The news cycle moves so fast now that you may have already forgotten Thursday’s outrage, Trump’s announcement of a “1776 Commission” to promote a “patriotic education” that defines love of country as unquestioning loyalty to (some of) its leaders.
That’s the lede of an essay I published for a now-defunct publication called Gen—in 2020. Update: The news cycle moves so fast now you may not know yet about Wednesday’s, today’s, executive order, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” It’s the culmination of that 1776 Commission, mocked, at the time, as “just theater.”
I’ve written about that cliche of political journalism before, “just theater.” The way it immunizes political reporters from the contagion of alleged hysteria. Lets them keep believing that the kind of politics they were trained to cover—horse race, who’s hot, who’s not, sometimes even policy—are still what really matters.
Now, the “theater” of the 1776 Commission matters as much as the A-B-Cs of our kids’ schools. The title of the piece I published in 2020 was “‘Patriotic Education’ is How White Supremacy Survives.”
That was the first of two pieces I wrote on the process at the end of Trump’s first term which led to this executive order. They’re both behind paywalls, so I’m going to post what’s relevant—some history of this erasure of history—below.
The first article, from Gen, details the roots of the lies in textbooks created for fundamentalist homeschoolers and students of Christian academies of the sort to which another executive order issued today will transfer significant taxpayer funds. The second, from Vanity Fair, is a close read of the report Trump released four years ago on MLK Day—which, if you’re keeping up, you know will no longer be observed in a growing number of federal agencies.
Here’s the first piece:
…But Trump — and the aides who drove the project — have more in mind than the current moment. “Patriotic education” is his historical hydroxychloroquine, a know-nothing attempt to cover up the past that challenges his present — the 1619 Project and generations of work by scholars and activists to recognize the centrality of white supremacy in American history and to topple it, just like the Confederacy’s stone tributes to treason and hate.
Liberals who want to dismiss Trump’s latest salvo as so much campaign fodder point to the fact that the federal government doesn’t set school curriculums — a failure yet again to grasp that Trumpism is a noxious movement as much or more than the work of a man; that, while no, Trump can’t instill “patriotic education” in the nation’s schools [Update 2025: He has], a thousand mini-Trumps, school board strongmen, can; and that many more teachers will censor themselves for fear of running afoul of parents such as the one who, according to NPR, wrote that America-hating faculty will only grasp what Trump called “the magnificent truth” of our past “once they’re looking into the barrel of a gun.” Christian nationalists have been getting that gun ready for a long time. Patriotic education isn’t a last-minute campaign stunt of 2020. It’s the result of a decades-long effort, beginning with a modern Christian right that built its power not through national elections but through local school boards.