The report itself does not amount to much. It is the detritus of the waning days of the Trump administration, a bit of unfinished business sent out the door in the closing hours and now swept away by an incoming administration. But as a study in the growth of right-wing pseudohistory, it's a key document.
As pseudohistory, it argues from ideology rather than evidence, starting with an argument -- that all bad things come from the left -- and then pretzeling the past to fit a politically expedient thesis, one that deliberately erases the need to grapple with things like racism or contradiction. Under the Trump administration, proponents of this ideology reached a new peak of influence, and Trump's defeat does not relegate them to the fringe.
Reading history through the 1776 Commission's ideological lens produces some pretty strange conclusions. In the report, anti-racists and anti-fascists are the successors of enslavers and Nazis.John C. Calhoun, an ardent defender of slavery who argued that it was not "a necessary evil" but "a positive good," becomes, in the commission's telling, the father of identity politics. An appendix draws a straight line from Calhoun to today's civil rights activists -- the very ones who have committed themselves to dismantling White supremacy.
That bizarre argument is not original to the 1776 Commission. Over the past few decades, a cottage industry of right-wing histories has thrived in the United States, making up in sales what they lack in credibility.
But they do more than fatten their authors' wallets: they are part of the alternative reality constructed by conservative media. (Not coincidentally, many of the authors of these books are right-wing media figures, from Brian Kilmeade and Glenn Beck to Dinesh D'Souza and Bill O'Reilly.)
The master of the genre is D'Souza, and it's worth noting that the vice chair of the commission is a favorite of his, political scientist Carol Swain, who features heavily in his documentaries. Over the past decade, D'Souza has pumped out a steady stream of books and documentaries aimed at rewriting history so that every dark action can be traced to the Democratic Party and the modern left. The histories themselves are fatuous, as I've explored in-depth elsewhere, relying on the basic claim that the Democratic Party was pro-slavery in the 19th century so must necessarily be racist today.
That tissue-thin argument does not stand up to any rigorous scrutiny. But it's not meant to. The point of these pseudohistories is not to construct a careful argument about the past -- or to educate anyone looking to know more -- but rather a set of talking points that can be used to shut down any meaningful conversation about racism.