Tearing The 1776 Commission Report A New Asshole
Unpacking Trump’s idiotic attempt at rewriting American history
Welcome to Moronitude!
It’s been a heck of a week, right? It’s not often that I run the full gamut of human emotion in a single Monday-through-Friday, but here we are. Monday was trepidation, Tuesday was fear, Wednesday was joy, actual honest-to-goodness joy, Thursday was hope and by Friday the depression that has become all too familiar over the last four years crept right back in. But it’s not like it was last week or the week before or the years before that. We’ve reached the light at the end of the tunnel. While it’s not the light I wanted most (she’s still in the Senate) or my second choice (he’s currently the world’s most popular meme), it’s a light nonetheless.
I can’t overstate how great it feels to be irritated with the president over simple policy issues instead of the constant low level terror I felt during the Trump years. Still, it’s going to take a while to get fully over all of the Trump damage to my psyche. I expect the spectre of the Orange One to linger in the back of my brain for at least a couple of months, but honestly, I’m already starting to feel less stressed.
My vitriol for the pathetic excuse who just exited the White House will fade, that much is inevitable, but it will not disappear, the stain he has left on the nation is too strong. That being said, I am a man driven by my passions, so I wanted to make the most of this anger I carry inside of me before it dissipates.
I want to send Donnie out with a thorough dissection (and total refutation) of his last disgusting attempt at skewing our nation’s history—The 1776 Commission. (You can read the whole thing here, if you’re a masochist.)
The very reasoning behind the existence of the 1776 Commission is backlash from the right over the ongoing 1619 Project by The New York Times. If you haven’t read up on the 1619 Project please do so as it is a truly amazing project, but the general gist of it is that when the first slaves arrived in Virginia (in 1619 as I’m really hoping you already guessed) it changed the country that would become America profoundly. So profoundly that every piece of our history moving forward is in some way tied to our history with slavery.
To some, including me, this seems like a pretty innocuous take on American history. Of course the decision to build an economy (and in many ways, a nation) on a system of chattel slavery is going to have some massive consequences, consequences that will reverberate for centuries after the end of the system. To me, this seems abundantly clear. To Trump and his cronies, this is the most offensive telling of American history imaginable.
Whether or not Trump would have been as enraged by the 1619 Project if it came from a source other than The New York Times is an interesting hypothetical, but the reality is that he was furious. Thus, he created a commission to tell what he believes to be the real history of the country.
On the surface, this is pretty hilarious. Trump gets angry about “fake news” about history so he decides to rewrite his own version of it. It’s even more hilarious that the 1776 Commission was removed from the White House website about 3 minutes after Biden was sworn in. But even if it’s fun to laugh off how preposterous the entire thing is, lots of people are taking this very seriously. All over the country there are similar movements to get this version of American history, or at least something very close to it, taught in schools. And that, my friends, is dangerous. A lot of work has been done by a lot of very smart people to repair the “rah-rah, America rules” version of history most of us learned in school over the last couple of decades. It’s important for young Americans to understand that our country has done a lot of amazing things and that we’ve done some repugnant and horrific things as well. To see the whole picture you need to learn about the good and the bad in our country’s past.
For completely cynical reasons—mostly to promote white supremacism, deify the founding fathers and firmly establish themselves as the Party of Lincoln—Republicans hate seeing a nuanced version of American history. The 1776 Commission is what they believe should be the only official version of our history, which is why I still want to address it after it’s been wiped from the official White House page.
Trump appointed an 18-member panel to “establish the core principles of the American founding and how these principles may be understood to further enjoyment of ‘the blessings of liberty.’” Not a single historian was appointed to the commission to try to make sense of that word salad disguising as a purpose. Let me repeat that for the people in the back. Not a single historian worked on what was designed to be the definitive version of American history, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the actual document is a fucking joke.
For starters, the entire thing is 45 pages long. With pictures. And huge pull quotes. But no actual citations of sources. If I turned this in to Mr. Sandberg, my eighth grade social studies teacher, he would have handed it right back to me as incomplete. This would not be taken seriously as a middle school project, how in the world is this supposed to be taken seriously as an academic project?
The TL;DR version of the report is that America is wonderful, the Founding Fathers are demigods, progressivism is the greatest ill to taint the nation, slavery wasn’t that big of a deal and the civil rights movement went astray because they wanted preferential treatment. You can read the entire thing here, but I want to dissect a couple sections in particular because they are stupendously idiotic..
The Introduction
If you were still holding out any hope that this report might be a serious exercise in understanding our nation’s past, that notion will be obliterated by the second paragraph of this monstrosity. Let me quote the entire second paragraph because, well, it’s a doozy.
“The declared purpose of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commision is to ‘enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and 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.’ And a rediscovery of our shared identity rooted in our founding principles is the path to a renewed American unity and a confident American future.”
That’s a lot of words to say “we need to go back to the good old days when nobody questioned the actions of America.” It completely throws away all of the work done over the years to make sure the entire American story gets told, warts and all. Further on in the introduction the current divide in our country over its history is compared to the Civil War, which when you consider that this report was released 12 days after an armed insurrection in D.C. might be a little more apt than I want to admit.
It is right here on the first page that the report asserts that “the facts of our founding are not partisan.” The only thing remarkable about this statement is the way the report does everything in its power to completely refute its own argument. It starts unraveling this by saying that since the Declaration of Independence’s principles are universal it is the actions of imperfect human beings that betrayed those principles by, for example, owning slaves. America isn’t to blame, only flawed humans. Yet, when those very same flawed humans have their flaws called out, it isn’t their fault either, but the way society was at the time. Trying to have it both ways is a definite theme throughout.
Our Very Special Birthday
Did you know that the United States is the only country to have a definite birthday? It’s true! No other country on Earth started on a single day the way we did and apparently this makes us super special.
I can’t believe this was actually included in here: “Other nations may have birthdays. For instance, what would eventually evolve into the French Republic was boring in 1789 when Parisians stormed a hated prison and launched the downfall of the French monarchy and its aristocratic regime. The Peoples (sic) Republic of China was born in 1949 when Mao Tse Tung’s Chinese Communist Party defeated the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War. But France and China as nations—as peoples and cultures inhabiting specific territories—stretch back centuries and even millennia, over the course of many governments.”
On the surface, this just seems to be some sort of Trumpian way to say that we’re extra special because we have a real birthday. But when you take in the context of the next paragraph, which explains that British subjects became a people on the day they declared independence, you can clearly see the first tricky topic this report completely avoids—all of the people who lived here prior to Europeans showing up.
The people who lived here for millenia don’t matter in this report. In fact, they are never even mentioned. There is no mention of the Trail of Tears, no mention of smallpox infected blankets, no mention of Little Bighorn, no mention of the genocide and no mention of the squalid conditions on reservations. None.
Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln!
I love Abraham Lincoln. He’s one of the greatest world leaders of all time, he rocked a sweet hat, he had a face that even a mother would struggle to love, he was a pretty hilarious dude in a not so hilarious time and he had a beautiful way with words, both in his speeches and his personal diaries. Lincoln rules.
But… holy shit does this report mention Lincoln a lot. You wouldn’t be blamed if you came out of this thinking that Lincoln was president for the entirety of the 19th century. Throughout the report Lincoln is used not only in regards to the time he lived in, but his opinions on Jefferson and others as well. It seems like any time they could quote Lincoln, they quoted Lincoln.
There’s nothing wrong with quoting Lincoln, but if you allow me a moment of cynicism here, I can’t help but wonder if they do so because of his ties to the Repbulican party. Every thinking person knows that Lincoln’s Republican Party bares little to no resemblance to today’s Republican Party, but right-wing pundits love to make this connection as much as possible. Not only does it give them clout, but it gives them the moral high ground to point out that the Democratic Party was the party of slavery and segregation. If you’ve spent any time on Twitter in the last four years you’ve heard this argument 50 billion times, it’s exhausting. Let’s move on.
The Founders Definitely Hated Slavery and People Who Say They’re Hypocrites Are Mean
From the second this whole thing was announced we knew this was the section everybody was most interested in. Over the summer, Trump was irate about people tearing down (or local governments removing) statues depicting slaveholders. This is when he started defending every Confederate and slaveholder as “very fine folks,” so you had to know this report would do the same. And oh boy do they.
“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.”
Let me preface this by saying that I think the founders were amazing people who pulled off a remarkable thing by creating this country. But if you write a document that claims all men are created equal while owning slaves, well, you’re a fucking hypocrite. Thems the non-partisan facts, son.
The justification this report gives for slavery is the same one I tried to give to my parents when I wanted my first tattoo—everyone else is doing it, so why can’t I? “The unfortunate fact is that the institution of slavery has been more the rule than the exception throughout human history.”
The report goes on to explain that the Western world didn’t start to repudiate slavery until around 1776, which is only sort of true. If you want to consider the “Western world” to be Europe, every country except for Spain and Ireland (who was under British rule) had outlawed slavery priot to 1776. The British allowed it in their colonies but not at home, which is so telling about the British Empire, but that’s a different rant for a different day. But the report tries to pretend that people were still way into slavery all over the world, but that just isn’t true. Slavery was really only thriving in the colonies.
Then the report goes into the great myth of the slaveowner who detests slavery. As a person who hates a lot of things, I can assure you that this is not how human nature works. If you own a plantation and you detest the institution of slavery there is a very, very easy solution—get some employees. Can’t make ends meet without free labor? Well, sir, looks like you should learn to code. Or whatever the 18th century equivalent of coding is.
The report mentions how George Washington and Thomas Jefferson hated owning slaves. They hated slavery so much they just kept on owning slaves and, in Jefferson’s case, fathering children with them. Give me a fucking break. If any slave owner actually hated slavery they would have freed their slaves on the spot. Instead Washington, and many others like him, would write it into their will that their slaves were to be freed, a desire that was often ignored. Washington’s slaves were eventually freed and his views on the institution did change greatly throughout his life, no one is denying this, but let’s stop pretending that he owned slaves against his desires, the only people held against their will were his slaves.
The report goes on to say that the founders actually planted the “seeds of the death of slavery in America” in their work. Which, uh, I guess? Things get a little weirder when the report brags about being the birth of the abolition movement. Which seems a little implausible given other countries who had abolished slavery, but it also seems like a really stupid brag since the only way it could happen was if we still had slavery. This was not the first or last time I seriously wondered if reading this thing broke my brain.
I know we’ve spent a lot on this section but this is where things get really nuts. I highly recommend checking this out yourself, but apparently John Calhoun is responsible for creating racism. By bringing up the theory held by Calhoun (and the soon-to-be Confederacy) that rights are not inherent in individuals but in groups or races of people as their justification for slavery, the report attempts to vindicate all of the founders from any responsibility for the institution. Not only did the founders hate slavery, but it was evil people who didn’t believe in the Declaration of Independence who twisted their words that allowed its continued existence.
The actual end of slavery is given one sentence in the report. One might imagine that from here we would discuss the lasting effects of spending 250 years enslaving people based off of the color of their skin… wrong. Instead we learn that “the damage done by the denial of core American principles and by the attempted substitution of a theory of group rights in their place proved widespread and long-lasting. These, indeed, are the direct ancestors of some of the destructive theories that today divide our people and tear at the fabric of our country.”
So, to wrap things up, our country was founded on the belief of equal rights for all people regardless of race by a combination of slaveholders who hated that they have to own slaves and others who didn’t own slaves but were willing to compromise so their friends could own slaves, but they aren’t hypocrites because other slave holders are responsible for subscribing to “group rights” which will eventually evolve into affirmative action programs that are bad. Did I get that right? Holy shit this thing is a mess.
The Next Great Enemy of America is… Progressivism?
Seriously. Progressivism gets more attention than facism does as far as the “ills of America” go, so that should tell you everything you already know about the people who wrote this.
The Civil Rights Movement Shouldn’t Have Wanted Actual Equality
The topic on racism is titled “Racism and Identity Politics.” Are you fucking kidding me?
I really should just stop there as we all know this section is going to be trash from the onset. But I think this section contains the most potentially dangerous ideas, so I don’t think I can just ignore it. It glosses over all of the atrocities between 1865 and the 1960s in a paragraph that can be summed up as “people did some bad things, but let’s not place blame or go into them too much.” The report then goes on to say that the Civil Rights movement was successful because it was consistent with what the founders always intended. This is a fine sentiment to believe if you really want, but hold on, it turns out that after getting some reforms in the 1960s racism would have been fixed if it wasn’t for certain groups getting greedy for more rights.
“The heady spirit of the original Civil Rights Movement, whose leaders forcefully quoted the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the rhetoric of the founders and of Lincoln, proved to be short-lived.”
We see where this is going…
“The Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. The ideas that drove the 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.”
Yup. Martin Luther King = John Calhoun. What the hell? You won’t be surprised to learn that from here it goes on to lament that Blacks were given preferential treatment through affirmative action laws and so forth.
“Today, far from a regime of equal natural rights for equal citizens, enforced by the equal application of law, we have moved toward a system of explicit group privilege that, in the name of ‘social justice,’ demands equal results and explicitly sorts citizens into ‘protected classes’ based on race and other demographic categories.”
What follows is the standard rant against “identity politics” that assholes like Rush Limbaugh have been giving for decades. But then there’s a twist that I really should have seen coming: “Identity politics make it less likely that racial reconciliation and healing can be attained by pursuing Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream for America and upholding the highest ideals of our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence.”
I’m a little shocked they didn’t just throw in a fake quote of Dr. King saying “All Lives Matter,” but that probably would have been a bit too clever for these nincompoops.
Americans Love America Because America’s Founders Loved America’s Love of America… or Something
Judging from reading the conclusion of the report, the entire point of this thing was, I guess, to make Americans love America even harder than they did before. It’s truly bizarre to read that the commission’s conclusion really is nothing more than “people need to believe that America is great and everything in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution is perfect.” That’s all they really wanted to accomplish. That’s it!
Now, the reason I even wrote about it is that even if the 18 non-historians who worked on this really are simpletons who wanted to pen a love letter to the American spirit, some of the ideas they give credence to are a lot more problematic than that.
Pretty much everybody lauded within the report is white. The ones that aren’t white (Dr. King, Frederick Douglass) are lauded mainly for agreeing with the ideals of the founders, not for any of the amazing achievements they accomplished. There is no mention of Native Americans and very little mention of any immigrant groups. There is no mention of the movements for women’s rights or LGBTQ rights. There is scarcely any mention of how the United States has meddled in the affairs of other countries.
When you combine all of these ommissions with the rampant justifications for slavery, the attention given to the ills of “identity politics” and the section focused on attacking “progressivism,” this document is a perfect encapsulation of the entire Trump presidency.
Make no mistake, The 1776 Commission is a raised middle finger towards anyone who disagrees with the direction the nation has gone in the last four years. And I say this without even considering the subtle “fuck you” that came by releasing it on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Much like Trump’s presidency, we can’t just sweep this iditiotic report under the rug and pretend it didn’t happen. We need to look deep into it, understand the motivations behind it and make goddamn sure that the people who penned it are kept as far away from power as possible.
That’s this week’s Moronitude. Next week we’ll be back to the regular format. Thank you for reading, tell your friends. Boom.