Patriotic Education and the End of History

Or, a brief history of today's erasure of history.

Cedarville Township, Michigan

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.

Some years ago, I took a course in “patriotic history,” subjecting myself to a term of textbooks such as United States History for Christian Schools and The American Republic for Christian Schools and the teachings of scholars such as William Federer, author of America’s God and Country. This oddly titled collection of quotations (the United States is its own country, no?) was compiled to demonstrate Federer’s thesis that America is a Christian nation, the separation of church and state described by Thomas Jefferson as a “wall” actually a myth. The wall is one-way, argued Federer then and Mike Pence now, meant to protect churches from the state but not the state from the churches of a nation made, in this vision of the past, by Christians, for Christians.

Lest that sound fringe, consider that last week [2020] the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Election Commission declared separation of church and state a “fallacy” and falsely claimed that John Adams deemed the Constitution Christian. (He did not.) Bringing this unsolicited history lesson into the present, the FEC chairman further signed on to the idea that the 2020 election he’s charged with overseeing is a “spiritual war” to return the United States to a “Christian moral foundation” — despite the explicit work of the founders to guarantee both freedom of and from religion.

“Patriotic education” — a merger of Stephen Miller’s fascism with Mike Pence’s fundamentalism — is both old and new. It is a return to the “great man” vision of history long taught (and still often taught) to our children, not to mention the biblical education that dominated American schools until the 1930s. But what once was an unexamined given of a white supremacist system is now a weapon, mobilized in explicit opposition to examination of slavery’s centrality in U.S. history. As Jean Guerrero writes in Hatemonger, her political biography of Trump commissar Stephen Miller, Trump’s intellectuals recognize the larger restructuring of knowledge necessary to the triumph of personality as power. For Miller and the cynics and believers who provide Trump with the targets to which he applies his invective, Trump isn’t everyman, he’s uberman. His “victories” — whether in fact or in declaration — are presented as “your” victories. You win when he wins, because whiteness wins. “That which God has given us,” as Trump proclaimed on July Fourth at Mount Rushmore. That speech, in which Trump paid tribute to the genocidal doctrine of Manifest Destiny, was widely seen as his historical turn, the moment in which his speechwriters began to retrofit “Make America Great Again” with a right-wing revisionist history that casts Trump’s ascendency as inevitable.

But Trump has long subscribed to a typically Trumpian take on what Nietzsche called “the uses and abuses of history.” Overlooked in 2016 was an early meeting with conservative evangelical leaders at which, according to Christian bestseller God’s Chaos Candidate by Trump evangelical adviser Lance Wallnau, Trump proposed his merger with the Christian right in “historical” terms: “We had such a long period of Christian consensus in our culture that we kind of got... spoiled. Is that the right word?” he asked. “We’ve had it easy as Christians for a long time in America. That’s been changing.” In public, he spoke of “our Christian heritage,” a phrase so seemingly absurd coming from his mouth that critics failed to take stock of the historical project embedded within it. Privately, he told this gathering of evangelical leaders that “Christians” — he’d picked up on their belief in themselves as the only ones worthy of the name — had gotten “soft,” that it was time to be hard, to concede nothing, to brand it all — past as well as future.

“Trump spoke their language and told their stories,” writes Harvard Divinity School scholar Lauren R. Kerby in her book Saving History, a study of the booming Christian nationalist alt-history tourism industry. That is, he distilled Christian nationalism’s historical jeremiad of a fallen nation into a four-word formula for its certain restoration: “Make America Great Again.” At Mount Rushmore, and again at the National Archives on Thursday, he spoke of history not as the ongoing study of an only partly knowable past but as an “unstoppable” force. There is no debate to be had, no consideration, for instance, of the 1619 Project as part of a larger conversation — only variables to be plugged into a fundamentalist equation of history that always equals Trump.

So it was no surprise when Dr. Larry Arnn, president of conservative Hillsdale College, opened Thursday’s proceedings by quoting George Orwell’s 1984: “He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.” Dr. Arnn, whose scholarly work on the “divine” origin of the Constitution is not as well-known as his dismissive description of minority students as “dark ones,” was slightly misquoting Orwell, but such errors have become protocol for P.E. — patriotic education — instructors. When William Federer of America’s God and Country tried to quote the same passage to me, he attributed it to Orson Welles — inadvertently apt, since Welles’ most famous film was Citizen Kane, a fictionalization of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, American jingoist forebear of Fox News. It is also, as it happens, one of Trump’s two favorite movies (the other is The Godfather). The Right’s parasitical genius is its repurposing of critiques of power for the sake of power’s glory.

As much could be said for the entire project of “patriotic education.” Dr. Arnn argued, falsely, that school children are taught only the villainy of Jefferson — that he was a slave owner but not that he was critical of slavery. He was both, of course, even if the latter didn’t lead him to liberate the human beings he kept as private property. For Arnn, apparently, it’s the thought that counts. Patriotic education implicitly makes Jefferson’s critique of slavery into the only fact that matters with regard to the 600 Black lives Jefferson held in monstrous captivity across the span of his one “great” lifespan , just as in the speech that followed the panel Trump declared the enshrinement of slavery in the Constitution as a kind of precondition for white America’s act of abolition. Freedom, in this telling, wasn’t a result of Black struggle, it was the fruit of the very white supremacy that necessitated it. Such is the same logic as the “American carnage” Trump now declares he will resolve.

Of course, this isn’t logic at all. It’s theology, a form of what Rousas John Rushdoony, the ultra-right father of the modern Christian education movement, viewed as “providential history” — history written with an eye for God’s interventions. Trump, of course, need not undertake such a study; in his mind, and that of many of his followers, he is the intervention. But American students will need to be taught to see such truths as clearly as the Chosen One. “Who, knowing the facts of our history,” begins a junior high textbook popular with the patriotic education set, “can doubt the U.S. has been a thought in the mind of God from all eternity?” Trump said so himself on Thursday, describing the inexorable process that brought America “your favorite president” as “the fulfillment of a thousand years of Western civilization.”

In Trump’s vision for patriotic education, the past is confirmation of the present. “Heritage,” like inheritance (say, $413 million, the amount bequeathed Trump by his father), like the “good genes” for which he praised his nearly all-white crowd in Minnesota last Friday night after a tirade about “patriotic education,” is as much a fundamentalist concept as biblical literalism. Your father is your father, and his father his. There is nothing to interpret, only a genealogical — and a racial — inheritance to claim.

Back during my own course in patriotic history, Bill Apelian, director of Bob Jones University Press, one of the biggest publishers of Christian educational materials, told me he liked to think of history as “Heritage Studies,” a chronology of “God’s working in man.” The same paradoxical logic as in Arnn’s deployment of 1984 comes into play in that idea: Patriotic education is objective and yet through divine influence on history’s heroes it is immune to the discovery of previous overlooked facts, such as Jefferson’s relationship with enslaved Sally Hemmings, as documented in 2009 by Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed, or George Washington’s pursuit of escaped slaves, as documented in 2017 by Rutgers historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar. Such are the challenges of scholars who actually work in archives like the one in which Trump staged his conference on American history, for whom actual evidence outweighs the myth of inevitability. But Heritage Studies is a cult of personality. History matters not for its progression of “fact, fact, fact” according to Christian nationalist educator Michael McHugh, but for the “key personalities” that determine it. Not social forces or popular movements, certainly not structural racism or anything that really acknowledges race at all. The “great man” view of history is, ultimately, a strongman’s view. History is merely the object upon which it gazes. He who looks, he who names — Trump, Trump, Trump, it’s all branding — is its hero and its true concern.

Trump doesn’t need to know the particulars of Christian nationalist history to know it points to him. He surely doesn’t know John Witherspoon, the only pastor to sign the Declaration of Independence, from whom many Christian nationalist intellectuals derive a means of viewing divine rule as a democratic outcome. It is enough for Trump to be familiar with men such as General MacArthur, another “key personality” celebrated in nationalist education despite — or because — he was fired for steering the U.S. toward what could have been World War III. That’s what “patriotic education” wants American boys to be. (Girls, meanwhile, are patriotic education’s parenthetical, not actors but acted upon, venerated by history’s heroes lest they be violated by its villains.) These men are in Trump’s terms “killers,” on the right side of history’s division of humanity into winners with “killer instincts” and losers without it. Or, more simply, the rulers and the ruled, who should be grateful for each other.

They are, they are. You see it at Trump’s rallies, arena-sized classes in patriotic education, rituals in mutual recognition at which the crowd sees greatness in Trump and he sees his greatness reflected in their eyes. Critics of Trumpism puzzle over how he can speak so brazenly of “mob violence” — Secretary of Health and Human Services Ben Carson opened the White House Conference on American History by framing it as a response to the “mob violence” of a “coordinated attack” on American history and humanity itself — when he thrills his masses to screaming rage and ecstasy. He praises those who “hit back,” he revels in grotesquely detailed accounts of hurt endured (by American martyrs, mostly female and blonde, victims of immigrant “animals”) and inflicted (by American warriors, mostly on Muslims). He unknowingly invokes “regeneration through violence,” as historian Richard Slotkin described “the mythology of the American frontier.” But when liberals cry hypocrisy, they reveal only the impoverishment of our schools and the danger of actually studying such history. “Mobs,” they should have learned, are the many, lacking a hero to unite them. “Our people,” as Trump calls those he says may be moved to violence, will move as one, agents not of social forces but the great man’s will. They will move against America’s enemies. They are not masses but a singular mass, and it sees what Trump sees, present, past, and future.

***

I published the above in 2020 before the election. One of Trump’s last actions, on MLK Day in 2021, was to leave a blueprint for the executive order signed today, in 2025. I wrote about it for Vanity Fair, in an article titled “The 1776 Report is Trump’s Last Gasp of State-Sponsored Hate.” Not my title! I didn’t think it would be the end. I didn’t realize, though, just how much of a beginning it was.

The article is behind a paywall, so I’ll post it here:

It’s perhaps fitting that one of Trump’s last gasps in office, the “1776 Report”—revisionist guidelines for teaching U.S. history—came on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which in right-wing circles marks a massive celebration of misappropriation. Ted Cruz, facing the horrors of a Biden administration, quoted King, calling on us to have “the courage to face the uncertainties of the future”; gun-toting representative Lauren Boebert, who described the white supremacist mob before it attacked the Capitol as “her constituents outside [the] building,” cited King’s 1963 book Strength to Love, much of which was written in jail. But it was a local Las Vegas politician, Councilwoman Victoria Seaman, who most fully expressed the right’s bizarro-world distortion of MLK and history when she invoked King to condemn…Black Lives Matter protests.

Such is the spirit of 1776 as conveyed in this report, likely to become a blueprint for millions of red state and Christian academy children. It’s also a window into what’s already there: the curriculum of textbooks such as The American Republic for Christian Schools and homeschooling programs that celebrate Confederate general Stonewall Jackson’s birthday; the hugely popular “history” produced by David Barton, a former math teacher whose organization advises GOP leaders that the irksome wall between church and state was actually meant to protect the church from state authority—not the other way around.

That view is one of the foundations of this “new” report, which, eked out on the penultimate full day of Trump’s presidency, is mostly meant as a means of mainstreaming Christian nationalism into the very public schools it disdains. It’s authored by a handful of right-wing scholars and businessmen, plus the founder of Patrick Henry College, created for conservative homeschoolers and Charlie Kirk, the smirking face of far-right student group Turning Point USA, who himself dropped out of college to devote his days to campaigning against what’s taught at college.

What Kirk and co. appear to hate most is the discipline of history itself, one in which the study of the past is not fixed but ever subject to new research, evidence, and yes—because we are human—interpretation. Stop right there, says the Commission. The “facts,” it says, are settled, and so, too, their meaning. These “facts” of history “provide necessary—and wise cautions against unrealistic hopes and checks against pressing…utopian agendas too hard or too far”—a sentiment that may be more concisely phrased as “stay in your place.” Beneath this not-so-great notion appears a picture of Washington crossing the Delaware; a page down we find MLK on the Washington Mall, his hand raised, presumably, as a “check” against the crowd’s “unrealistic hopes.”

King appears again in a section of the report titled “Challenges to America’s Principles,” under the heading “Racism and Identity Politics”—equal “challenges” in the report’s view, as if the demand for diversity is every bit as hateful as, say, lynching. The report hijacks King and makes of his memory a missile it aims at his legacy: “The Civil Rights Movement,” reads the report, “was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders.” The awful outcome, according to the report, is “social justice,” which it equates to the views of John C. Calhoun, the seventh vice president and one of history’s most ardent advocates of enslaving Black people.

The report does acknowledge slavery as one of the “challenges” of American history, but Trump’s Commission warns against pressing that critique “too hard or too far.” For instance, those who fault Jefferson for enslaving 600 human beings, have had a “devastating effect on our civic unity.” Not slavery’s legacy; its critics. What’s special about America, they contend, was its eventual renunciation of slavery—some 61 years after Haiti, decades after England, only by force of arms, and in many ways incomplete to this day. But don’t let those fixed facts get in the way of history’s MAGA mission. Looked at in the proper light, suggests the report, the Three-Fifths Compromise—by which slaves were counted for the representational purposes of slave states as three fifths of a human being—was a good thing. “Practical politics,” says the report. Unity, in the upside-down vernacular of the post-insurrection Republican Party.

Premature abolition, argues the Commission—forcing free white men to give up their property, which is what the right interprets as “the pursuit of happiness”—could have led to despotism. So too, Black Americans demanding equal protection under the law today—that is, not getting shot by police—is seen by many on the right as a form of tyranny. In fact, the report proposes, it is slavery, not the freedom struggle, that is the “direct ancestor” of such “destructive theories that today divide our people.”

Allow me a breath; this document is not just absurd. It’s worse than ugly. It is profane. As the Trump administration leaves, it screams hate to the last.

The next “challenge” faced by the U.S., according to the report, which does not mention Native Americans at all, was—wait for it—“Progressivism.” That’s the movement that brought us child labor laws and the 40-hour work week. But what the Commission really loathes is the civil service, a.k.a. the “shadow government.” Read: the deep state, a shout-out to QAnon, presented here in Q’s own horror-movie terms: “it continues to grow around us.”

Much like fascism, the “challenge” that follows. “Like the Progressives,” begins the section, “Mussolini”—and I’ll stop right there. Besides, proposes the report, communism was a much bigger problem, even now, because college, where the wicked thought of Marx (and George Soros) “pervades much of academia and the intellectual and cultural spheres.”

Perhaps Lenin put it best: What is to be done? “Patriotic Education.” It starts with “The Role of the Family,” which is to “reclaim [the] duty to raise up morally responsible citizens who love America.” Reclaim from whom? Public school teachers, who “demean America’s heritage.” The antidote? Faith. Indeed, the report proposes, there may not be an America without the “pulpits, sermons, and publications of Christian instructors.” There could not be a clearer statement of Christian nationalism, the far right’s insistence that the U.S. is a Christian nation in which other faiths are suffered only so long as they pay deference to the “fixed laws” of God. A casual reader, brainwashed by public education, might wonder what these are. Chief among them, know Christian nationalists, for whom “natural law” has long been a bulwark against secularism, is gender. God created man and woman. Fixed law. There are, I should note, no women included in the report’s 11 images, though in one, the sun falls beatifically on a little blonde white girl raising her hand.

The longest section of the report is an appendix dedicated to further attacks on “identity politics,” named here as the wicked lovechild of not just John C. Calhoun but also the midcentury refugee intellectuals known as the Frankfurt School—Adorno, Marcuse, Walter Benjamin. It’s a charge that brings to mind another bracing critique of identity politics that begins with an assault on the Frankfurt School: 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, better known as the manifesto with which the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik justified killing 77 people in his attempt to stop the tide of “Cultural Marxism.” Does the connection seem extreme? Consider that Breivik was, in fact, plagiarizing influential American conservative writer, William Lind. Think of those who would violently defend the states of Confederate traitors. Or simply look at the insurrectionist mob, which launched its war on democracy with a hashtag it believed to be rooted in history, #1776. Such are the claims of this Commission.

Update 2025: And now, such are the state-mandated lies of our classrooms.