Image Source: WhiteHouse.gov
This week, the White House released the first of a series of American History videos to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the U.S.A. sweepingly titled “The Story of America.” These videos were produced by the “White House Salute to America 250 Task Force” and Hillsdale College. These are filled with glaring omissions, distortions, and outright factual errors, but these are what one has come to expect from the official version of “patriotic education.” While the specifics matter, what is in many ways more interesting is how the introduction to this series, by Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn, exposes the dark inner logic of MAGA thinking about the past and the nation’s essence.
The introductory video begins with a montage of sweeping panoramas, presidents, battles, moon launches, baseball, interned Japanese children waving little flags, and Dr. King’s March on Washington. Arnn is seated in a cavernous and stately but empty room, flanked by two American flags, and speaks in a hushed and reverent voice of how President Trump wants to do things “again” and this is like remembering or even history! “This places him somewhere near the politics of Abraham Lincoln,” Arnn observes, in a statement both absurd and segueing to a dangerous misreading of the meaning of the American experience.
What is the point of repetition? What is the glorious moment that we need to return to “again”? It is, Arnn says, the moment of Washington and the Declaration of Independence. According to “The Story of America”, this was no ordinary moment and the signing of the Declaration was no ordinary event. The Declaration was not just parchment, not just a resolution, but an expression of “eternal laws, laws we don’t make, laws that are ever end forever…” This is because the Declaration expressed “the Laws of Nature and of nature’s God”. As such, Arnn labors to point out, the Declaration’s principles “means that it’s true now, if it was true then, and [if] it’s not true now, it was not true then. It excludes any idea of a change in the fundamental conditions.”
Dr. Arnn is not the first scholar to imply a divine origin to the birth of the U.S.A. Caroline Drinker Bowen made the bestseller lists in 1966 with her history of the drafting of the Constitution called Miracle at Philadelphia. Sacralizing America’s founding with intimations of divine intervention and smiling providence has been an element of American politics stretching back to the invention of the stump speech when such were actually delivered standing on a stump. Had Arnn stopped there, flopping back in his overstuffed chair overcome with exhaustion from the visitation of the Holy Ghost, all would have been as expected–this is, after all, merely the prerequisite of patriotic education.
The deeper problem arises when Arnn then distorts the sweep and trajectory of all that follows. To Arnn, and presumably to the White House and the MAGA movement it represents, the course of American history has been a steady decline from that founding perfection. Arnn accomplishes this by framing the Civil War not as a conflict over the question of what were the principles of the nation but as a fight simply to restore the ideals of the Framers: “Washington did something for the first time extremely honorable, including the defense of the Declaration of Independence on battlefields… Abraham Lincoln comes along later and he wants to restore all of that. He took the view that that was a very hard thing to do, but it wasn’t a new thing to do…”
This is a fundamental distortion of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the nature of the nation’s bloodiest war. As Gary Willis shows in his brilliant Lincoln at Gettysburg, Lincoln’s short speech was in fact a clarion call for the nation to fulfill the ideals IT HAD NOT YET REALIZED. The key moment in the address was when Lincoln summoned his listeners, and all Americans, to “the great task remaining before us”, to fight for “a new birth of freedom.” These words ring because they speak of the realization and the truth that Lincoln had arrived at: not only could a house divided not stand, but that a nation founded on slavery could not also be one of law, of liberty, or of a people’s government.
Here, then, is exposed the inner logic of this “Story of America.” It is the pious belief that the USA was born in perfection and has since steadily fallen from that Eden. There never was a need for a “new birth of freedom” because the original white settler slave state permitted all the freedom and justice the nation required.
More episodes are scheduled to drop soon and it is hard to imagine how they will tell an uplifting story when all our greatness is twelve score and nine years in the past.
Timothy Messer-Kruse is the author of The Patriots’ Dilemma: White Abolitionism and Black Banishment in the Founding of the United States of America (Pluto Press, 2024).
