We Need Civics Education — Not The White Power Propaganda Trump Promotes
Americans are, as I’ve noted before, appallingly ignorant of their own history and institutions. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni found in a survey of college graduates that less than 20 percent could accurately identify in a multiple-choice survey the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. One-third did not know that Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, and nearly half could not correctly identify the term lengths of senators and representatives.
No one exemplifies this dangerous ignorance more than President Trump. He reportedly had no idea what happened at Pearl Harbor, and he has said that there were airports during the War of Independence; that Andrew Jackson was “really angry” about the Civil War, which occurred 16 years after his death; and that Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895, “is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more.”
Even more worryingly, Trump seems unaware of the rule of law or the separation of powers — the bedrocks upon which our constitutional republic is built. “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he said, which would certainly come as news to the Founders.
So in theory it’s a not a bad thing that Trump unveiled an initiative last week to reinvigorate civics education. The president himself would be a prime beneficiary of any such schooling. But, of course, what Trump announced is not a serious educational undertaking — something that is badly needed. His speech Thursday at the National Archives was simply the latest salvo in his campaign to try to convince his White supporters that the country they love will be destroyed by a pack of anarchists and radicals led, improbably enough, by Joe Biden.
“The left has warped, distorted, and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies,” said a president not known for his own fidelity to the truth. He pointedly named his project the 1776 Commission, to distinguish it from the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning series, the 1619 Project, which he said “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.”
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But the 1619 Project, if shorn of inaccuracies, plays a useful role in correcting an earlier version of “patriotic” U.S. history that Trump seems eager to revive. This was the triumphalist narrative crafted by White historians who played down the crimes committed against African Americans, Native Americans and other people of color. This older history also promoted pernicious Southern myths about the glories of the “Lost Cause” and the evils of Reconstruction and largely ignored the experiences of women and minorities. Trump is an inveterate racist who denies that “White privilege” exists, embraces nationalism and seeks to protect the monuments of traitors who waged war on the United States to preserve slavery. He wants schools to ratify his own prejudices, not to teach what actually happened.