“It’s a bitch,” says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “And I thought it would kill me.”
But writing a book didn’t kill her. Here she is, on the fifteenth floor of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, holding forth to about 20 graduate students. The fruit of her nearly deadly labors sits on the table before her. Signed copies are for sale in the back. The title screams off the page in red and blue ink: Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy.
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Weingarten is on an extended publicity tour. The book came out last September, but she’s still hawking it as if it were fresh off the presses. She has a rough-hewn personality and a face that looks like an Aztec sculptor’s attempt at Gertrude Stein. She has never felt squeamish about self-promotion. In fact, she thrives on it.
Weingarten has ruled the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union since early 2008. She has taken credit for nearly every success in American public education (and caught flak for its many failures). She styles herself a revolutionary, proudly owning the epithet Mike Pompeo gave her in 2022: “the most dangerous person in the world.”
That remark may as well have been the genesis of her book. It certainly gave Weingarten an inflated sense of her own importance. In the introduction to Why Fascists Fear Teachers, she refers to Pompeo’s comment as part of a right-wing strategy to “blame teachers over and over and over again, truth be damned, in order to divide the American people and defund and destabilize public education.”
That defense is a bit rich. After all, Weingarten may be responsible for the greatest destabilization of public education in living memory. In 2020, during the Covid pandemic, the AFT used its influence to keep schools closed until the federal government placated it with a $126 billion aid package. Many children lost more than a year of full-time, in-person education. A generation is still suffering the consequences.
But Weingarten doesn’t seem too bothered. Today, before she tears into a sopping slice of cheese pizza, she delivers her version of a history lesson. For the better part of 5,000 years, she says, autocrats of all kinds have attempted to control the minds of their people. At the same time, teachers have sought to free them. The American Founders recognized the importance of education for the maintenance of a free society. (Though Weingarten is careful to hedge on this point: “They preferred that it be basically, you know, white dudes that controlled everything.”) Still, over the last 250 years, the struggle has continued. Authoritarians attempt to dominate; teachers push back.
The latest battle may be the most critical one yet. And without Weingarten, apparently, the United States could be doomed to the despotism of Donald Trump and his progeny.
“If you had asked me last January, I would say we had a 50–50 shot,” Weingarten says, pausing before going a shade darker. “If I was really being honest, I would have said a 75–25 shot of losing our democracy.”
How will we lose it? That’s left unclear. Though Weingarten admits that she is less pessimistic now than a year ago, she doesn’t seem to understand her enemies. She tosses around words like “king,” “demagogue,” “autocrat,” and “tyrant” freely but doesn’t apply them to the Trump administration in a coherent way.
Our present troubles, Weingarten maintains, trace back to Viktor Orbán and his political career in Hungary. “It really appears that Orbán was the teacher of many of the people in the Trump administration, including Donald Trump and J. D. Vance,” she says. Orbán schooled Trump and acolytes in the “fascistic behavior of not simply having a discourse about ideas but literally demonizing and vilifying.”
Orbán was remarkably successful with his high-profile pupils. Many Trump followers have repurposed Orbán’s tactics to advance their own dark agendas.
“The Steve Bannons, the Russ Voughts, the Stephen Millers of the world, they really do care,” Weingarten warns, devolving into political psychobabble. “They really are trying to yoke this to where Orbán yoked it, which is that there was a period of time that is much more Christian nationalist in view—that there should be, you know, a white male hierocracy [sic] in this country and in this world. They really believe that.” Lest she leave a buzzword out of her harangue, she concludes: “They’re using AI—that’s why this Curtis Yarvin stuff is so important to me—they’re using AI to try to yoke to that.”
Weingarten is afflicted by a problem that plagues many who spend their careers devoted to activism: she has become so accustomed to thinking and speaking in slogans that she can do little else.
This becomes especially clear when she explains the title of her book. Authoritarians, she says, rely on four things to acquire and retain power: division, fear, apathy, and isolation. They fear teachers because “what happens in a classroom is kind of the opposite of those things. . . . What you are doing as a school teacher is you are bringing a diverse group of people, creating an inclusive environment, and you are creating a system of not equality, but equity of opportunity,” she says, spelling out the acronym D-E-I for anyone who missed the point. “You’re creating the habits of democracy. You’re creating a mini society.”
Weingarten drones on for another 15 minutes like this, praising the youth “taking back their future,” harping on the profound need for “critical thinking” in public life, warning of democratic “backsliding.” Eventually, the students stop taking notes.
Outside, the clouds have given way to a brilliant spring day over Manhattan. We all start shifting in our seats. I look down at the pizza, where the grease atop the cheese has settled into a complacent ooze. After a few perfunctory questions, the Columbia administrators call the session to a close. The room clears out. The books remain on the table.
I ride the elevator down to the street with Weingarten. In her book, she describes herself as a “five-foot-tall Jewish lesbian grandmother.” Underneath this banal image, there is, if not the most dangerous person in the world, something a little too familiar. Weingarten possesses a desire for control not unlike that which she criticizes.
Weingarten likes to portray herself as a champion for public education. But in truth she is only a creature of her union. She represents its interests, its fixations, its obsessions. And when those don’t align with the actual work of teaching children, the results are ugly.
I’ll always think of her as the woman who held public schools hostage during the pandemic, who used the power of the teachers’ union to keep them closed until her group’s demands were met.
And she got everything she wanted. It was a total coup, a masterclass in the use of division, fear, apathy, and isolation to achieve her ends. In Randi Weingarten’s own estimation, then, what does that make her?