Politics & Power Quote by Phyllis Schlafly

“National Standards” is doing double duty here: it names a policy project while also smuggling in a villain. Schlafly doesn’t argue the content of proposed history standards so much as she tries to delegitimize the entire enterprise by recoding it as ideological theater. The line’s real work happens in the contrast she sets up: not “a narrative of past events” (a comforting, supposedly neutral baseline) but “leftwing revisionism and Political Correctness” (a charged pair of terms that signal coercion, elitism, and social engineering).

The intent is strategic compression. “Revisionism” is a slippery accusation because history always revises; new archives surface, new questions get asked, old myths get punctured. Schlafly exploits that inevitability, reframing normal scholarly updating as partisan tampering. Then she adds “Political Correctness,” a culture-war keyword that evokes speech policing and moral panic. Together they shift the audience from evaluating evidence to choosing sides.

The subtext is about authority: who gets to define the nation’s story, and who gets to feel at home in it. By insisting on “past events” as if they come unedited, she implies that any attention to race, gender, labor, or empire is an intrusion rather than part of the record. It’s an argument for preserving a familiar patriotic narrative by treating discomfort as proof of bias.

Context matters: Schlafly rose to power as a conservative organizer by turning institutional reforms (education, feminism, civil rights enforcement) into existential threats to “common sense” America. In the 1990s fights over national history standards, her framing offered a ready-made skepticism of experts and bureaucrats, and it still reads like a template for today’s curricular battles: don’t debate the syllabus, question the legitimacy of the storytellers.