After last week’s post here at Civic Field’s on MAGA and the founders, the eminent public memory scholar Dave Tell sent me a friendly note challenging my claims. We ended up in a back-and-forth email exchange that helped clarify matters for both of us. Rather than hog all that I learned from Dave to myself, I asked him to write a response to my post here at Civic Fields, and he graciously obliged. Dave is a professor at the University of Kansas and the author of the highly esteemed book, Remembering Emmett Till, which became the basis of a Smithsonian exhibit, among many other things. Check it out!
In his October 2 post on Civic Fields, Ned O’Gorman argued that the founders are missing-in-action among the MAGA wing of the American Right.
The paucity of references to the founders and the inability to distinguish Steve Jobs from George Washington is, Ned argued, indicative of a political movement that has little capacity to wrestle with a complex past. In the absence of a textured historical reckoning, the habits of late capitalism, represented by Las Vegas, have colonized large sectors of American public life. When consumption is the dominant mode of citizenship, there is apparently no need to wrestle with the tangled legacies of the American founding.
I leap to agree... and disagree. I share Ned’s conviction that MAGA has no capacity to wrestle with a complex past. Even when they engage the American founding, it feels designed to provoke the most basic emotions of rage and pride. In the MAGA world, the founders are little more than clickbait.
And, yet, here’s where I differ perhaps: we have something to learn from the clickbait. The MAGA invocations of the founders may be ill-informed and reactionary, but by paying attention to the contexts in which the MAGA right talks about the founders, we can gain some insight into the engine that powers the clickbait. It is not just capitalist consumerism; it is also racism.
One could do worse than to date MAGA’s investment in the founders to November 2, 2020. With $90,000 carved out from the Department of Education, Trump spent the day before the election creating “The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission.” Its task was to advise the president on the “principles of the founding of the United States in 1776.”
The Commission met twice before releasing its official report on January 18, 2021, two days before Biden took office. It is a virtual love letter to the founders. The word “founders” appears 59 times in 45 pages. “Miraculously,” it gushes, the founders “achieved what they set out to achieve. They defeated the world’s strongest military and financial power and won their independence.”
The Commission included media personalities, lawyers, screenwriters, politicians, Heritage Foundation lackeys, and academics from Hillsdale College. It included no historians, save, perhaps, Victor Davis Hanson, whose Wikipedia page describes him as a “military historian.” The report referenced the founders incessantly—but it is a classic example of history-as-clickbait.
The liabilities of the Report notwithstanding, it demonstrates the meaning of the founders in the MAGA world. MAGA might not think about the founders very hard, but they talk about them constantly. Indeed, considered alongside the White House webpage dedicated to the “Founding Fathers” and the Trump administration’s efforts to force the Smithsonian to frame the founding as an “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness,” the Report seems like a 45-page primer on the MAGA approach to the founders distilled to its purist form: talk about them, but don’t think about them.
But why talk about them so much? With walls to build, people to deport, colleges to clamp down on, crypto to exploit, judges to fire, friends to appoint, vaccines to undermine, industries to deregulate, and agencies to weaponize—one might wonder why the Trump administration keeps talking about the founders.
Ned suggested an answer. He argued that foundings matter because they “anchor us to something bigger” than ourselves. They ground us in a “larger American project.”
If this is so, it is worth asking what larger project MAGA’s founder complex serves. To answer this question, we need to consider the precise wording of the charge given to the 1776 Commission: to advise the president on the “founding of the United States in 1776” (emphasis mine).
The year was the point. If the Trump administration was at pains to nail down July 1776 as the national birthday, it was because that very date had recently been called into question. Seventy-six days before the creation of the Commission, the New York Times Magazine published the 1619 Project—a collection of essays suggesting that the founding of the United States might be better dated to August 1619, the month that the first enslaved Africans came ashore at Jamestown, Virginia. While a few elements of the essay were not without criticism among professional historians, the 1619 Project effectively turned public attention to a different American founding.
The opening essay by Nikole Hannah Jones was a heart-rending cri-de-coeur and a studied retelling of the American founding. At the heart of her essay, Jones documented the contributions of Black Americans to the ideals articulated by the founders. Noting that movements for Black freedom provided templates for virtually every other freedom movement, Jones argued that to the extent that America lives up to its founding proposition that “all men are created equal,” it is because of the legacy of Black Americans. “As much democracy as this nation has today,” she wrote, “it has been borne on the back of black resistance.”
And if it is Black Americans who worked to turn Jefferson’s promise of equality into a shared reality, then perhaps we need to rethink who, precisely, counts as a founder. “Black Americans,” Jones concluded, “are this nation’s true ‘founding fathers.’”
The desire for a new slate of founders is as old as abolition. “The White people of the United States point to their Washington,” abolitionist Charles Remond proclaimed in the 1880s. “It is ours to point to [Crispus] Attucks of bygone days.” Casting aside the storied battles of Concord and Lexington, Remond’s comrade John Rock announced that the “only events in the history of this country that deserve to be commemorated are the organization of the Anti-Slavery Society and the insurrections of Nat Turner and John Brown.”
Every political dream comes with its own slate of founders. Building on the legacy of Remond and Rock—and DuBois and Baldwin and King—Jones and the other writers of the 1619 Project were expanding the list of founders in order to deliver the freedoms of which the MAGA-approved founders actively undermined for Black people.
Read against the backdrop of the 1619 Project, the 1776 Commission (and the founders complex to which it bears witness) can only be read as a bad-faith, evidence-be-damned attempt to disqualify Black Americans as a critical component of our country’s founding story. The narrative that remains makes it seem as if history itself supports the cruelest Trump initiatives. Why welcome immigrants if they’ve never contributed to the American dream? Why think creatively about enhancing diversity if we’ve always been pursuing a more perfect union? Why protect the rule of law if it’s never been threatened?
So long as the founders remain clickbait—invoked but not engaged—there are no answers to these questions. Why? Because the triumph of civic consumerism identified by Ned and the racism identified here are mutually reinforcing political habits. So long as the founders exist as clickbait—commodities to be owned and deployed—it’s all too easy to enroll them in a whitewashed American narrative. And the whiter the American story becomes, the easier it is to talk about the founders without thinking about them.
 | A guest post by
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