On Monday (Jan. 18), President Donald Trump‘s (Trump) 1776 Commission released a public report on its mission to revisit America’s founding history and its efforts to reunite Americans around the values and principles of the nation.
The commission was established in the last year of Trump’s first term. The reason for its creation is that Americans are currently “deeply divided” over the meaning of their country, its history, and how it should be governed. There is a growing consensus that America’s history is based on racism and racial oppression.
After revisiting the principles and ideals contained in the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the report writes: “The United States, like no other nation, has ever perfectly practiced the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice, and harmonious government, but no nation before it has dared to make these truths the formal basis of its politics, and no nation has done more to realize them. put forth more effort to achieve them.”
The report’s authors devote significant space to exploring the challenges to America’s founding principles. Some of these challenges are historical, such as the existence of slavery, which is fundamentally incompatible with the idea that all men are created equal; others are more modern, such as Progressivism, which argues that the Constitution should evolve to ensure evolving rights; fascist and communist movements, which seek to establish a totalitarian government that does not respect individual rights; and modern identity politics. Fascist and communist movements seek to establish a totalitarian government that does not respect individual rights; and modern identity politics, which supports a clear system of group privilege in the name of “social justice,” among others.
According to the report, “While the arguments, tactics and names of these movements have changed and the scale of the challenge varies, they are all united by their insistence on the same error: that people should not have equal worth and equal rights.”
The report warns of the danger that modern political movements are departing from the founding principles of the United States, noting that many historical movements have succeeded because they helped uphold those founding principles rather than depart from them.
“Great reform movements like abolition, women’s suffrage, anti-Communism, the civil rights movement and the anti-abortion movement often emerge to raise our dedication to the principles of the American Declaration of Independence as set forth in the Constitution,” the report’s authors write.
The report calls for a “national renewal” education to teach future American citizens the basic principles and character necessary to practice these principles. According to the authors, teaching patriotism does not mean ignoring the shortcomings of the nation’s past, but rather viewing history with a clear and healthy attitude of reverence and love.
The report warns that U.S. colleges and universities are doing just the opposite, having become “hotbeds of anti-Americanism, defamation of America and shielding of authentic information” with the intention of “manipulating views rather than educating minds.
The report singles out historian Howard Zinn and Pulitzer Prize winner Project 1619 for preventing students from seeing the humanity, kindness and benevolence of American historical figures. Instead, they present a distorted version of American history to young readers.
The report reads, “American historical revisionism tramples on honest scholarship and historical truth, shames Americans by emphasizing only the sins of their ancestors, and preaches a systemic racism that can only be eliminated through more discrimination. It is an ideology designed to manipulate views rather than educate minds.”
The revival of American unity will depend on the willingness of every American to stand up against the tyranny they face in their daily lives, the report says.
The report states, “Above all, we must bravely confront petty tyrants in every sphere who demand of us that we can only talk about the evils of America and deny its greatness.” “We have the right to stand up for America at home, in our schools, in our workplaces, and around the world. It is the people, and only the people, who can defend our way of life.”
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