The Florida Legislature’s obsession with communism is so 1952 | Editorial
When it comes to protecting our democracy, bills in the Florida Legislature requiring schoolchildren be taught the evils of communism are fighting the wrong fight, at the wrong time, in the wrong place.
Legislation set for floor debate in Tallahassee Friday would require all Florida schoolchildren to be indoctrinated on the evils of communism. Yes, even those still young enough to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.
Two bills make the history of communism and its “atrocities” a major requirement of the curriculum through 12th grade.
Only the House bill (HB 1349) specifies that the instruction must be “age appropriate and developmentally appropriate.” When the Senate version (SB 1264), cleared its last committee stop, Democrats in the voting minority objected that it was unnecessary, but it’s actually worse than that.
To their credit, all six Democrats on the Senate Fiscal Policy Committee voted no: Sens. Rosalind Osgood from Broward, Lori Berman from Palm Beach, Shevrin Jones from Miami-Dade, and Linda Stewart, Geraldine Thompson and Victor Torres Jr. from Orlando.
Keep politics out of classrooms
The issue isn’t how old kids should be when the state scares them with political bogeymen. It’s about the bill itself. No legislature ever should command any subject to be taught in the slanted way these bills prescribe. Politicians are the last people who should be dictating classroom content.
Not only that, but they overlook what should be taught.
They’re also fighting the wrong battle, as politicians often do. It’s another diversion — some would say a cynical one — from the real dangers to democracy in the United States.
Communism faded away in the 1940s as a political influence anywhere in the U.S., despite Joseph McCarthy’s overblown and highly destructive anti-Communist crusade in the early 1950s. It is no threat to our politics or economy, even if some young people have unquestioningly embraced communism’s hammer-and-sickle symbol.
Capitalism in China
Abroad, only China, Laos, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea still profess to be communist. Even China has taken on the trappings of capitalism.
Russia, where it all began, is now run by a capitalist oligarchy that looted the former communist state’s assets. Aleksei Navalny lost his life fighting the corruption.
The new threats to freedom are personified by authoritarians like Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and by a deadly serious antidemocratic movement here at home.
Former President Donald Trump openly admires and cultivates those foreign dictators, repudiates the Republican Party’s historic defense of democracy wherever it is threatened, and makes repulsive jokes about being a dictator “only on Day One” if he’s elected again.
His beguiling influence over so many Americans, worst of all his toadies in Congress, exposes an alarming indifference bordering on contempt for the importance of democracy.
Beating a dead horse
The Legislature should be ensuring that schools teach the positive values of democracy, rather than beating a dead horse.
Statism is the contemporary enemy of humanity. It does not matter under which economic theory it travels; democracy is the antidote.
Freedom House, a nongovernmental agency that has been defending liberty since the rise of Nazi Germany, has been tracking the decline of democracy worldwide for 17 years. The U.S. made the backsliders list because of what the agency describes as our “unequal treatment for people of color, the outsized influence of special interests in politics, and partisan polarization.”
An organization called Lawyers Defending American Democracy has documented anti-democratic trends in Florida, Arizona, Iowa, Tennessee and Texas.
The report faulted Florida for curbing voting by mail; anti-diversity policies in schools and universities; infringing on teaching race, sexism and slavery; crackdowns on undocumented immigrants and gender-related medical care; 15-week and 6-week abortion bans; siphoning public school students into less accountable, tax-subsidized private schools; Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” law restricting how schools deal with LBGTQ issues; the takeover of New College of Sarasota; legislation encouraging book-banning; bans on mandatory mask and vaccination rules; the surgeon general’s demonizing of vaccinations; blanket secrecy over university presidential searches and on the governor’s travel; and the governor’s unprecedented claim that he has an “executive privilege” to keep secret anything he chooses, despite Florida’s public records law.
The Legislature is equally responsible for all of that. It should look to its own disloyalty to democracy rather than to indoctrinating school children on any other “-ism,” especially one that’s no more of a threat than those imaginary monsters under their beds.
The communism education bills serve only the insatiable need of some Cuban émigré legislators to flog the corpse of Fidel Castro. They are also useful for forcing opponents — only Democrats so far — to cast votes that may return to haunt them in attack ads. (“Senator so-and-so is pro-Communist!”)
A law DeSantis signed in 2022 already requires schools to observe “Victims of Communism Day” every Nov. 7. Current state academic standards for social studies incorporate communism in the requirements for grades 7 and 9-12. That’s plenty.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.