When the New York Times published its examination of the role of slavery in America’s founding, it certainly expected a reaction. The 1619 Project, as it was titled, hoped 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 project debuted in August 2019, 400 years after the first African slaves arrived in what is now the United States.
It was probably not expected, though, that the reaction would include being pilloried by the sitting U.S. president and that it would lead to a formal response from that president's administration. That response was published on Monday — Martin Luther King Jr. Day — with the pointed title “The 1776 Report.” The unsubtle implication: American history necessarily begins with the Declaration of Independence and no earlier.
The government’s document is oddly defensive, a treatise from an unsure author. The emergence of the United States as the world’s greatest, richest power is presented not as the product of struggle and incremental improvement but, instead, as an inevitable culmination of some words written on some parchment 250 years ago. That the administration is responding at all is an admission of weakness.
Coupled with the White House’s announcement that it would push forward with a “National Garden of American Heroes,” the effect is striking. In its final hours, the administration of President Trump has invested a lot of energy in presenting a very specific vision of America, a vision that adheres to a very strict and closely policed set of boundaries.
It is, fundamentally, the vision of America that sits at the heart of Trump's own understanding of the United States. During the “make America great again” movement's last days leading the free world, Trump and his allies have finally gotten around to presenting their vision of what that America looked like in the first place.
Unsurprisingly, it is a vision of America that would be familiar to any conservative baby boomer. Light in nuance, it’s a fairly standard articulation of the establishment of personal freedoms and the subsequent evolution of the nation. Given that it’s primarily a reaction to the Times project, it is self-conscious about issues of race, but in ways that perhaps reveal more than intended.
For example, slavery is identified as one of the “challenges to America's principles” but is framed with a very Trumpian whataboutism.
“Many Americans labor under the illusion that slavery was somehow a uniquely American evil,” it states. “… But the unfortunate fact is that the institution of slavery has been more the rule than the exception throughout human history.”
In fact, it continues, it was the West’s repudiation of slavery, “only just beginning to build at the time of the American Revolution,” that redirected the world’s approach to the practice. It raises various bits of evidence to prove how conflicted the Founding Fathers were on the practice, simply raising the question introduced by the 1619 Project: “the clear language of the Declaration itself,” that “all men are created equal,” shows that “the founders knew slavery was incompatible with that truth.”
It apparently took just another 90 years and a war for slavery to end and then another 100 years after that before the federal government was willing to mandate that Black Americans not face overt discrimination — precisely the timeline that the Founders intended, it seems. That the Constitution explicitly didn’t count slaves as “men” equivalent to White Americans was just a necessary “compromise.” That politicians and the courts upheld slavery for decades is simply not addressed.
Again, this is one of the “challenges to America’s principles” as viewed by the Trump administration’s historians. The others to which slavery is functionally equated include the progressive movement, which emerged at the turn of the 20th century (and which secured new rights for American workers, among other things), and communism.
Then there’s the “challenge” of “racism and identity politics.” The document’s authors praise the civil rights movement — but only to a point.
“The civil rights movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders,” it reads. “… 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 Calhoun mentioned there is John C. Calhoun, the virulently proslavery former vice president. His effort to create “group rights,” as the report has it, was an attempt to argue for the primacy of state decisions over national ones — an attempt, in other words, to maintain the economy of enslaving Black people. The 1776 Report equates this with the effort to ensure the protection of rights for minority groups in the post-civil rights era.
Any even moderately sophisticated understanding of American politics and culture will recognize that dictating that no discrimination exists is insufficient for uprooting existing discrimination. If something is not understood to be discriminatory, it won’t run afoul of prohibitions against discrimination. So efforts to address deep-rooted discrimination have often been targeted specifically.
This is really the heart of the conflict between the 1619 Project and the 1776 Report. The former accepts that discrimination has always been an undercurrent to politics and power; the latter treats it as something that has largely been resolved. It holds that efforts to address extant discrimination are the actual problem, impositions on Americans’ rights equatable to fascism or communism.
In that sense, it echoes the MAGA movement specifically.
Since Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, his support has been heavily centered among White Americans who feel as though they, equal with or instead of other groups, are targets of discrimination. Polling has shown over and over that White Republicans broadly and Trump supporters specifically see White Americans as being targets of discrimination as commonly as do Black or Hispanic Americans.
This is unquestionably in part a function of recent efforts to draw attention to discriminatory practices and systemic racism. Democrats responded to the Black Lives Matter movement by shifting their understanding of how discrimination works. A July 2016 poll from Monmouth University found that most Republicans thought Black Lives Matter had instead simply made racial issues worse.
But it’s also about how the United States is changing. White Americans are declining as a percentage of the population, and, with more cultural and political power, Americans of color are forcing new consideration of U.S. power and history. To some extent, the tension that arises is a bit like those apocryphal complaints about “new math”: The way one group learned something is simply the correct way to learn it, even if the “new” way is better, more accurate or more effective. Here, though, what’s at stake isn’t the speed of doing calculations, it’s the importance — and culpability — of one’s own cultural group.
What Trump promised implicitly with his campaign slogan was that White Americans would not need to feel like they were still part of a system riddled with racism and that the evolution of the United States that they’d learned in school (and that didn’t challenge their understanding of why people like them held power) was correct. That the United States inexorably moves toward more perfection and that criticism of that movement is therefore unwarranted. That the civil rights movement fixed the last problems with race that the country faced.
The real enemies are those who challenge that idea and discriminate against White Americans by pointing out that there are still racist systems and power structures in the country. The real enemies are things such as “multiculturalism,” which suggest that maybe the United States is a land in which different cultural traditions can coexist.
This is why the 1776 Report exists: During the 2020 campaign, Trump saw efforts to introduce nuance to the evolution of the country’s history as a useful political foil. He understood that his base saw such questions as un-American, probably because he shares that sentiment, and so he amplified these purported “threats” to that shared understanding.
It’s not clear what goal is accomplished by the 1776 Report or that garden of national heroes (predictably overrepresented with individuals sharing Trump’s gender and who had cultural significance when he was young) — at least from a practical standpoint. There’s not much point in creating a document that largely regurgitates what American history textbooks have articulated for the past century.
From an ideological standpoint, though, the intent is clear. This is the established history of America seen through the MAGA lens; it is the America to which Trump’s baseball cap pledged its loyalty. Twice now, most American voters have rejected that vision. But that won’t detract from the accomplishment that the 1776 Project now sets in cement this one particular assessment of how America got here, an assessment that views conservative politics as a triumph and liberal politics as a threat.
All it is, really, is the longer version of Trump’s hat.
