How America’s New Civics Text, The 1619 Project, Uses History to Justify Big Government—And Why Universities and Media Need Republican Reforms
When President Trump came into the White House after an unpredicted electoral victory, liberals still predicted what to expect: a push to dismantle the “deep state” and “drain the swamp” by people out to destroy the system. But destruction for destruction’s sake isn’t the purpose of the new conservative project. Its purpose is to rein in national institutions that are trying to regulate Americans and rewrite Americans’ views. Nowhere is the need for this reining in more obvious than in civics education, where a three year old text has begun circulating rapidly in schools around the country. This text, the most important civics text of the past fifty years, a bombshell that hit the world of American history in 2019, was The 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s redefinition of American history that placed "the consequences of slavery and the contribution of Black Americans at the very center of the United States' national narrative." What the Project is saying and how it came to be show the need for the institutional cleanup conservatives are pushing—and the forces arrayed against us.
The lead essay of the project asked, rhetorically, about Black Americans, "what if America understood, finally, in this 400th year, that we have never been the problem but the solution?" The project emphasized that "to this day, black Americans, more than any other group, embrace the democratic ideals of a common good" and defined these goods as universal healthcare, a higher minimum wage, the acceptance of more refugees and affirmative action, all Democratic Party positions that call for a larger national government. It didn’t mention that the displacement of large numbers of American Blacks and American Indians and the slow de-industrialization of the Black, White and immigrant working class were also consequences of a large national government since 1945. In this civics lesson, there was no middle ground.
It was distributed by the hundreds of thousands for free to schools, museums and libraries, even though it was criticized by some historians and one of the experts consulted for the project as having a major flaw: calling the preservation of slavery a major motive for the American Revolution. Hannah-Jones dismissed her critics as “old white men.” Dissent was limited to The World Socialist Website, The Wall Street Journal and a Czech magazine. According to the historian Sean Wilentz, a tenured professor at Princeton University, whose dissent was published in the Czech magazine,
it is also an open secret that many historians are simply intimidated about saying anything too loudly, too publicly, lest criticizing in any way The 1619 Projects or offshoots invites being labelled and mobbed as a racist on Twitter, thereby endangering their careers.
As one of the 1619 contributors noted, getting the tone of the push, "a re-education is necessary." By Oscars season 2020 The Times was running ads for the re-education program featuring the actress Janelle Monae, framed by the tagline: "The truth can change how we see the world."
Some of The 1619 Project is rooted in a big truth: Black Americans’ rightful sense that they’ve been blamed for sixty years for changes in their communities that they had nothing to do with, especially de-industrialization and the move of Black professionals from cities to suburbs. But the actual content of The 1619 Project is a product of America’s big institutions: universities, media, Hollywood, the Democratic Party. Its claims come from 10 years of insider institutional politics—and these politics come from a much less helpful place. It’s a place meant to justify institutional power using American history—with an insistence that’s new and dangerous.
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The original shift, the one that’s passed through political and social changes into The 1619 Project, happened in history departments. Its best barometer is a friendly New York Times interview with the historian Woody Holton, a prominent defender of the Project, which provides a bigger clue as to what’s happened in the field of history:
…A Harvard historian named Bernard Bailyn, who just died last year…was really writing the books that formed how people think about the Revolution
…And Bailyn’s great insight…was the American Revolution was an emotional event. And he didn’t use this word, but it really gets at what he was thinking, that the people that we’ve all heard of — the Adams cousins, John Adams and Sam Adams, John Hancock, even Ben Franklin in Pennsylvania and the Lawrences in South Carolina, where I live and work — they were paranoid.
That is, if you’re not a paranoid person…I can slap you on the back, and you’ll go, OK, well, he’s one of those people like Biden who likes to make physical contact. But if you are a paranoid person, I could just try to shake your hand, and you get all nervous. What’s this guy doing? Is he trying to steal my wallet? What’s going on here?
And Bailyn’s great insight was that the people who brought us the American Revolution, he used the word “conspiracy.” They had a conspiratorial cast of mind. And that’s why I use the word “paranoid” because it makes it even more clear. Another word for it would be just touchy. There’s people that I can cut off in traffic, and I don’t get shot. And there’s other people that I look at them wrong, and I do get shot. And they were more of the latter. The people who gave us the American Revolution were touchy….
The main points here are about Bailyn, the most important American historian for any American who takes an argument against dominion seriously. And they point to where Holton’s counter-argument is headed. Fundamentally, it’s a rejection of the ideas that drove the Revolution as anything to be taken seriously at all. In Holton’s framing, they’re not ideas, they’re conspiracies. And Holton’s stand is probably not coincidental, because ideas like the Revolutionaries are at large in the world today among Republicans. Understanding the link takes a look back at Bailyn’s histories.
Bailyn did his most influential work in the 1960s, part of a new middle class allowed into the universities thanks to government funding on education after 1945 to mobilize America’s research universities against the Soviets. As a result, American historians like Bailyn felt free to look at something they'd never studied before: what the Americans who led the revolution and the ones who wrote about it, well-off but also middle-class and rabble-rousing colonists, had to say about what they were doing.
They found a set of ideas that were very defined and had a long lineage dating back to the ancient Roman republic. These ideas centered on the civic idea of citizenship and its opposite, dominion: any situation, from Roman emperors who took over the Republic to English monarchs who tried to muzzle Parliament, where leaders set the terms of peoples’ lives without their consent. The colonists, who had settled the tip of a frighteningly wide continent and conducted most of their business in their legislatures but relied on Britain for military support and some rules of trade, believed in this idea of accountable government. For some, it was a matter of life and death: in 1763, western Pennsylvanian settlers angry that the legislature in Philadelphia wouldn’t support them against Indian attacks led a countryside revolt. It took Benjamin Franklin to stop them marching on Philadelphia.
Starting in the 1760s, the Administration of the British Empire tried to take this right to representation away: it used method after method to tax the colonists without the consent of their legislatures. This affected more than colonial leaders or westerners; the taxes took money out of the hands of urchins and artisans, cobblers and farmers, and they did it without their consent. Like a lot of assertions that offend something fundamental in people, Britain’s efforts to contrive a tax (Stamp Tax, Import Tax, Tea Tax, etc.) ensured growing political resistance from the ground. Some colonists were more educated and worldly than others—Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence to justify to potential European allies exactly why Americans were righteous in going to war. But they were all operating from the same fundamental playbook: resistance to arbitrary power and dominion.
This was how the Revolution started—and this is what Bailyn discovered by pouring through pamphlets of the period. It’s also what his most successful student and another of Holton’s targets, Gordon Wood, built on. Wood traced how ordinary Americans who had been shut out of politics in the colonial period took this logic to claim a place for themselves. According to Holton, in the same interview, Wood only cares about the Founders as figures to give Americans “unity”—but Wood’s histories show that unity had very little to do with anything; fighting power did.
So why is this reality getting lost? One reason is a scholarly one. Over the past thirty years, since the 1990s, American historians have begun to focus in a different direction than the history of ideas. Instead they’ve looked at the way that peoples’ concerns were expressed even closer to the ground: in a newspaper article or diary, by the random participant in a rally you’ve never heard of, or the sister of a famous colonial American leader you’ve never heard of either.
But over the last ten years, that shift in focus has become politicized, in tandem with a lot of other shifts. In academic humanities departments, hiring decisions are made on the basis of whether or not research is being conducted on a marginalized group. As university bureaucracies have grown, so has the number of administrators supporting student identity activism over racial, gender and sexual politics. At the same time, partisan changes, like higher earning media consumers who work for larger institutions going Democrat, have pushed those politics to the forefront of media. All of these groups are pushing the same line: larger national government. The 1619 Project is a natural outcome of this confluence: originating in universities which need government funding, pushed by a media selling to higher-earning Democrats, put out into public schools which Democrats want to fund, and justifying government expansion as protecting marginalized groups.
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The 1619 Project is the biggest sign of the same shift happening in quieter ways in all of these institutions—academia, university campuses, the media—tied into the Democratic Party’s pushes on policy. And none of it is a conspiracy—it’s well-connected people thinking along the same lines and pushing arguments to support what they want or believe.
In history departments and academia, writers like Holton, Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman and Kermit Roosevelt III are putting out books arguing that, since the Constitution allowed slavery, the real founding moment of the country happened in 1865, when slavery was abolished by a strong national government. That, in turn, means that the Founders’ division of power between the states and the nation that’s embodied in the Constitution is no longer valid. These books by Feldman, who testified at Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial against him, and Roosevelt, the grandson of one of the key early members of a CIA funded by an expanding national government, come out at a suggestive time. It’s as Democrats are pushing to break the filibuster in the name of racial justice and pass the Voting Rights Act—both direct assaults on state powers that have existed in the federal system since 1787. President Biden went so far as to compare Democratic opponents of both pushes to segregationists—which is the argument Feldman and Roosevelt are pushing from an academic perch.
The situation is just as bad in the public parts of universities. Students at Princeton, to use a recent example, were treated as part of their required orientation to examples of systemic racism perpetrated by their institution. These examples included a sitting tenured professor who had publicly objected to a 2020 letter signed by more than 300 Princeton faculty and staff that proposed increasing the university administration substantially to combat racism on campus. And this orientation, at least the part given by associate professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta, had a broader point: introducing the idea that free speech is a privilege not a right.
When I speak about the privileges that we have I am particularly intent on one of those privileges. This is the privilege—especially for those of us who have the benefits of tenure—to exercise free speech. But I don’t mean free speech in the masculinized, bravado sense . . . I envision a free speech and an intellectual discourse that is flexed to one specific aim, and that aim is the promotion of social justice, and an anti-racist social justice at that.
Follow the logic to the next step: privileges, unlike rights, can be taken away. How far is this from the eighteenth century British redefinition of the colonial right to representation as a privilege adjustable by imperial administrators, only now it’s not in the name of monarchical power but of racial equity? And what does it mean that this push is happening during a presidential Administration that has promised to “embed[s] issues of racial equity in everything it does” and at a place that is seeding the people who will enter Democratic politics in just a few years?
In some ways, the mainstream media focus is clearest, so a single example is enough to make the point. Less than a year after The 1619 Project premiered in The New York Times, the magazine fired its editorial page editor for printing an opinions piece by Senator Tom Cotton arguing that National Guard troops be sent into some cities in response to racial protests. A Times staffer told CNN that the purge "had prompted meaningful conversations about systemic racial biases and diversity inside the newsroom," a statement later echoed by its incoming executive editor. The outcome of this episode converged with the paper's financial interests: according to a report from the online news site Axios that same year, the New York Times, publicly traded and so more pressured by shareholders than some of its competitors, was particularly focused on expanding opinion coverage, and "some argue that the Grey Lady's focus on subscriptions could cause its journalism to cater more to its mostly progressive and affluent subscriber base."
How can conservatives and Republicans respond to this concentrated push? The point of this piece is to show the need, not delve into policies, but one of the ways President Trump’s Administration tried to fix this problem was by signing an executive order tying national government funding of universities to their promotion of free inquiry. This isn’t a small move: according to the public transparency organization Open the Books, $41.5 billion of the eight Ivy League schools’ money “could be traced back to taxpayer-funded payments and benefits” meaning that “the average amount of money that the eight Ivy League schools received annually over that time period — $4.31 billion — exceeds the amount of money received by 16 of the 50 states.”
These is just one ideas. But conservatives need to think of more, and keep thinking. When they do this they aren’t destroying the institutions—they’re making targeted efforts to curb them, to save them, because the institutions won’t do it for themselves.