1776 or 1619? The Struggle for Control of America’s National Narrative

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One of President Biden’s first acts after taking office was to issue an executive order dissolving the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission, a body set up to counter the New York Times’ 1619 Project as a program for teaching American history in schools. Each initiative constitutes a bid for control of the ‘national narrative’ and speaks for less than half of the country. Each implicitly understands the challenges to social cohesion inherent in the kind of pluralist society America has always been. The NYT sees the Trump administration as trying to impose ‘white supremacist’ homogeneity on America’s diversity through its criticism of multiculturalism, while the 1776 Commission sees the NYT initiative as sowing division in the body politic as part of a left-wing project to impose socialism.