Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 18: Another pass at "The 1776 Project"

Alex Shephard provided a good brief summary of the model Trumpista history manifesto, The 1776 Project in Donald Trump's Dumb “1776 Project” Is a Perfect End to His New Republic 01/20/2021. Here's a sample:

This ethos is epitomized by the other big historically themed project Trump released in the last days of his administration: the 1776 Project. Conceived as a response to The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which centered slavery in the history of America, the 1776 Project makes the case that the United States has been and always will be great. Like a “For Dummies” version of Bill O’Reilly’s historical works — you could call it “Killing American History”— the report insists, over the course of 45 shallow pages, that slavery was a necessary precondition of America, and therefore of American greatness: “As a question of practical politics, no durable union could have been formed without a compromise among the states on the issue of slavery.”

The fact that many of America’s founders were slaveholders is shrugged off — slavery, after all, existed in lots of places, not just America. The project suggests that George Washington freed all of his slaves when he died (he didn’t). It decries the civil rights movement for abandoning “the nondiscrimination and equal opportunity of colorblind civil rights in favor of ‘group rights,’” claiming that Martin Luther King Jr. would not have supported affirmative action. It is a deeply political document, somewhere between a Facebook post from your crazy uncle and the drivel on The Federalist, more concerned with pushing back against the specters of “identity politics” and “socialism” than anything that even resembles history. “It’s a hack job. It’s not a work of history,” American Historical Association executive director James Grossman told The Washington Post. “It’s a work of contentious politics designed to stoke culture wars.” [my emphasis]

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