In the early 1960s, parents in the roiling conservative hotbed of Orange County, California, took aim at a history textbook. The text, written by the legendary historian John Hope Franklin, allegedly took too dim a view of the American past, and therefore had to be excised from the curriculum of Orange County schools. Today, most historically literate Americans would find these parents’ squeamishness loony. John Hope Franklin was a giant of 20th century historiography and a man whose intellectual gifts have enriched generations of history students. Why remove his work from your schools?

The answer, of course, is that the same fragility that drove Orange County to target Franklin’s work for removal has resonated for generations. Some conservatives believe that the resilience of patriotism is weaker than advertised. Rather than learning the brutal truths and glorious triumphs of our exceptionally complex American past, they want students to learn that America should be loved unconditionally–a nationalistic insecurity that belies doubts buried somewhere deep in the minds of Americans anxious about their privilege.

It is no coincidence that conservative parents went after John Hope Franklin at a moment when the country’s longstanding hierarchies were under attack. The Sixties were a time of civil rights activism and Second-Wave Feminism, of John F. Kennedy’s soaring liberalism and the first inklings of the counterculture up the coast from Orange County in Mario Savio’s Free Speech Movement. Historians have long noted an insecurity in suburban conservatives, an anxiety about their place in the world and an unsteady attachment to the world they know. We saw this in the Sixties and we are seeing it again in a time with a recrudescence of social reform.

Today’s fragile conservatives have organized their tantrum around what they call “Critical Race Theory.” It is, of course, ridiculous to claim that an arcane theory from 1970s legal academia is polluting the minds of America’s youth. But the general idea that many educators want to examine the brutality of parts of America’s past in an effort to shape a more enlightened and empathetic generation is not exactly crazy. If you want your kids to learn about George Washington chopping down a cherry tree and Conestoga wagons heading west, you’ll likely balk at a curriculum that complicates your comfortable and, yes, jingoistic convictions about the country’s history.

I do not believe that American history is bereft of things to be proud of. From Independence Hall to the Edmund Pettis Bridge, Americans have struck many blows for human equality and human progress. But in those very same places are indicators of the harsher, darker side of a great people. Jefferson excised a condemnation of the slave trade from the Declaration of Independence. Alabama State Troopers cracked John Lewis’s head open in the midst of a maelstrom of violence and beatings. I believe great nations have the confidence to confront their own injustices. If only right-wing nationalists did too.