The 1776 Report A Trump commission tries to correct the historical record.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1776-report-11610754084?mod=opinion_lead_pos4
President Trump established the 1776 Commission with an executive order last year for the purpose of producing a counter-balance to the political left’s largely negative interpretation of American history.
The commission’s report, set for release Monday, won’t silence criticism of America, as liberal teachers groups feared. That isn’t in the power of the federal government, let alone an advisory commission. Instead, the 1776 Report makes the case for the American creed and a less radical way to teach history.
“Neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice and government by consent,” the report states. “But no nation before America ever dared state those truths as the formal basis for its politics, and none has strived harder, or done more, to achieve them.”
The Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal” was a revolution in itself, a turning point in world history. To reduce America to its violations of that principle, as do many contemporary writers, is to miss the distinguishing part of the story that roused freedom lovers and terrified tyrants everywhere—and still does. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate Monday, could make America better by insisting it be truer to its own founding principles.
Those steeped in recent academic accounts of the U.S. may wonder how the 1776 Report can say core U.S. principles are “true” and still call itself history. That’s because it reads the Declaration not as archaeology or dissimulation, but as a live claim that demands adjudication.
Can anyone be surprised to hear that undergraduate history enrollments lately have hit new lows, facing worse drop-offs than any other department? It’s hardly an edifying experience when professors always emphasize the bad, always expose and deconstruct, or always trace the “dynamics” of power and identity, rather than striving to understand America’s historical actors as they understood themselves.
President Trump created the 1776 Commission to promote what he called “patriotic education.” That isn’t the term the commission would have chosen, but the fact remains that instilling understanding, rather than hatred, of one’s country is a core purpose of education. “Thoughtful citizens embrace their national community not only because it is their own,” the report observes, “but also because they see what it can be at its best.”
One mistake the commission makes is telling the American story as though it leapt from the Declaration and Constitution straight to Calhoun and Lincoln and then on to the progressive movement. While not everything can be included, this conservative chronology skims over urbanization, industrialization and their political effects—leaving readers ill-equipped to understand why challenges to cherished principles and institutions arose and succeeded.
An appendix to the report does better in explaining how identity politics divides Americans into victims and oppressors and measures moral claims accordingly, clashing with the principle of equality. But the report treads incautiously on this contested ground. Its argument that identity politics “creates new hierarchies as unjust as the old hierarchies of the antebellum South” is excessive. Slavery was a unique evil.
The report is correct in understanding our freedom and prosperity as “direct results of America’s unity, stability, and justice, all of which in turn rest on the bedrock of our founding principles.” Today that is taken as a conservative interpretation, though liberals once believed it too. It also happens to be true.
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