Former President Trump’s 1776 Commission has issued a report that summarizes “the principles of the American founding and how those principles have shaped our country.” It will be the only such report – President Biden swiftly dissolved the commission by executive order after being sworn into office on Wednesday.
Biden’s decision is regrettable because “The 1776 report calls for a return to the unifying ideals stated in the Declaration of Independence,” as Chairman Larry P. Arnn, Vice-Chair Carol Swain, and Executive Director Matthew Spalding said in a statement. “It quotes the greatest Americans, black and white, men and women, in devotion to these ideals.”
The report rejects the teachings of historians such as Howard Zinn, The New York Times’s 1619 Project, and other efforts aimed at fundamentally transforming how Americans view their country’s history. Neither hiding America’s flaws nor offering a triumphal account of American history, the 1776 Commission aimed to recover “our shared identity rooted in our founding principles” – which, its report argues, is “the path to a renewed American unity and a confident American future.”
“Our country’s founding principles are the key to a peaceful, self-governing people,” Arnn stated, “and the 1776 Commission sets out to educate the American public about them. The Commission’s report is an approachable introduction to the historical facts of the founding and the principles that animate it.”
Beginning with an overview of American founding principles and the constitutional architecture that the Founders fashioned to secure them, the report then catalogs the various threats to republican government and proposes tools that Americans can use to recover a way of life conducive to republican citizenship.
Though not denying that America was founded by a particular people with a particular history, religion, and virtues, the report stresses that the nation was nevertheless founded on the universal principles enunciated in the Declaration. This is why Abraham Lincoln argued by implication in the Gettysburg Address that the United States celebrates its birthday on July 4, 1776…
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