact, as I have written previously, one characteristic that truth-tellers and whistleblowers share is an other-regarding orientation, meaning that they internalize the impact of harmful actions on others, even if it doesn’t affect them personally. In other words, they are empathetic.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that empathy is under attack. Elon Musk, as the quote above illustrates (from his interview with Joe Rogan), considers it a “weakness” of Western civilization. Conservative Christian podcasts have characterized empathy as “toxic” and warn that it will “align you with hell.” I learned in researching this post that one guy actually wrote a book called The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits (for real!) and argues that appealing to your empathetic response (by, for example, pointing out the human or environmental consequences of a policy) is a form of “manipulation.” In a New York Times opinion essay, columnist David French observes “the Republican Christian right made a hard turn against immigration and, in its most extreme political faction, is turning against empathy itself.”

You know the famous Martin Niemöller poem, “First they came for…”? It’s an argument for empathy. As the poem powerfully illustrates, empathy can both spur collective action and act as a bulwark against fascism. That’s why it was the cornerstone of an education curriculum almost a century ago.

The Springfield Plan

In 1940, Springfield, Massachusetts was the home of “The Springfield Plan,” an ambitious project that set out to turn its public schools into “arsenals of democracy” by teaching students the value of a pluralistic democracy and how to spot and reject fascist propaganda designed to pit them against their fellow citizens.¹

I came across this program while putting together my Yale disinformation course syllabus back in 2018. Like the history of The (real) Freedom Academy, which I also came across then (and after which this Substack is obviously named), I thought The Springfield Plan was fascinating, not least because it not only highlighted that the current moment is not this country’s first rodeo with fascist propaganda, but offered a window into how people before us tried to combat it.

The Springfield Plan has its origins in the education community of the late 1930s, which was grappling with a rising tide of racist and anti-semitic rhetoric across the country inspired by Nazism. New communications technology — the radio — allowed this propaganda to be spread widely by people like Father Coughlin in the 1930s. Basically the Rush Limbaugh of his day, Coughlin espoused themes that will sound familiar: Renee DiResta, author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, writes that Coughlin “affirmed for his audience the sense that their values and institutions were threatened, validated their struggles, and offered them not only an explanation but a set of villains and scapegoats.” She estimates that almost a quarter of the U.S. population listened to his Sunday “sermons” (though some were “hate listeners” who disagreed with him) in which he exhorted that “This is a country for white Christians.” This was also a time of active and rising Ku Klux Klan activity — which had been revived in 1915 by the propaganda film The Birth of a Nation, depicting the Klan as the country’s saviors — across the South.

In response, the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), school officials in Springfield, Massachusetts including Superintendent John Granrud, and Columbia Teacher’s College graduate Clyde Miller, founder of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, created a public school curriculum grounded in the belief that “a robust democracy was all that stood in the way of a creeping totalitarianism in the world.” Democratic citizenship was defined as not only civic engagement, but also as understanding and appreciating the contributions of various religious, ethnic, and religious groups in the nation’s history.

The Curriculum

Springfield, Massachusetts, where European immigrants or children of immigrants made up 60% of the population and Black Americans made up 2% of the population, made it an ideal site to pilot the experimental multicultural program. The curriculum included things like the following:

A junior high school orchestra is learning to play the music of the nationalities represented among its members. The glee club sings the Christmas carols of many countries. An art class sketches the family heirlooms brought in by pupils and arranged in an informal exhibit, in which a Russian samovar that crossed the Atlantic in the steerage stands between a colonial powder horn and a family Bible dating back to the Revolution. In class in current events the children are deeply impressed when a Jewish boy reads to them a letter from his brother in the marines praising the words of Protestant and Roman Catholic chaplains in his unit….

In senior high school a class in modern languages is corresponding in Spanish with high school boys and girls in South and Central America. For an English composition assignment, a dark-haired Syrian girl wrote an account of her church…[which] pictured sympathetically the loneliness of the old people who were trying to create in a new land the likeness of the home of their youth….An English class is corresponding with students in a school in the Far West, exchanging views, information, experiences, growing in mutual understanding.

Importantly, the multicultural education was accompanied by instruction in resisting propaganda, particularly with regard to fascist propaganda. Clyde Miller, one of the Plan’s founders, believed that independent, critical thinking was the flip side of the coin of mutual understanding:

It is essential in a democratic society that young people and adults learn how to think, learn how to make up their minds. They must learn how to think independently, they must learn how to think together. They must come to conclusions, but at the same time must recognize the right of other men to come to opposite conclusions. So far as individuals are concerned, the art of democracy is the art of thinking and discussing independently together.

This instruction drew on the findings conducted by Miller’s Institute for Propaganda Analysis and contained in Vol. I of its publications (which is worth a read in its own right). Students were taught to identify the seven propaganda devices that are the calling cards of fascism. (Shout out to Professor

Jennifer Mercieca

, an expert in propaganda and rhetoric and author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, who gave me the “official” names for these devices, indicated in parentheses):