Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has written a bill that requires teaching on the history of communism in Florida public schools, beginning in the 2026-2027 school year. DeSantis wants students inoculated against the evils of Marxism.
It’s a great idea. One suggestion — use rock ‘n’ roll in the lesson plan.
Rock ‘n’ roll is an exciting, popular art form geared toward young people. It also has a proud (and largely ignored) history of anti-communism.
In their book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, who both work for the libertarian outfit Reason, reveal the often hidden history of popular music as a weapon against totalitarianism. In the chapter “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World,” they detail how the music helped defeat communism.
As Welch and Gillespie note, Vaclav Havel and the leaders of the 1960s revolt against communism in Czechoslovakia were deeply influenced by American rock and roll, particularly the band the Velvet Underground. A group of young Czech hippies formed the group the Plastic People of the Universe, named after a Frank Zappa lyric, and were soon banned by the government. A fan of the Rolling Stones, Havel saw and heard in rock and roll “a temperament, a nonconformist state of the spirit, an anti-establishment orientation, an aversion to philistines, and an interest in the wretch and humiliated.”
In 2024, liberalism has become the censorious, joyless, oppressive state.
Partly as a result of their love of the Velvet Underground, Havel and his friends launched “Charter 77,” which called for free artistic expression. The document spread widely through the underground, ultimately making its way to Poland and the Solidarity movement.
It is no exaggeration to say that American rock and roll helped bring down communism. It’s the dynamic sound of truth, beauty, the drama of a human life, the desire for ordered freedom, and the reach for the spiritual, all the things that Vaclav Havel and the Plastic People of the Universe fought to express.
It’s a good thing that libertarians are writing about rock and roll because both the Right and the Left have often misjudged the music. In The Declaration of Independents, Gillespie and Welch cite some truly embarrassing things conservatives have said about pop music. Here is William F. Buckley, writing in September 1964: “Let me say it, as evidence of my final measure of devotion to the truth. The Beatles are not merely awful, I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than they are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic, even as impostor popes went down in history as ‘anti-popes.’”
On the Left, the fact that rock and roll had been critical of communism is ignored. In Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Tim Mohr explores how the postwar German Stasi harassed, monitored, and beat punk rockers. Between 1981 and 1985, one of the most popular bands behind the Iron Curtain was Wutanfall (“Tantrum”), a Leipzig six-piece which, Mohr writes, “represented a loose but dedicated opposition to the state.”
The leader of Wutanfall was a frontman calling himself Chaos. Chaos was interrogated every week by the Stasi, who harassed and beat him so severely that Chaos ultimately gave up. “I’m not doing anything!” he once told his parents, who advised him to abandon music. “I just play music and spike my hair up with shaving cream, OK? I just want to have my own brand of fun, that’s all. That’s no reason for them to beat me half to death!”
In The Declaration of Independents, Welch and Gillespie note an incredible irony. In October 1989, a month before the Berlin Wall was torn down, rock and roll and hippie icon Neil Young released the album “Freedom.” Young meant the title ironically; the title track was about how the world was collapsing with Reagan-inspired greed and violence. But when the album was received in Central Europe, the newly free young masses took to it without irony.
It’s an exciting piece of history. DeSantis should add it to Florida’s new pro-freedom curriculum.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
