Overshadowed by an attempted insurrection, a pandemic and a second impeachment, the 1776 Report deserves more attention as the Republican party has entered a dangerous new phase.
I wasn’t going to write this article. American politics move at such a rapid rate now. By the time I recovered from COVID-19 and coping with the burn-out from my first year of teaching, it seemed that The 1776 Report was barely relevant. Anytime I mention it that the Trump administration published an ahistorical document; the GOP version of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, almost no one knows what I’m talking about. They published it a couple days before Trump left office, a little less than 2 weeks after the Capitol Riots. The timing of it was peculiar and as a result, it largely fell under the radar.
I was going to leave this research in the archives of attempted ideas but then I stumbled across an AP article, a couple weeks ago. Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, recently denounced the teaching of critical race theory in Florida public schools. The governor is proposing teachers who undergo training to teach their version of civics would get a $3,000 bonus. $16.5 million would be devoted to this indoctrination program. DeSantis states, “There is no room in classrooms for things like critical race theory.” Additionally, over the last month, Texas lawmakers have also been encouraging similar efforts to promote “patriotic education” in Texas public schools, their plan is entitled The 1836 Project.
This issue isn’t going away, clearly.
While Trump is out of office and President Biden almost immediately revoked The 1776 Report and removed it from the White House website, this effort to politicize social studies education in public schools is continuing. When it was released, historians promptly rebuked the document for having no citations, bibliography or works cited, and no historians on the writing team. In fact, all of the writers were from various right-wing circles including Conservative and Christian colleges, former right-wing politicians and members of the Heritage Foundation, a GOP think-tank. The Chair of the Report, Larry P. Arnn is a trustee at the Heritage Foundation, and was once embroiled in a controversy in which he described people of color as, “dark ones.” When trying to defend his words, he doubled down and stated he was referring to “dark faces.” So that just gives you an idea of the kind of people we’re dealing with here.
With no historians on the team, no bibliography, historical inaccuracies on almost every page… even some evidence of plagiarism; with no evidence of a structurally sound historical document one has to wonder what was the intent of publishing this? I’m in the camp of believing this was never intended to be a historical document. It doesn’t follow the basic structure or guidelines of academic writing because it’s not meant for academic minds. Rather, it’s a rhetorical document, designed to push this mythological narrative of “American patriotic education.” It serves as confirmation bias for those that buy into the myth of American exceptionalism.
While it seems to have largely fallen into obscurity with liberals, I believe there needs to be greater attention given to this document, as it will serve as a white supremacist and fascist blueprint to dismantle social studies education in public schools. This document is truly a complete mess: random quotes and images of people in American history with no context or source citations or analysis whatsoever. No evidence to back up the numerous inaccurate claims… it’s chaotic. I’ll spare you the line-by-line analysis that took me over a month to get through (it really is that painful of a read). Instead, I’ve divided up the analysis into three sections: Historical Revisionism, Conspiracy Theories, and Rhetoric for Fascist Education.
Lastly, while this is a strong condemnation of right-wing ideology, it must be stated that I am not a Democrat. I believe in many ways, the two dominant political parties maintain and uphold white supremacy. I have plenty to say about the Democrats, but that’s for another time.
Historical Revisionism
As mentioned above, The 1776 Report is a direct response to The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which itself was a historical revisionist endeavor. According to the NYT website, “The 1619 Project, is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
The act of historical revisionism isn’t problematic in and of itself, especially when one considers the majority of documented history was dictated from the rich, white male perspective. And frankly, The 1619 Project really falls short in many ways because it fails to dive deeper into the intersections of race, class and gender. But what do you expect from the New York Times?
Revisiting and reframing historical sources and applying an intersectional framework is, in many ways, historical revisionism. However, the way revisionism has long been applied, is to highlight the dominant narrative and erase marginalized voices. The 1776 Report does not hold back in doing exactly that.
The first section of the Report, “The Meaning of the Declaration,” attempts to describe the foundation of this nation, the American Revolution and the meaning of American principles. In the whole section there isn’t a single mention of the existence of Indigenous peoples or the practice of slavery. The four pages are devoted to praising democratic principles, but how can any serious scholar of American history get away with ignoring the obvious contradiction the Framers were met with? Any praise of America’s founding principles has to be done in the abstract while acknowledging the reality; the principles didn’t apply to most people. How do you tell the story of America in a patriotic way without getting bogged down by the reality of genocide and slavery? Easy. Just don’t mention it at all.
In July of 2020 Trump claimed that children were taught in schools to “hate their own country,” claiming that public schools were indoctrinating students to wipe out history and hate the Framers. To the new Conservatives, they don’t want history to highlight the humanity and fatal flaws of people throughout time. It’s not to highlight the complexities of the beliefs, actions and decisions people made in a given time and place. Rather, to them, it’s to look to history for patriotic and moral instruction.
To new Conservatives, they perceive slavery as something separate from the foundation of this nation. To them, slavery in the conversation is defamatory because they’ve reduced any critique to: Slavery is evil. America did slavery. Therefore, America is evil.
They knew they couldn’t get away with not mentioning slavery at all, so after they didn’t mention it in the narrative of America’s foundation, they added a section about slavery in the chapter entitled, “Challenges to America’s Principles.” By doing so, they’ve essentially recategorized slavery as a foreign force to be defeated by America. They make excuses by stating that other societies were doing it too; asserting that America was unremarkable in its practice of chattel slavery. But you can’t say there’s such a thing as American exceptionalism, and in the same essay say it was unexceptional in its labor and economic system.
They defend the Framers, claiming they detested the practice of slavery. Though, we all know the Framers did absolutely nothing to stop it. They say that there needed to be a compromise in order to get the Southern states on board with the Union (another flimsy argument I heard in grade school). One has to ask, though, who were they compromising with? They were compromising with other slaveholding founders. Of the 55 delegates, 25 of them owned enslaved people. In any case, the Civil War proved there was no unified nation with slavery. Whatever strawman argument Conservatives can come up with, whatever the individual opinions were of the Framers regarding slavery, the sum of their actions was to protect and uphold the institution.
Right-wing ideology does not see history as a means of learning from it, it sees it as a source of nationalism. They look at history from a lens of people to emulate or enemies to be defeated; history is a parable to them. Historical role models serve as a purpose to make students proud of their country. Therefore, if you point out negative aspects, you must be teaching children to hate their country.
Conspiracy Theories
According to the writers of The 1776 Report, anything that arises in American history that they deemed unexceptional, must be some outside force. In addition to categorizing slavery as such, they also include communism, progressivism, fascism and identity politics on this list.
Much of these sections were used to demonize leftist politics and describe it as explicitly un-American. In the section on progressivism, they equate early 20th century progressives, with modern-day Democratic socialists and they are absolutely nothing alike. For example Tom Lea, the Mayor of El Paso from 1916-1918, was a self-proclaimed Progressive but he was also a eugenicist-believing white supremacist, a member of the KKK and was the first politician to outlaw cannabis. For more information on Lea, check out my thesis published by the University of Alabama here.
However, what’s more insidious about this, that goes deeper than the surface culture wars, is the anti-Semitic dog-whistling strewn throughout the document. In describing communism they say, “This legacy of anti-Americanism is by no means entirely a memory but still pervades much of academia and the intellectual cultural spheres.” This claim is rooted in anti-Semitic canard, which are conspiracy theories that claim Jewish people control major institutions like the media and academic institutions to push Communist propaganda.
They don’t stop there. In Appendix III, entitled “Created Equal Or Identity Politics,” they may have possibly cited a right-wing terrorist manifesto. In the section, “Intellectual Origins of Identity Politics,” they describe this conspiracy theory about cultural Marxism (another anti-Semitic theory), the Frankfurt school, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse and the development of Critical Race Theory as a method for dividing society into an oppressor-victim narrative. This type of rhetoric serves as a stand-in for Jewish people. The Nazi party has identical theories, except they call it Jewish Bolshevism.
In 2011, a man named Anders Behring Breivik went on a bombing and shooting rampage in Oslo, Norway. In addition he published a manifesto entitled, A European Declaration of Independence. In it, you can find the exact same conspiracy theory they put in The 1776 Report. No seriously, click the link, hit CTRL+F and type “Frankfurt School” or “Antonio Gramsci” and you can see it for yourself. Both the writers of The 1776 Report and this right-wing terrorist, brandished academics and experts as mere partisans; engaged in a conspiracy to destroy Western civilization. I don’t know if it gets anymore fascist than using the same rhetoric as Nazi terrorists.
Rhetoric For Fascist Education
I was warned that identifying The 1776 Report as a blueprint for fascist education was hyperbolic and will shut people off from my ideas. Well, what else do you call it then, Extreme right-wing nationalism? Is that throat-numbing enough for you? In all seriousness, I call this fascist propaganda because it is exactly that. In order to identify the features of fascist education, I turned to Jason Stanley, Yale professor of Philosophy and writer of the book, How Fascism Works. In the 1776 Report, they make the claim that fascism originated with Mussolini and died with Hitler, but Stanley asserts fascism is more fluid of an ideology than that. He states that it began much earlier than the 20th century and it continues to pervade many of our modern institutions today. In his book, Stanley traces American fascism back to European colonization and chattel slavery.
According to Stanley, education has always been the site of an ideological battle. In the early 20th century, as modern public school curriculum was being written, Edward Ross published the book, Social Control. In it, he concluded the most effective way of controlling the masses is through public school curriculum, as the government mandated children to receive an education. At the same time, the decision was made to teach social studies in schools. Historians, of course, wanted history to be taught; a detailed recounting of what happened in the past from various perspectives. However, that’s not necessarily what happened. Instead, early social studies curriculum pushed a more uniform narrative of American identity, which precluded multiple perspectives. And of course, if a group of rich white people are deciding a uniform narrative, they’re not going to go with a traditionally marginalized group like Indigenous history. In fact, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, education was used as an act of genocide towards Indigenous people. They took the youth away from their families and put them in re-education boarding schools, hundreds of miles away so that they may abandon their traditional ways and assimilate into Anglo capitalist society.
But even mentioning the existence of Indigenous indoctrination schools within the narrative of American history is an affront to those that wish to mythologize the past and adhere to a uniform, fascist perspective. The glorification and mythologizing of the past is a key feature of fascist historiography.
“Further back in time, the mythic past was a time of glory of the nation, with wars of conquest led by patriotic generals, its armies filled with its countrymen, able-bodied, loyal warriors whose wives were at home raising the next generation. In the present, these myths become the basis of the nation’s identity under fascist politics. In the rhetoric of extreme nationalists, such a glorious past has been lost by the humiliation brought on by globalism, liberal cosmopolitanism, and respect for “universal values,” such as equality.” -Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works
Alternatively, in a democratic education, it includes all the perspectives that make up our society. Essentially, intersectional history is at the heart of democratic education. Expanding our view to include Black, Latinx, LGBTQ+, disabled, Indigenous, women, working class… all members of the population into the fabric of our narrative, is essential to modern historical inquiry. By contrast, fascist education only wishes to focus on the dominant narrative of the dominant race.
The goal of democratic education is to elucidate; to provide its students and citizens with a full understanding of the nation’s past and allow them to draw their own conclusions. It allows them to make more informed decisions about policy proposals in their community, overcome generational divisions and hopefully make a more perfect union. In recent years, social studies education has shifted significantly to democratic historical inquiry, but the GOP want to roll that back.
In fascist education, the goal of social studies is to glorify the national traditions, leave out the sins of the past, and create admiration for those that dominated in society. The primary goal is to glorify; in 1922 Mussolini said, “We’re going to create a myth of a past, the mythic past will inspire us.” That was and continues to be the primary function of the mythic past; it never really existed, but it is there to inspire the people of the present to create that vision. Make America Great Again.
Another function of fascist education is to promote job skills. Fascism props up authoritarianism and emphasizes that people be obedient and follow the leader. They do not want people to have the critical thinking tools to weigh in on policy. While the right continues to lambast schools for left-wing indoctrination, we’ve actually seen over the last couple decades grade schools and universities actually have moved to the right; their educational practice is more rooted in teaching job skills and producing workers, rather than producing citizens for the polity.
Fascist education repudiates scholars, philosophers and experts, “You can’t listen to them, only listen to me.” Instead of conveying experience on a particular subject, it’s used as evidence for bias. Taking it to its logical conclusion, the person who is the most trustworthy is the person who knows the least.
Conclusion
While The 1776 Report was quickly discredited and deleted, the fact that it was published on the White House website at all gives it a lot more credit and legitimacy than it ever deserved. Historians and scholars took a glance at it, tossed it aside and thought their op-eds in the Washington Post calling it trash would be enough to let it fade into obscurity. But like Trump’s presidency and the GOP writ-large, they’re not going anywhere. As we are witnessing in the Biden presidency, Republicans have no substantial policy proposals in their arsenal. They rely on voter suppression tactics, culture-war politics and fear-driven ideology to feed their voters the red-meat, to carry them into the 2022 mid-terms. Which is why The 1776 Report needs to be on the radar. It will serve as a fascist blueprint for state-sponsored dismantling of social studies education. Texas and Florida have already begun in this effort and they won’t be the last. As demographics of student enrollment in public schools continues to shift in the coming years, we must be vigilant in protecting our collective historical reality. We must protect the truth, our survival and our children’s survival depend on it.
Sources:
AP, “DeSantis knocks critical race theory in civics curricula,” March 17, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-ron-desantis-florida-coronavirus-pandemic-naples-56d68d06e08105796e87c684f95bf1a7.
Stanley, Jason, How Fascism Works, 2018, Penguin, New York.
The 1619 Project, New York Times, August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html.
The 1776 Report, The White House, January 18, 2021, https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmVzW5NfySnfTk7ucdEoWXshkNUXn3dseBA7ZVrQMBfZey.
The Hill, “Trump: Children Are Taught in school to ‘hate their own country,’” July 3, 2020, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/505841-trump-children-are-taught-in-school-to-hate-their-own-country
Video: Jason Stanley, Democratic vs. Fascist Education, (05:59), The Brainwaves Video Anthology, YouTube, https://youtu.be/Wjc6TpCREIk.
Video: Jason Stanley, Education vs. Indoctrination, (06:02), The Brainwaves Video Anthology, YouTube, https://youtu.be/HQy4yDx01bA.
Video: The 1776 Report, (57:17), Shaun, YouTube, https://youtu.be/b2d8u2QyvAo.