Confederate Heritage Month 2021, April 6: Bulwark article on 1776 Project

The Bulwark, a neoconservative site headed by NeverTrumper Charlie Sykes, offers an unsympathetic analysis of the ideological perspective of The 1776 Project: Joshua Tait, The Origins of Trump’s Slapdash, Last-Second ‘1776 Report’ 01/22/2021.

Tait calls the viewpoint of the report's brand of white supremacist ideological pseudohistory "Straussian Trumpism." The reference is to a branch of conservative thought identifying with the tradition of philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973). There was quite a bit of discussion and analysis of the Straussian perspective during the Bush-Cheney Administratio, when the neoconservative perspective was so influential in driving the disastrous foreign policy and warmongeing of that government. Strauss was a big influence among those who identified with the neoconservative viewpoint.

Tait writes:

The driving force behind this authorized history [The 1776 Report] is a group of conservative scholars colloquially called West Coast Straussians. Typically right-leaning, Straussians are the students—or, more likely, the students of students—of the German-American scholar Leo Strauss. During the 1970s and 1980s, Straussians divided more or less regionally over how best to understand the United States. Was it a decent regime, built on low but solid foundations, as the East Coasters had it? Or was it “broadly continuous with the classical and Biblical traditions” and in some respects “perfecting those traditions,” as the West Coasters, led by Strauss’s first student, Harry Jaffa, believed?

Jaffa not only celebrated the founding, but treated it as something sacrosanct. He believed the founding’s dedication to the Declaration of Independence, and its completion in the Civil War, made the United States a good regime dedicated to the universally valid principle of equality. [my emphasis]

This kind of "highbrow" pseudohistory typically includes quirky claims that are seemingly inconsistent with the broader vision, as with "the universally valid principle of equality" here. Because the Lost Cause narrative incorporated into The 1776 Report is definitely not concerned with equality: not equality of opportunity, not legal equality, not equality of votes, not equality of rights, not even equality among white men who are at the center of their narrative.

Jaffa's outlook may provide a clue to one of the strangest reversals of historical symbolism we saw in the Trump Administration, the adoption of Andrew Jackson as a symbol for Trumpism. Because Jackson's key stands against John Calhoun's secessionist position in the Nullification Controversy and against the concentrated economic power represented by the Bank of the United States are not remotely comparable to Donald Trump's political perspective, to the extent that he has one beyond demagoguery and grifting. The Lost Cause narrative and that of the 1776 Project are Calhounian to the core.

But conservatives are inordinately fond of such symbolic reversals, e.g., the people who criticize racism are the real racists. A perspectiv  e we see in the 1776 Project, as well.

Because they are ideological determinists, the West Coast Straussians struggle to see their opponents on their own terms. They reduce them and their ideas to “nihilistic” successors of John C. Calhoun, one of Jaffa’s punching bags. This is why the 1776 Report goes to such great lengths to connect modern identity politics to that “Marx of the master class,” [Calhoun] noting that “there are uncanny similarities between 21st century activists of identity politics and 19th century apologists for slavery.”

In other words, John Calhoun who put slavery above patriotism and above the interests of even Southern whites, the arch-reactionary who could rightly be considered the guiding spirit and political theorist of secession and civil war on behalf of slavery - that guy was like people today who want to combat racism against African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans.

This is basically smarmy small-town Bircherism. "West Coast Straussians" seems like far too pretentious a name for it.

But this West Coast Straussianism appars to be A Thing, as we say these days:

The 1776 Commission is dominated by these Straussians. Larry Arnn is its chair. The editor of the Claremont Review of Books, Charles Kesler, is a member. Matthew Spalding, the commission’s executive director, heads and teaches at Hillsdale’s D.C. center. The report lifts whole pages from Spalding’s previously published work. In short, the 1776 Report is simplified West Coast Straussianism with the presidential seal slapped on it. [my emphasis]

Unfortunately, these kinds of ideological constructions are very much a part of the present-day Republican Party that is operating in the reactionary insurrectionist spirit of January 6.

A copy of The 1776 Report as issued by the Trump White House is available from The 1776 Project.