Alexander Jones: Requiring teachers to post lessons could backfire

The North Carolina Republican Party has selected a new target. A new piece of legislation, filed last week, dictates that teachers post their lesson plans online in documents accompanied by their legal names. (And this, after the same Republican lawmakers voted to make their own official business secret from the public.) The clear intent is to intimidate. What the GOP is doing by, in effect, sending schoolteachers to the stocks is setting up another wave of vilification to stoke their base’s lust for revenge.

Vilification, or “Othering” in academic terms, is a powerful tool that authoritarian forces have used to harness natural human animosities for political ends. It has deep roots in social psychology. Researchers have found that intergroup hostility can be stoked even by strategies as simple as having people put on different kinds of shirts. The NCGOP, an authoritarian party, has exploited this human defect for over 13 years.

The shape their demagoguery tends to take is that they will select a vulnerable outgroup and stir up a rhetorical storm to convince their base that these people are a deadly enemy to the Southern home. Their targets have tended to have a touch of unfamiliarity. Young Black people attending college at HBCUs were said to be committing mass voter fraud and stealing elections on behalf of Barack Hussein Obama. Trans people were invading women’s bathrooms to commit acts of sexual depravity. Throughout the GOP’s ruling era, Hispanic immigrants have been a constant scapegoat, with their Brown skin, Spanish accents and Catholic religiosity.

The GOP’s new scapegoat is the teaching profession. Conjuring fever dreams, Republican demagogues allege that teachers are indoctrinating children into exotic gender ideologies and disseminating Marxism. The idea is wild, lurid and utter nonsense. Its purveyors are reaching down into the deepest depths of their base, the netherworld of paranoid evangelicals and internet conspiracy theorists like Republican Superintendent of Schools nominee Michelle Morrow, to produce a narrative that demonizes the teaching profession and infuses the reputation of public schools with the stigma of deviance. The Republican Party is placing an aggressive gamble on their base’s paranoia.

This strategy has paid off repeatedly in the Trump era. 2020 saw a staggering 81% turnout rate among North Carolina Republican voters — higher than the turnout rate of white men in the 1860 Mississippi secession referendum. And distrust of public schools has grown into a piquant source of distress for the hardcore GOP base demographic. On social media and in the darker corners of the right-wing internet, conspiracy theories fester and swirl about “socialist indoctrination centers” — again quoting Michelle Morrow — corrupting the fine young white people of Red America. The volley of hostility Republicans are firing at the schoolhouse door may directly hit its target.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps instead of proving to be a deft bet on the remaining laten anger of their very angry base, Republican anti-teacher legislation will annihilate the party’s reputation with mainstream voters. After all, their most notorious effort to demonize a vulnerable minority backfired so spectacularly that it cost Republicans the governorship, and teachers are far more relatable to white suburbanites than is the transgender community. And gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson already has a reputation for vicious scapegoating.

The results could, indeed, be even more catastrophic than a political backlash would be. Laws requiring teachers to post their full names in an atmosphere of violence could result in outcomes truly unspeakable. A paranoid extremist with a gun could fall off the precipice of insanity and attack a teacher — this is the easiest thing in the world to imagine. Then, after over a decade of making teachers the enemy, the devil’s game right-wingers are playing with violence could end in the shedding of blood.