Ep 395 - The Red Scare That Stole Critical Thought with Andrew Hartman
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They say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist. Capitalism pulled off something even trickier: convincing us it’s just the way things work.
Historian Andrew Hartman joins Steve to examine how American public education became a battleground in the struggle over class, ideology, and political consciousness. Drawing on his book Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School, Andrew traces how the radical possibilities of the 1930s, including militant teacher organizing and encouraging students to question capitalist individualism, were systematically narrowed by the Red Scare. Schools increasingly shifted toward preparing students to adapt to the existing order.
Steve and Andrew explore the crucial role of liberal anti-communism, the Cold War equating of capitalism with democracy and freedom, and an educational culture that treats capitalism as ordinary reality while Marxism and socialism must continually justify their existence. The result is a powerful look at cultural hegemony: how the boundaries of what Americans consider reasonable, possible, or even thinkable were constructed, and why so much of that Cold War ideological architecture remains with us today.
Andrew Hartman is a distinguished professor of history at Illinois State University and the author of several books, including Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School; A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars; and Karl Marx in America, out in 2025 with the University of Chicago Press.
His website: Andrew Hartman
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/andrewghartman
Twitter/X: @HartmanAndrew
IG: https://www.instagram.com/professorandrewhartman/
BlueSky: @andrewhartman.bsky.social
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-hartman-45045610/
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