Children Are the Future: Authoritarianism, Culture War, and Making Model Citizens

“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.” This is a quote typically attributed to Adolf Hitler from a 1930s rally.  

I raise it here because it has appeared on multiple occasions across the American right in recent years, primarily in the context of education. The Hamilton County, Indiana, chapter of Moms for Liberty utilized the quote in their newsletter, later issuing an apology for, as one would assume, quoting Hitler. Also in 2022, a Southern Colorado District School Board member used the quote in a Facebook post calling for opposition to critical race theory and social and emotional learning. Representative Mary Miller (R-IL) paraphrased it at a 2021 rally of Moms for America. 

The context of education is central here, but it is not the whole picture. What I want to put forward is an analysis of MAGA’s approach to children as rooted in an authoritarian view of citizenship. In this view, young people are not yet fully realized citizens, which means both that they lack the agency and rights we would traditionally recognize in citizens and that they must be shaped into being the right sort of member of society upon maturation. 

In this way, controlling what they are taught about American culture and life—not to mention science, art, and world history—is a right-wing citizen-making project. It also means that their value hinges on their ability to join the ranks of ideologically aligned and productively capable citizens when they become adults. Such an approach also devalues those youth who diverge from MAGA’s ideal citizen, through their politics, their sexual or gender expression, or by possessing some physical or mental disability. 

This is an instrumentalist way of thinking about kids, one that robs them of the rich interiority and individualism we know they possess. And it is one that justifies deeply authoritarian policies with regard to public education, identity, and public health. 

Molding Model Citizens 

Education in a liberal democratic view is about creating empowered and economically independent individuals. We learn vital critical thinking skills, build foundational knowledge for the careers we want to pursue, and develop a rudimentary understanding of how our government and civil society work. 

But in the MAGA view, education is about producing MAGA citizens—uncorrupted by the weakening effects of Social-Emotional Learning; unburdened by the complexities of America’s past and present struggles with racial inequality and other injustices; and unthinkingly accepting of MAGA’s politicization of truth and fact. This is what owning the youth is about. 

The assault on Critical Race Theory, spearheaded nationally by figures like Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute and locally by groups like Moms for Liberty, has always been about ensuring that children learn a version of American history conducive to the MAGA political worldview. 

A lot of words have been written in this debate, so I won’t rehash the basics here. What I want to do is center the efforts of MAGA to reshape American society in part by trying to rewire its youth. 

A thoroughgoing understanding of American history does not require shame or self-loathing in students. But it does expose MAGA’s cries of white victimhood and its downplaying of America’s past abuses for the lies they are. 

Of course, opposition to CRT has always been portrayed as itself an anti-propaganda effort. As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said on signing the state’s Stope Woke Act, “We believe in education, not indoctrination. We believe an important component of freedom…is the freedom from having oppressive ideologies imposed upon you without your consent."

The purpose was and is to manufacture citizens untouched by the “virus” that is woke ideology. After all, that same spring, DeSantis signed the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, effectively muzzling discussion of much LGBTQ content in schools, though a legal settlement clawed back some freedoms. 

A subsection of the CRT debate has come to be focused on what’s known as Social Emotional Learning (SEL). As the non-profit The Committee for Children tidily explains 

Social Emotional Learning is the process of learning social and emotional skills…with SEL, students learn to manage their own emotions and behaviors, have empathy and show care and concern for others, solve problems effectively, make responsible decisions, and maintain healthy relationships.

But MAGA disagrees. Chris Rufo has argued that

 The intention of SEL is to soften children at an emotional level, reinterpret their normative behavior as an expression of ‘repression,’ ‘whiteness,’ or ‘internalized racism,’ and then rewire their behavior according to the dictates of left-wing ideology.

Empathy for others is not merely counterproductive. It weakens children, making them susceptible to weedy, liberal beliefs like pluralism, mutual toleration, and even social welfare. This is directly linked to bills like Don’t Say Gay. Allowing students to openly discuss and learn about experiences different from their own tends to cultivate respect and understanding. These are obstacles to MAGA’s desire to crush LGBTQ and other minority groups. 

Consider Elon Musk’s declaration that “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” In Musk’s view, too much regard for the other has led us to overspend on welfare, embrace self-flagellating histories, and dilute our culture by welcoming too many immigrants. 

For MAGA, a rigorous understanding of history and well-developed sense of empathy do not make a good citizen. 

Empathetic citizens would not, do not, tolerate an immigration regime that abducts individuals off the street and sends people to a torture prison in El Salvador absent any due process. Citizens with rich understandings of history object to America turning on her oldest allies and understand the importance of remembering both the sufferings and contributions of black Americans, Native Americans, and other groups. Citizens with a basic grasp of environmental science realize the need for us to move to a clean energy future and fight the worst effects of climate change. 

But citizens such as these are not MAGA citizens. And a MAGA body politic can’t be built and sustained overnight. It has to be cultivated, and the seeds must be planted in classrooms across America. At the same time, it must be reproduced in the way all nations reproduce, and that brings us to a key way that LGBTQ young people are viewed as an impediment to progress. 

Good Citizens Make More Citizens 

One of the deep preoccupations of the MAGA right is the issue of declining birth rates. The concern is not itself invalid. The United States and most other wealthy democracies are experiencing serious declines in population growth, and the slowing birth rates stand to put increased pressure on social safety nets and economic productivity. But MAGA’s focus on so-called pro-natalist policies is about cultural and political concerns and not only economics. There is a real fear on the MAGA right of losing “real” America to low birth rates and an influx of immigrants. 

So while it’s crucial to understand the attacks on LGBTQ youth as part of a wider far-right culture war, it’s also important to explore the reproductive anxieties at play and how these interact. 

Elon Musk, who has sired numerous children with multiple mothers, has openly worried about the loss of national cultures if women in Western countries do not start having more babies. JD Vance, whose position as vice president is thanks in part to Musk’s support, has claimed that “If we want a healthy ruling class in this country . . . we should support more people who actually have kids.”

This focus on reproduction is not new, and it has been getting mainstream attention for a few years now. But what’s relevant here is the way this intersects with the question of LGBTQ rights and especially LGBTQ youth. 

In a 2016 article for Ave Maria Law Review, Jason Carroll and Walter Schrumm insisted that reproduction ought to be at the heart of the debate over the legalization of same-sex marriage: 

Because of the critical role opposite-sex marriage plays in perpetuating and maintaining the vital conceptual link between marriage and procreation, it warrants the exclusive recognition, promotion and protection of the state.

If same-sex marriage and the proliferation of same-sex relationships pose a threat to America’s procreative capacity, an issue that fixates the MAGA right, then the flourishing of LGBTQ youth presents a long-term challenge to reigniting American birth rates. Consider it this way: the maturation of LGBTQ youth into LGBTQ adults means an increase in the kind of marital and familial relationships that are not inherently reproductive and which contradict MAGA’s values and aims. 

As Elizabeth Gregory, the director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at the University of Houston, has argued, 

… anti-gay and anti-transgender policies aim to push the growing group of young people who identify as LGBTQ back into the closet, and into heterosexual relationships and more pregnancies, planned and unplanned.

So when the state of Tennessee passed a law last year affirming the legal right of parents who hold anti-LGBTQ views to foster LGBTQ kids, we can interpret this as a MAGA government attempting to enact a kind of conversion therapy by proxy through the foster care system. The result will absolutely be to reduce the safety of LGBTQ youth in Tennessee and almost certainly to keep some from coming out. 

Jace Wilder, who is the education manager at the Tennessee Education Project and an transgender advocate, told the Tennessee Lookout that his own experiences being partly raised by family friends due to his father’s abuse enabled him to come into his identity: 

Without finding people that accepted me and really helped me grow, I think I would have been stuck in the position of being too afraid to transition, too afraid of being out.

Laws like Tennessee’s and Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill neither prioritize family health nor protect children from indoctrination. Rather, they create environments that are actively hostile to the exploration and expression of queer and trans identities. And as such, they make it more likely young LGBTQ people will stay in or go back into the closet. As Gregory stresses, and I agree, this can’t be decoupled from efforts to preserve their procreative potential. 

There is an agency problem at the heart of this. Children are, we know, developing and thus we don’t extend to them the same level of freedom and autonomy that we do fully grown adults. But the process of growing up naturally entails both social and legal acknowledgments that it is a journey toward independence. And so when a kid announces a preference in how they express themselves, it’s improper to dismiss this out of hand, even if it’s often important to provide parental and professional guidance. 

But MAGA rejects this precisely because the individuality of the child is subordinated to the priorities of citizen-making and culture war. The refrain that measures taken against access to gender-affirming care or targeting the public discussion of LGBTQ identities are to protect children rings hollow when we see how little the children, as people, are being considered at all. They are seen merely as citizens-in-production. Kids qua kids are hardly entertained at all. 

When it comes to transgender youth in particular, it’s hard to ignore the open disgust with which MAGA politicians and commentators speak. This is highlighted by the insistence on discussing transgender individuals as mentally ill, and it raises the importance of stepping back to look at how MAGA views kids who are in fact mentally or physically disabled in some way. 

MAHA’s Unwanted Kids 

One of the central conspiracy theories of the anti-vaccine movement is the false belief that vaccines cause autism. At the heart of this fear is a disgust with those with Autism Spectrum Disorder and a sense that autism itself is a kind of death sentence. 

RFK Jr. made his career peddling this unfounded propaganda, and he’s now directing the nation’s health policy with the same principles in mind. A glance at some of Kennedy’s comments on autism reveals just how little he thinks of those with ASD. 

Kennedy has said that kids with ASD “are kids who will never throw a baseball, they’ll never go out and date. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never pay taxes.”

What he is saying here is that autistic people cannot be full members of society. They cannot participate meaningfully in all life has to offer. As such, they are somehow set apart from the general public. Not only that, they’ll never pay taxes, meaning they will never be productive and never put into society what they are taking out. 

The fascistic impulse—and I do believe fascist impulses are what animate MAGA—is to see neurodivergence and disability as deleterious to the public body and as disqualifying for full citizenship. One cannot obtain the fullness of membership in the national body if one can’t live up to its ideals. 

Just this week, Secretary Kennedy laid off almost half the staff at the CDC researching birth defects and developmental disabilities. Dr. Belinda Avalos told CBS News,

If [the funding] is not restored, it will disrupt life-saving public health programs, halt critical research, and increase preventable hospitalizations, complications, and deaths. Its elimination runs counter to the Administration's stated commitment to addressing chronic disease.

What emerges is a policy of indifference and even outright malice toward anyone with any form of disability. It’s an approach that will almost certainly ensure many do not survive to see adulthood. Of course, the cruelty here goes all the way to the top. 

Trump’s cruelty toward those with disabilities is well-documented. But it also extends to his own family. His nephew, Fred Trump III, has a disabled son. Last year, Fred detailed in his memoir that, when he approached his uncle for financial help paying medical bills, Donald replied, "I don't know, he doesn't recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida."

All of this, of course, is morally repugnant and objectively unscientific. People with ASD do live flourishing, meaningful lives. People with all manner of disabilities do. The very definition of a life worth living offered by Kennedy is objectionable because it suggests we can circumscribe what is and isn’t a valuable life. We can’t. And any endeavor to do so should be recognized for what it almost always is: the first step in unleashing humanity’s capacity for unbelievable evil. 

And this exercise in delimiting capable and valuable kinds of children from those who are not exposes the broader logic now widespread on the MAGA right. 

A Person’s A Person 

What I’ve tried to outline is the way in which MAGA has subordinated concerns for children to a fascistic conception of citizenship in which kids are meant to be brought into an adulthood where they are in ideological alignment with society and can reproduce those values personally, physically, and sexually. 

But children are already citizens with rights, not future cogs in waiting. And, while young people are still developing all of the tools they need to make fully independent decisions, they are not objects to be coerced and controlled. 

The MAGA framework elides the agency of children by focusing on their susceptibility to indoctrination. This is projection. It’s MAGA ideals of government, speech, sexuality, and fitness that are being forced into classrooms and used as a cudgel. And it’s MAGA attempts to force the family back into a Victorian-era box that poses the greatest threat to safe and stable childhoods in America. 

America’s youth deserve to grow up in a country that has rejected MAGA’s politics. The MAGA project depends on them growing up to support it.