Trumps "Patriotic education" -- a merger of Stephen Miller's fascism with Mike Pence's fundamentalism
Very good article.
‘Patriotic Education’ Is How White Supremacy Survives
No, Trump can’t rewrite school curriculums himself, but a thousand mini-Trumps on the nation’s school boards can
https://gen.medium.com/patriotic-education-is-how-white-supremacy-survives-d92a944e14a
Jeff Sharlet 8 hours ago·10 min read
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Schoolchildren pledging allegiance in the 1950s. Photo: Lambert/Getty Images
It feels strange, as mourners gather outside the Supreme Court, to be writing of anything but the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the looming prospect that Donald Trump will seal the court into a new era of right-wing absolutism unprecedented in our lifetimes. It’s hard not to think of the future, of all that will be lost. But the past, too, is under threat. 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. 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, 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.
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Too often our schools gloss over the intricacies and struggles of Black liberation
gen.medium.com
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 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..
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God forbid that young children would be brought up to think like Trump.
