As the corrupt, criminal, seditious conspiracy that is the Trump Presidency stumbles drunkenly towards its final reckoning, it continues to wallow in the moral and ideological filth it has poured out upon the country.
In an act perfectly in keeping with the vicious character of the outgoing rogue President, his servitors chose Martin Luther King Day to release the so-called 1776 Report, a blatant attempt to restore the flaking whitewash on the racist history of the US.
Ostensibly produced in response to The New York Times 1619 Project, the report describes its purpose as follows:
The declared purpose of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission is to “enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.” This requires a restoration of American education, which can only be grounded on a history of those principles that is “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling .”
The report is neither accurate or honest. Consequently, its evocation of “unifying, inspiring, and ennobling” is nothing more than hollow cynicism.
Its grounding isn’t in historical accuracy but in an extreme Right Wing political agenda. It is, in fact, an attack on historical accuracy in that it seeks to impose an ideologically regimented hagiography in place critical historical inquiry.
This becomes evident almost immediately with the following passage.
In two decisive respects, the United States of America is unique. First, it has a definite birthday: July 4th, 1776. Second, it declares from the moment of its founding not merely the principles on which its new government will be based; it asserts those principles to be true and universal: “applicable to all men and all times,” as Lincoln said.
And:
There was no United States of America before July 4th, 1776. There was not yet, formally speaking, an American people. There were, instead, living in the thirteen British colonies in North America some two-and-a-half million subjects of a distant king.
Except that the United States was actually founded two days earlier on July 2, when the Continental Congress voted for independence, as founder John Adams noted at the time.
The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.[7]
More:
Historians have long disputed whether members of Congress signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, even though Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin all later wrote that they had signed it on that day. Most historians have concluded that the Declaration was signed nearly a month after its adoption, on August 2, 1776, and not on July 4 as is commonly believed.[9][10][11][12][13]
Here the Presidential Advisory 1776 Commission makes plain that they are planting their flag on historical mythology rather than historical fact. Independence Day marks the signing of the Declaration of Independence, not the founding of the US per se.
A small thing perhaps but a clear sign of worse to come.
With this shambolic beginning, the Report then goes into an extended section on the Constitution that is predictably skewed. As such we need not devote to much time to it. One glaring example should do.
Finally, the right to keep and bear arms is required by the fundamental natural right to life: no man may justly be denied the means of his own defense. The political significance of this right is hardly less important. An armed people is a people capable of defending their liberty no less than their lives and is the last, desperate check against the worst tyranny.
Such a formulation is entirely absent from the 2nd Amendment, which speaks only of a “well regulated militia.” Not content with misstating history, the Report has moved on to misstating the Constitution itself.
It’s following this that the mythologizing begins in earnest.
At the same time, it is important to note that by design there is room in the Constitution for significant change and reform. Indeed, great reforms—like abolition, women’s suffrage, anti-Communism, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Pro-Life Movement—have often come forward that improve our dedication to the principles of the Declaration of Independence under the Constitution.
Indeed, abolition, women’s suffrage and Civil Rights are great reforms, as they are all enshrined in the Constitution by Amendment but how do anti-Communism and the Pro-Life Movement qualify? They possess no Constitutional standing.
The section on Slavery is uniquely troubling in that it provides some valuable and valid historical context but at the same time displays an all too familiar ethical an intellectual blindness.
The most common charge levelled against the founders, and hence against our country itself, is that they were hypocrites who didn’t believe in their stated principles, and therefore the country they built rests on a lie. This charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric
The Report does good job of demonstrating that many of the founders did, in fact, recognize that slavery was antithetical to their stated principles. It does a good job of enumerating the efforts of some to inhibit the effects of the practice, if not the practice itself. Had they done so while recognizing that this was a tacit betrayal of those principles and the essence of hypocrisy, well and good. Instead, they argue that this somehow acquits the founders of culpability in the practice! They make use of a number of quotes from Lincoln but somehow fail to note this one.
Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-men’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”
Clearly Lincoln was not a vote for acquittal.
Moreover, the Report makes a demonstrably false claim:
Indeed, the movement to abolish slavery that first began in the United States led the way in bringing about the end of legal slavery.
The fact is that Great Britain abolished slavery in its Dominions 20 years before the Civil War and emancipation.
Here it seems appropriate to ask: Who are these people to be pontificating about the teaching of history?
At this point Report devolves into bald ideological/political polemic, blaming the Progressive movement of the early 20th century for the creation of a “shadow government”.
Far from creating an omniscient body of civil servants led only by “pragmatism” or “science,” though, progressives instead created what amounts to a fourth branch of government called at times the bureaucracy or the administrative state. This shadow government never faces elections and today operates largely without checks and balances. The founders always opposed government unaccountable to the people and without constitutional restraint, yet it continues to grow around us.
It ranks Progressivism with Fascism and Communism.
Its superficial treatment of Fascism is an occasion for retailing more myth.
Before the Nazis could threaten America in our own hemisphere, the United States built an arsenal of democracy, creating more ships, planes, tanks, and munitions than any other power on earth. Eventually, America rose up, sending millions of troops across the oceans to preserve freedom.
As anyone with a reasonable knowledge the history of WWII knows, the US was not prepared for war when it broke out. It was only the massive mobilization of resources by the Federal Government after the fact that produced the necessary material and manpower for victory.
The Report’s passage on Communism seems an exercise in Cold War nostalgia for McCarthyism.
But Communism’s relentless anti-American, anti-Western, and atheistic propaganda did inspire thousands, and perhaps millions, to reject and despise the principles of our founding and our government. While America and its allies eventually won the Cold War, this legacy of anti-Americanism is by no means entirely a memory but still pervades much of academia and the intellectual and cultural spheres.
Rounding out this catalogue of boogeymen is Racism and Identity Politics. Here’s some of what these Right Wing mavens of history have to say.
Despite the determined efforts of the postwar Reconstruction Congress to establish civil equality for freed slaves, the postbellum South ended up devolving into a system that was hardly better than slavery. The system enmeshed freedmen in relationships of extreme dependency, and used poll taxes, literacy tests, and the violence of vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan to prevent them from exercising their civil rights, particularly the right to vote. Jim Crow laws enforced the strict segregation of the races, and gave legal standing in some states to a pervasive subordination of blacks.
If you are expecting any explanation of how this came about you will look in vain. It’s merely preamble to a description of the Civil Rights Movement which, oddly enough, turns out to mirror the report’s ideological narrative.
Cynically citing Rev. Martin Luther King’s evocation of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, while ignoring that his understanding of those documents differed radically from theirs, the Report launches into an attack on the gains of the very movement it pretends to celebrate.
The Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. The ideas that drove this change had been growing in America for decades, and they distorted many areas of policy in the half century that followed. Among the distortions was the abandonment of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of “group rights” not unlike those advanced by Calhoun and his followers. The justification for reversing the promise of color-blind civil rights was that past discrimination requires present effort, or affirmative action in the form of preferential treatment, to overcome long-accrued inequalities. Those forms of preferential treatment built up in our system over time, first in administrative rulings, then executive orders, later in congressionally passed law, and finally were sanctified by the Supreme Court.
Sanctified, that is, by the very process ordained by the Constitution they claim to revere.
Here the actual goal of the 1776 Commission’s serial mythologizing is made clear. Rewriting history so that Dr. King becomes an opponent of the very programs and reforms he advocated while living and transforming the Civil Rights movement from a opponent of racism into a proponent of racism.
It should be evident at this point that the true purpose of this Report has little or nothing to do with academic standards or historical accuracy. Rather, it is a manifesto for imposing a single ideological frame on educational and public discourse. If there were any room for doubt, the final passages and appendices of the document would remove it. Therein the Commission presumes to dictate the proper modes of family life, religious practice and belief, education and culture while pronouncing anathemas on beliefs, opinions and ideas they deem anti-American. It is a call for regimenting US society and life in accordance with their own ideological precepts, even at the cost of falsifying history on a scale to rival that of Totalitarian regimes. All wrapped in pieties of a bogus individualism.
Take note of this comparison with Identity Politics.
While not as barbaric or dehumanizing, this new creed creates new hierarchies as unjust as the old hierarchies of the antebellum South, making a mockery of equality with an ever-changing scale of special privileges on the basis of racial and sexual identities.
The level of moral and intellectual depravity required to equate Identity Politics with Slavery, regardless of what one may think of the former, is so self evident as to render comment unnecessary.
It’s surprising they had so little to say about Fascism. They seem to have an excellent grasp of its program.
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