1619/1776/2025

September 2, 2024

Laura Meckler writes in the September 2nd edition of the Washington Post that if Trump triumphs in November, he will reinstate the 1776 Commission, an education doctrine that promotes patriotism grounded in the idea that “such an education starts by teaching that all Americans are equal members of one national community.”

After reading Meckler’s article, I reread the report which came out of the Commission: The 1776 Report. The timing of this is perfect — we will soon start reading The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story in my graduate class. This work, curated and edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, is paired with Peter Wood’s 1620: A Critical Response to The 1619 Project.

There’s much in The 1776 Report that rings true. Ideally. We Americans are grounded in the Declaration of Independence, a document that asserts that we “strive to form a more perfect union” and that “all men are created equal” and the Constitution serves as a template for how to form a more perfect union and make men [sic] equal.

The entire report can be challenged (as any government document should in the spirits of collaboration and compromise), but one section gives me pause: “The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ must also be properly understood. It does not mean that all human beings are equal in wisdom, courage, or any of the other virtues and talents that God and nature distribute unevenly among the human race. It means rather that human beings are equal in the sense that they are not by nature divided into castes, with natural rulers and ruled” (page 4).

Like Marx and Engels, the writers are forgetting about human greed and envy. Why are virtues and talents distributed unevenly? It has nothing to do with God or nature. The desires to have what others have, to have more, to find the next thing and people be damned — these desires are borne from greed and envy. War, colonization, slavery, displacement — all caused by these fundamental negative emotions that make us want status, wealth, and power. I don’t buy the arguments that people are lucky or unlucky to be born where they are. If we’re born in the US, we have the chance to be free and prosperous, or if we’re born in, say, Malawi, we’re destined to poverty. There are those impoverished in the US and free and prosperous people in Malawi, but the conditions created by humans, not God nor nature, have distributed strengths unevenly.

Meckler references Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education in the Trump Administration who fought against the establishment of The 1776 Commission, noting that “the United States does not have a national curriculum, and for good reason.” DeVos resigned her position the day after the January 6th Insurrection. The Commission was established in the final days of Trump’s presidency, and it has become “the backbone of legislation in at least 23 states.” We can and should teach our children history in myriad ways. However, this is not one of them.

Meckler, Laura. “With His 1776 Commission on Patriotism, Trump Helped Spark a Culture War.” Washington Post, September 2, 2024.