A Second Trump Term Will Redefine the Teaching of American History

The Washington Post has an excellent article by Laura Meckler on how the Trump administration, during its last weeks in office, hastily set up the 1776 Commission and issued a report on how to promote “patriotic” education in public schools. It’s important for two main reasons. The first is that the effort morphed during the Biden administration, which immediately canceled the Commission, into a nationwide conservative effort to bully local school boards into soft-pedaling slavery and racism in their curriculums. Most famously, in 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida pushed through a law mandating that “students may not be made to ‘feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress’ because they were forced to reflect on bad acts committed in the past by members of their race.”

Talk about snowflakes, am I right?

The second reason this history is important is that Trump, if re-elected, is promising to revive the 1776 Commission. One thing Meckler reveals in the article is how personally invested Trump was in setting up the Commission, and how it really was a result of his failed effort to get then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to impose a national curriculum banning classroom discussion of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, “a set of essays…that centered slavery in understanding the founding of the nation.”

What’s kind of strange about this for me is that I actually have a small degree of sympathy for the impulse behind the effort. This can be seen in Ben Carson’s remarks at the first meeting of the 1776 Commission in December 2020.

“Today, as America faces new attempts to redefine the date of our founding, our national story is being rewritten and denigrated with irredeemably flawed descriptions. Every sin from our past is highlighted and every triumph is buried,” said Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, an ex officio member of the commission.

If the people on the Commission focused on creating a sophisticated telling of American history that balances the sins and triumphs of not only our nation but figures like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, I’d see that as worthwhile. No self-confident and self-respecting nation should consider it a good idea to trash its own founding and its most accomplished leaders, especially a nation that seeks to lead the world by example. Efforts like the 1619 Project have worth in that they serve as correctives to a too-rosy history that focuses too much on triumphs and not enough on sins. But the answer isn’t to skew too far in the other direction.

Having said that, there’s a reason we don’t have a national curriculum, and this limitation of federal power is ordinarily supported by conservatives with more fervor than progressives. And, speaking of progressivism, it was treated by the 1776 Commission on a par with slavery, fascism, communism and “racism and identity politics.”

Progressivism, an early 20th-century reform movement cited by many academics as a moment of advancement in U.S. history, was presented as an ill alongside slavery, with the report criticizing its embrace of experts and creation of an “unaccountable” federal bureaucracy. The report went so far as to compare American Progressives, who strengthened the federal government’s power, attacked the concentration of wealth and embraced regulation of industry, to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

The people behind the 1776 Commission were ostensibly alarmed that children were being taught a biased history that led them to feel guilt and shame about their forebears and country. But when you lift the covers, we see them trying to impose a national curriculum that teaches that staffing the federal government with career civil servants rather than political machine-appointed flunkies is a mistake as big as Jim Crow. They argue that using experts to drive policy is a sin as great as fascism, which is actually a fascist argument.

I think we know how this group feels about other Progressive accomplishments like labor rights, the income tax and federal reserve, antitrust enforcement and women’s suffrage.

It’s ironic. As Meckler reports, the movement to fight back against the 1619 report really began with a speech at Mount Rushmore on July 3, 2020. Standing in front of the giant sculpture of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, Trump stated,  “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children. Children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe the men and women who built it were not heroes but … villains.”

But when the 1776 Commission issued its report, Republican Teddy Roosevelt and his Progressive Movement were compared to Benito Mussolini. That seems off task to me, but then the whole project was political from the start and based in an ideology of white, Christian nationalism that sees the nation’s greatness only through the eyes of its affluent white settlers.

If Trump is reelected, he’ll make sure that his Department of Education does not push back the way the DeVos-led department pushed back in his first term. We will see this settler-focused history imposed on every classroom, even the classrooms of our inner cities.

It’s just one more reason to desperately oppose Trump and his movement.