Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 24: HIstorians groaned over "The 1776 Report"

With crackpot history, there's always a judgment to be made as to whether professional refutations of it may serve to give it more publicity and even credibility than it deserves.

In the case of The 1776 Report pamphlet released by the Trump Administration as it was on it way out the door, ignoring it entirely wasn't really an option for historians. Because it was a kind of an oficial statement of the Trumpista white supremacist version of American history.

The intiial response from professional historians was understandly harshly critical. Gilliam Brockell provided an early roundup (‘A hack job,’ ‘outright lies’: Trump commission’s ‘1776 Report’ outrages historians Washington Post 01/20/2021):

The [1776] commission was created in September with a confusing news conference featuring Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. The 45-page report is largely an attack on decades of historical scholarship, particularly when it comes to the nation’s 400-year-old legacy of slavery, and most of those listed as authors lack any credentials as historians. While claiming to present a nonpartisan history, it compares progressivism to fascism and claims the civil rights movement devolved into “preferential” identity politics “not unlike those advanced by [slavery defender John C.] Calhoun and his followers.” ...

“It’s very hard to find anything in here that stands as a historical claim, or as the work of a historian. Almost everything in it is wrong, just as a matter of fact,” said Eric Rauchway, a history professor at the University of California at Davis. “I may sound a little incoherent when trying to speak of this, because the report itself is not coherent. It’s like historical wackamole.” ...

Several historians said it was particularly offensive that the report was released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and included several photos King and quotes they said were taken out of context. [my emphasis]

Of course, when trying to "own the libs" is always a high priority, being "particularly offensive" is considered a feature, not a bug. It may not be the whole point of it. Or then again, maybe it is!

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 21: White surpemacists say, oh, white racism? That's all in the past!

The white supremacist 1776 Report provided a narrative framework for contemporary Trumpistas and white supremacists. Here is its template for the present to say that white racism is a thing of the past:

It would take a national movement composed of people from different races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions to bring about an America fully committed to ending legal discrimination.

The Civil Rights Movement culminated in the 1960s with the passage of three major legislative reforms affecting segregation, voting, and housing rights. It presented itself, and was understood by the American people, as consistent with the principles of the founding. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his “I Have a Dream” speech. “This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

It seemed, finally, that America’s nearly two-century effort to realize fully the principles of the Declaration had reached a culmination. But the heady spirit of the original Civil Rights Movement, whose leaders forcefully quoted the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the rhetoric of the founders and of Lincoln, proved to be short-lived.

The Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. [my emphasis]

The key ideological claims involved there include:

• The US since the 1960s has been "fully committed to ending legal discrimination".
• The legal part is key; private discrimination is not a legitimate concern for government remedy.
• Actual racial discrimination even in areas like government employment is okay as long as it's not explicitly legally mandated.
• Legislation in the 1960s against formal legal segregation, voting rights, and housing means that all legitimate concerns about racism and racial discrimination ended sometime around 1970.
• Those goals of the civil rights movement were presented by that movement as consistent with major aspects of the American political tradition and were "understood" as such by the public.
• After that magic turning point, the demands of that "Civil Rights Movement" switched radically to things that opposed to the American tradition and so are today thoroughly un-American.

As important as it is to understand some of the details of how propaganda works, debunking even shabby pseudohistory like this risks suggesting to some people that it's more serious that it is. This is only serious in its malignant intent. (In an earlier post, I talked some about the "highbrow" arguments of the "West Coast Straussians" provide a background for The 1776 Report.)

How that gets translated into typical Republican language is well illustrated by this clip of Brit Hume at FOX News. (Brit Hume on Derek Chauvin verdict: America is not a racist country FOX News 04/22/2021)

In the video, Hume says just after 1:30 that there "is a nearly unanimous consensus in America against racism. Being called a racist, and being shown to be a racist is about the worst thing that can happen to you. But unfortunately, that's been weaponized now, so the term is flung about with abandon by politicians and, and, others." And Brit doesn't have to explain to FOX News viewers who The Others are.

That is an updated version of the argument circa 1965 in the South that if you used "Negro" or "colored people" but didn't use the n-word in polite company, you weren't any kind of a racist. The current version is that complaining about white racism or calling white racists what they are is completely unacceptable and the correct Republican response is, "Oh, the Mean Libruls are tryin' to cancel me just 'cause ah hate n*****s! Boo, hoo, hoo, hoo!"

The pore white Republicans have to face the "weapon" of being called a racist that is being sprayed all over the place at them by the Mean Libruls. African-American have to worry that any encounter with the police could suddenly turn to them being executed with an actual weapons that fires bullets. According to Brit, "about the worst thing that can happen" to nice Republican white folks is to be called a racist by a Mean Librul or one of The Others.

White people whining gets really tiresome really fast.

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

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 11: The Lost Cause view of American Indians

These tweets call attention to the nature of The 1776 Report and include an interesting observation about the native peoples of North America fit into the Lost Cause worldview.

Jeffrey Ostler is a historian of the American West and author of Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (2019).

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.

Confederate Heritage Month 2021, April 5: Trumpist 1776 history

Derrick Clifton writes about The 1776 Report and its ideology in How the Trump administration's '1776 Report' warps the history of racism and slavery NBC News 01/320/2021). He gives this example of the propagandistic nature of the report issued by the Trump Administration in its closing days:

A portion of the report dedicated to the civil rights movement also misappropriates quotes from King, and claims that laws passed in favor of voting rights, housing and outlawing discrimination were the ultimate “culmination” of centuries of efforts to fulfill the nation’s founding principles. What follows is a rebuke of ongoing efforts to address discrimination, dismissing them as “group rights” that run counter to equality. The report is also notable in its omissions, as King issued searing critiques of racism in law enforcement and policing, access to economic opportunities, and various other elements of American society that went largely unaddressed by reforms passed in the 1960s.

“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” the document quoted from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

But according to Daina Ramey Berry, a professor and chair of the history department at the University of Texas at Austin, the "1776 Report" didn’t incorporate King’s words properly.

“Yes, he talked about a promissory note, but he said that the United States wrote a bad check,” Berry said in a statement. “The very next sentence of King’s speech is, ‘It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.’ As historians, this is precisely what we are trained not to do — to use quotes out of context. A full history of our land must include an accurate portrayal of the sacrifices and contributions of the enslaved and other marginalized groups of people.” [my emphasis]

This tweet was apparently a response to the issuance of The 1776 Project report, or at least it was posted just after the report came out:

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

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 1: "The 1776 Project"

Every year since 2004, I've posted daily entries for the month of April as a counter-observance of Confederate Heritage Month. This is a commemoration promoted by white supremacist groups and supported by a number of states, including my native Mississippi.

The Mississippi news site The Commercial Dispatch (Columbus-Starkville)posted this editorial earlier this year criticizing the grotesque practice, Our View: More relics of a regrettable era 01/19/2021:

... Confederate Heritage Day is a relic of a regrettable era, celebrating Mississippi at its absolute worst. Gov. Tate Reeves, like his predecessors, says in the annual proclamation that Confederate Heritage Month is time to reflect on our Confederate Heritage. We wonder, though, what Confederate heritage almost four-in-10 Mississippians, the black population, have to reflect on.

It’s embarrassing. Gov. [Tate] Reeves [also known to his critics as Gov. Tater Tot] knows that. It’s no accident that of all the state proclamations he has issued, Confederate Heritage Month is the only one that isn’t posted on the Governor’s official website and is not announced by a press release. He does it in secret because he’s ashamed to do it in public. [my emphasis]

This was one aspect of the larger white supremacist narrative in the post-Civil War period. It included a deeply dishonest, pseudohistorical account of slavery and the Civil War, widely known as the Lost Cause view. Figures associated with the Confederate, pro-slavery cause were adapted as icons of white supremacy.

The Trump-Pence Administration embraced the Lost Cause white supremacist view of US history and intended to promote it to be taught in schools via something they called The 1776 Project, an effort mercifully cut short in that particular form by the end of that administration. The administration posted the official ideological manifesto of the project just a couple of days before Joe Biden's Inauguration as President. The new administration quickly removed it. (It's archived here by the National Archives.)

Historian Jeff Ostler noted at the time it was first issued:

(Though the appendix provides full text of the D of I, which does mention "merciless Indian savages." Quite the city on a hill, aren't we?)

— Jeff Ostler (@Jeff__Ostler) January 18, 2021

The Conclusion of the report reads like it was culled from a book with a title like, Dorky Speeches Given by Local Politicians at VFW Meetings.

Colleen Murphy, a specialist in transitional justice efforts, applies that framework to our post-Trump, post-Capitol-insurrection era in How Nations Heal Boston Review 01/21/2021.

In his 2001 study States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, psychologist Stanley Cohen identifies three forms of denial of injustice can take. The first is literal denial, where basic facts are disputed. Consider Trump’s 2020 Presidential Executive Order 13950 and a follow-up Memo from the Executive Branch Office of Management and Budget to heads of Executive Departments and Agencies. Both engage in literal denial by suggesting that discussion of any racism or evil actions in our past is “propaganda.” (The memo makes this suggestion explicit.) More specifically, EO 13950 characterizes as mere ideology the claim that America “is grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual.” It stipulates as false that anyone on the basis of their race could oppress or benefit from racialized segregation or slavery, contending that such ideas are grounded in a “destructive ideology” and “misrepresentations of our country’s history and its role in the world.”

The second form Cohen discusses is interpretive denial, where an act or state of affairs that is wrong is re-described so as to downplay wrongfulness. A striking example is Senator Tom Cotton’s recently characterization of slavery as a “necessary evil.” Cotton’s words capture a common view among conservatives, downplaying the gravity of the wrong of slavery and implicitly seeking to justify, rather than repudiate, that part of our nation’s history. Likewise, the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which “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,” generated pushback that went beyond scholarly disputes to call into question the legitimacy of centering Black lives and experiences and centuries of slavery. This extreme form of repudiation is different in kind from the criticism about specific conclusions or pieces of evidence to which any research project is rightly subject; it reflects a form of interpretive denial regarding the significance and centrality of white supremacy and racial injustice in the United States. [my emphasis]

Colleen Flaherty looks at how The 1776 Project fits into the historical conservative ideological project in A Push for ‘Patriotic Education’ Inside Higher Ed 01/20/2021:

In an 11th-hour White House report, the administration that coined the term “alternative facts” says it's academics who have hijacked the truth about U.S. history.

Historians, in turn, generally agree that the report -- released by the Presidential Advisory 1776 Commission -- is garbage. The document lacks citations, fails to mention Native Americans entirely, traffics heavily in American “values” at the expense of objective truths and bemoans the “radicalization of American politics” from the 1960s onward.

Less clear to historians is how much of an impact the report will have on already divided and fact-challenged culture.

David Blight, Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University, said that academic historians, “even those with conservative instincts, will discredit this report whenever asked. We value research, facts, evidence, and then interpretation and debate above ideology. At least most of us do.”

Beyond academe, Blight said he was hopeful that the report “will have very little lasting power.” But even as President Trump is about to leave office, he said, “Trumpism is not going away,” and the report gives his supporters a “documentary calling card" in form of an official White House publication.

Ultimately, he said, the report’s real-world impact depends on “what Fox News and other right-wing media does with it. It is cleaned-up Trumpist lies put out for public use.” [my emphasis]

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