Biden Wants a $15 an Hour Minimum Wage. Good Idea?

With Republicans in control of the Senate for the last six years, and Mitch McConnell thwarting its consideration, raising the national minimum wage ceased to be a topic. That has left the minimum stranded at $7.25 since 2009, equating to less than $15,000 for a year of 40-hour work weeks. That’s anyone’s definition of poverty level.

Update: Feb. 27:
The Senate’s parliamentarian has ruled that the minimum wage increase cannot be a part of Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion relief act if the “reconciliation” rule is to be used for its passage by a filibuster-proof simple majority. That leaves the question of whether Biden will pursue a minimum wage increase and of a lower amount for it to possibly surmount a Republican filibuster.
    

Senate control has shifted and President Biden is passionate to raise the minimum to $15 an hour. Not all at once. He proposes a schedule of incremental increases across the next five years, with the minimum indexed to the median wage of all workers thereafter. That corrects a failure of the current law. Its fixed minimum has seen the buying power of $7.25 slip to only $5.66 even with mild inflation.

Behind the move in the midst of a pandemic is the strong sentiment that the true heroes, those who have worked in public places with high contact, caregivers to the old, supermarket workers supplying us with food, are to be rewarded with higher wages in an economy that rewards so many with outlandish incomes.

consequences

But then a week into February, the Congressional Budget Office came up with an analysis of the wage hike’s effect on jobs and the budget . Headlines ran with the CBO’s conclusion that while Biden’s plan would “lift 900,000 out of poverty”, some “1.4 million would lose their jobs” and “cost taxpayers $54 billion across 10 years”.

This page has pressed for a minimum wage increase several times, paying greater attention to the CBO’s belief that 1 in 10 workers — 17 million in all, measured against those 1.4 million — would see their incomes rise. As would another 10 million, their pay pushed upward by the increases to those at the pay grade below them. Put another way, those who would keep the minimum the same to protect the 1.4 million from being furloughed would be holding back 27 million people from an economic improvement in their lives.

What to do about the 1.4 million predicted to lose their jobs? Didn’t the Trump administration initiate an apprenticeship program that we never hear about? If such a program were made an option, the cohort displaced by unaffordable wages could wind up with a better future than the low-pay jobs they lost.

A big question is whether the CBO’s job loss projection is overstated. Staff economists at a government agency are obliged to follow economic orthodoxy which has its own Newtonian 3rd law of motion: When the chalk line on the blackboard labeled “wages” goes up, the equal and opposite reaction makes the chalk line labeled “jobs” go down. So they must formulaically assume job losses.

The Fight for $15 movement began in 2012
when two hundred fast-food workers walked
off the job to demand $15 an hour and union
rights in New York City. They are now a
global movement in over 300 cities on six
continents in support of underpaid workers
of every sort.

But there have been a number of studies and actual cases that show the losses to be modest. There was the sudden jump to a $15 an hour minimum in the city of SeaTac (between Seattle and

Tacoma) in 2015 that caused few layoffs, for example. There was the oft-cited study by David Card and Alan Kreuger, economists with roots in Princeton who compared the job market in adjacent counties of two adjacent states (Pennsylvania and New Jersey) after one state had raised the minimum while the other had not and found their job-loss differences negligible. Arindrajit Dube, once a kid flipping burgers at a Seattle McDonald’s in 1989, took that approach further from his perch as an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He compared wage changes in all side-by-side counties in adjacent states in the country and concludes about job loss, “My reading of the evidence is that those risks are probably not very high”.

Questions for the CBO

The news accounts of the CBO report don’t show evidence that the writers actually read the report. For the first time, the Office has introduced “behavioral effects” into its assumptions, “behaviors among businesses and people that result in changes in relative prices, the distribution of income, employment, and other economic factors.” The effects that higher wages bring about ripple across “a broad set of federal programs” and the report gives the impression that they pin blame for the $54 billion added cost on the minimum wage increase although the costs arise from the rules of those programs. Some direct effects are obvious: higher wages mean increased government revenue from payroll taxes, and reduced costs from fewer people qualifying for food assistance. But the report tracks through every cranny of government looking for every butterfly wing beat and its knock on effect.

Social Security, for example. An increase in the minimum wage would lead some workers with serious health conditions to claim disability benefits, so thinks the CBO, so their disability benefits are folded in. So is an assumption that some older workers would claim retirement benefits earlier. And then this: A higher minimum wage would cause Social Security benefits across the board to rise, because…

“initial benefits are indexed to economy wide average wages, which would be boosted by a higher minimum wage. Average benefits would also increase because raising the minimum wage would increase inflation, in CBO’s assessment, which would in turn boost annual cost-of-living increases in Social Security benefits.”

Thus does the report throws the book at the wage increase.

Most puzzling, there is not a single mention in its text or tables that so many states have been raising their minimum wage for years. Only 21 states still have not budged from the federal $7.25 an hour. Seven — such as California, Massachusetts, and Florida — are on the way to the full $15 an hour. On the 1st of this new year, 20 states and 32 cities and counties raised their minimum wage, most having done so for several years, and 27 of them headed for $15 an hour. Does no mention of the states strides in taking the minimum wage into their own hands mean the CBO’s calculations use the federal $7.25 an hour with no regard that half the country decoupled from the federal minimum years ago, meaning so many of the CBO’s assumed costs are already behind us? The report is utterly silent on the point.

Moreover, across the several years of these state and city wage increases, did we hear that they brought about severe job losses? To the contrary, we reached the lowest unemployment percentage in memory.

benefits

One assumption we can make is that every dime added to the paychecks of low-wage workers will be spent, which should be an attractant to Republicans who always seek growth in the economy.

Higher wages are not just pure cost, a number of businesses have found. They can increase worker loyalty, morale and effort, reducing turnover and therefore training costs of replacements. So we have seen Costco, Amazon, and Target raise their starting wage to $15 an hour. Lower wages make for resentment, productivity slow downs, absentee problems and quitting. And those who take the job and shove it tend to be the most productive, according to one study.

roadblocks

The president wants to tack the $15 an hour minimum wage onto his proposed $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill. Republicans propose only $618 billion and, more concerned for small businesses than their employees, think raising the minimum in the midst of a recessionary pandemic would be catastrophic.

Legislation that has a budgetary impact cannot be filibustered in the Senate, a hurdle that can only be surmounted by a 60 votes or higher. The relief bill surely has budgetary consequences and needs only a majority vote for passage under the so-called “reconciliation” rule.

Republicans argue that Biden’s minimum wage proposal is out of bounds, that it’s not a budgetary measure because the business sector pays for it. Democrats are trying to make the case that, because higher wages would result in higher payroll tax income and a mix of higher and lower governmental costs, it has a budgetary impact. That puts the issue in the hands of the Senate parliamentarian to decide. But even if the parliamentarian agrees with the Democrats, they may be short two votes. West Virginia’s Joe Manchin doesn’t like $15 an hour nor does Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema. Manchin’s state’s minimum wage is $8.75 an hour and, as The Wall Street Journal pointed out, the median wage in his state is barely higher at $16.31 than the proposed $15. So maybe once again the federal minimum wage will stay at a level that hasn’t changed in a dozen years.

There are many states like West Virginia, and Manchin’s dilemma brings up the wider point that, as a Journal editorial put it, the nationally imposed $15 an hour “would mean imposing the urban labor costs of San Francisco and Manhattan on every out-of-the-way gas station in rural America”. The U.S. economy differs by region and the concern is that doubling the wage floor would lead to prices in those locales that people could no longer afford.

A few years ago, the editorial crew at the Journal huffed that it was,

Hard… to understand why so many of our media brethren have been persuaded that suddenly it’s the job of America’s burger joints to provide everyone with with good pay and benefits.

Why shouldn’t it be? As Biden said, “No one should work 40 hours a week and live below the poverty wage”. An employer usurps workers’ time, all the time that they are able to give to work, time that may be all they have to sell. When employers pay too little for that time for employees to make their way in life, their workers are forced to apply for assistance — food, Medicaid, housing, child care — from state and federal governments, which is to say, we taxpayers. The public is made to subsidize business models that don’t work financially were they to be required to pay a living wage. So, as for those burger joints, it seems to be national policy to keep the price of fast foods low by shifting much of the cost into public assistance programs where the rest of us get to pick up the tab.

The Electoral College Has Got to Go.
But We’ll Never Get Rid of It

Consider this: Donald Trump’s insistence that the election was rigged, his claim of millions of fraudulent ballots, his re-election campaign filing some 60 lawsuits to overturn the election in key states, his suborning of state legislators to choose a slate of electors voting the opposite of how the people of their state voted, his attempt to lure Electoral College appointees to do the same,

his tweeting “Big project in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”, The Washington Post reporting that “The Proud Boys, members of armed right-wing groups, conspiracy theorists and white supremacists all have pledged to attend” and “far-right demonstrators workshopping ways to smuggle guns into the District”, and now asking Georgia’s secretary of state “to find 11,780 votes” somewhere to flip that state’s Biden win.

Consider all this and realize that all of it — every last bit of it — owes to a freakish 18th Century constitutional anachronism, the Electoral College.

Sound exaggerated? If we instead had chosen the president and vice president by the national vote count, we’d have known the election’s outcome by midnight November 3rd when Biden had already taken the lead. That would have been the end of it. We would have had none of the Kabuki ritual of the Electoral College — commissioners certifying county votes, legislators choosing slates of electors to send to Congress, Congress anointing the state submissions — that gave Trump the opportunity to attempt his coup by disrupting at every turn. It was the obsession with state votes, irrelevant in the national count, and the small margins of a few that gave Trump the opportunity to invent tales of fraudulent ballots and illegal votes in quantities that his faithful would — listening to his manic repetition — come to believe. Had there been only a national popular vote, even his avid supporters would have found Trump’s protestations of “millions and millions of corrupt Mail-In Ballots” (none ever proven) in the face of the seven million margin of Biden’s win to be the ravings of a madman.

And now, adding weight to our argument, along come Texas Republican Louie Gohmert and some of the losing electors of Arizona moments before the electoral votes are counted in Congress, with a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence! They assert that the 1887 Electoral Count Act that prescribes how electoral votes are counted unconstitutionally violates the 12th Amendment which conferred total authority to the vice president, in his role of president of the Senate, to choose which votes to count. (Not our copy of the 12th; it says only, “The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;”). Gohmert and his cohort wants to force Pence to choose sides: either count the elector votes for Biden or help Trump overthrow the government by counting Trump elector votes instead. So here we have yet another idiocy brought to you solely by the Electoral College.

accommodating the “peculiar institution”

Those who place constitutional originalism on an altar should realize that the Electoral College has its roots in slavery. The College was invented at the 1787 Constitutional Convention as a compromise to induce southern states to stay in the Union. Electors would represent voters, chosen for being more sensible and deliberative than hoi polloi, their number matching how many representatives and senators a state was eligible by its population to send to Washington. The population count for the southern states Included slaves, but counted as three-fifths of a person. Only White male landowners could vote.

Three years after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment did away with three-fifths, making Blacks full citizens, and the 15th Amendment two years later gave them the right to vote. But they were disenfranchised again when southerners crushed Reconstruction and replaced it with Jim Crow laws.

The Founders believed democracy was best served if it followed what the majority preferred. Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 22 wrote, “The fundamental maxim of republican government requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.” James Madison wrote, “[T]he vital principle of republican government is … the will of the majority.” Thomas Jefferson in his first inaugural address said the “sacred principle” is that “the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail.”

Yet the Electoral College has several times worked in the opposite direction. Twice in this young century we have seen a candidate win the presidency while losing the popular vote, George W. Bush in 2000 despite Al Gore besting him by 547,000 votes and Donald Trump in 2016 by winning in the Electoral College by a margin of only 77,000 votes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan combined while losing the popular vote by three million. It came close to happening again this year and in 2004, when a shift of only 60,000 votes would have handed the presidency to John Kerry who lost the popular vote by three million.

This comes about because the winner of the popular vote in 48 of the states takes all the electoral votes for that state. Winner take all is found nowhere in the Constitution. By adopting it, state legislatures perversely decided to make the Electoral College still more anti-democratic. The only exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, where electors vote for the candidate who won their congressional district. Winner take all, whether by a margin of one vote or a million, means that all who voted for the losing candidate are effectively disenfranchised. Their votes simply disappear, a disincentive for them to show up at the polls at all in very red or very blue states where the outcome is foreordained. Conservatives in New York and California or liberals in Texas and South Carolina must wonder why they bother.

This year’s election brought 66.2% of the voting-eligible public to the polls, a markedly better turnout, but still one need wonder how much winner-take-all and its obliteration of opposing votes is why a third stay home. When every vote counts, more people vote. In all other elections, from Congress on down the ballot, everyone’s vote counts. Only in the election for the most important office in the land are the votes of millions thus voided.

keeping the faith

Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia have passed laws that forbid electors to make their own choice of whom to vote for. They are chosen for their partisan loyalty and not to be self-appointed deciders of who should be president, and the Supreme Court recently ruled that states can replace and punish so-called “faithless electors” who break ranks and vote for their state’s losing candidate. Well and good, although it begs the question of if they are required by law to vote however the people voted, why are they needed? Why not shortcut the multiple steps of commissioners voting on behalf of counties, electors voting on behalf of states, and just have state legislatures submit their allotted electoral votes to Congress? Instead, Donald Trump was given openings for weeks after Election Day to corrupt the process and the people who were patriotically performing their — unnecessary as we argue — jobs.

Electors may be nailed down, but state legislatures and governors are not. The Constitution gives state them supremacy over elections, and even the Supreme Court tends not to trespass, witness its feckless avoidance of taking on gerrymandering’s corruption of democracy. Next time around a state’s legislature, controlled by the party whose candidate lost, could override its voters and send its own slate of electors to Congress. This loophole, which in a close race could deliver an election to the losing candidate, exists only because the gaping vulnerability of the Electoral College exists.

little heavyweights

The most frequent gripe is that it is weighted in favor of smaller states; the smaller the state, the bigger the weighting. Those two senator proxies added to the elector count mentioned above is the cause. At the extremes there is Wyoming, with just a single representative because of a population less than 600,000, but three elector votes when the senator proxies are added, versus California with 39.5 million inhabitants and 55 electoral votes, the senator bonus making little difference. That makes each Wyoming elector’s vote 3.7 times more powerful, relative to the number of people it represents, than California’s.

Those on the Right will hang on dearly to the Electoral College for just this reason — the extra weight given to the smaller states which are mostly conservative. They argue that it’s only fair that smaller states get a leg up in a country dominated by the big states. Except it says that some Americans should have a greater say than other Americans.

end runs

Objections to the albatross of the Electoral College has prompted many proposed workarounds, the most prominent being the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). It calls for a state to cast all its Electoral College votes for the presidential ticket that wins the national vote. So far, 15 states and the District of Columbia have signed on to the plan, bringing 196 votes to the total of 270 needed to make a majority (nationwide there are 538 electoral votes) and put the plan into effect for all member states.

The Washington Examiner says “this silly scheme” is unconstitutional, pointing to Article I of the Constitution that says, “No state shall, without the consent of Congress…enter into any Agreement or Compact with another state”. The publication asks us to consider how it would go down if Californians voted Democratic by 20 or 30 points only to have to hand over all of its 55 votes to a Republican candidate who won the popular vote.

Another plan would award a state’s electors in proportion to votes won by each candidate in that state, but with two of the electors, conceptually the two representing the state’s senators, given to the state’s popular vote winner.

can’t be done

There have been some 700 proposals to reform or abolish the Electoral College. It is by far the most disliked provision of the Constitution, yet it lives on. Instead of amending it out, we are stuck with this grotesque quadrennial fuss for choosing just the single person and his/her running mate. If the Electoral College didn’t exist today, certainly no one would propose it, so why do we keep it?

The short answer is that it is impossible to get rid of. Not since 1970 has there been an attempt. Republican Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana conducted a valiant campaign to pass a constitutional amendment that would abolish the College. A move for cloture to halt a filibuster led by southern segregationists Strom Thurmond and Sam Ervin came up a few votes shy. But then realize that would have been only the first step. Had it passed it would then have needed ratification by three-fourths of the states.

Nevertheless, we once amended the Constitution with some frequency — three times in the 1960s — but with today’s polarization the likelihood of Left and Right coming to agreement approaches zero.

don’t touch

Conservatives are content with the status quo. That engenders some figure-eight arguments on editorial pages such as The Wall Street Journal where Barton Swain argued that under the Electoral College fraud is much less likely for reason of malefactors not knowing in advance which state will prove crucial on Election Day. In fact, battleground states are known well in advance. The counter argument says that under a national popular vote, massive quantities of rigged ballots would be needed to swing an election, unlike the much more achievable numbers needed to tip a close battleground state.

A Journal editorial believes that the Electoral College checks polarization by forcing candidates to campaign in competitive states instead of spending all their time in states with the highest populations. But the corollary is that little or no attention is paid to the sure-thing red and blue states, only “battleground” states, which removes a hundred million or so Americans from the conversation.

But attention to most states would be paid if the national popular vote decided the presidency because candidates would campaign in those states to seek out their own — Democrats in red states or Republicans in blue states — to add to the national total. States of respectable size, that is; no point pretending that under either arrangement candidates would flock to the least populous states.

The newspaper’s normally savvy columnist Peggy Noonan made no sense whatever when, in a piece celebrating how the system worked and we got through the election after all,

“We owe this to the brilliance of our Founders, but we deserve credit too for our continued fidelity to their vision. (Those who would abolish the Electoral College: Keep in mind the role it just played.)”

What?! The role it played was the two months of chaos in which Donald Trump was able to persuade an as yet unmeasured percentage of his 73 million backers that the vote was rigged, seriously threatening the over 230 years of this democracy, whereas without the Electoral College it all would have been over by midnight November 3rd.

Court Cases Failed, Trump Allies Try Overthrow

Safe harbor day seemed to slam the door shut on Donald Trump’s hope for overthrow. It is the day — December 8th in 2020 — when, by an act of Congress in 1867, the states

must confirm they have certified the people’s choice of the next president. After much contention and attempts at disruption all 50 states certified.

But then the attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, petitioned the Supreme Court to block four states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin — from casting “unlawful and constitutionally tainted votes” when they formalize their choice when the Electoral College of all states meet in their state capitols on December 14th. Paxton’s suit contended that pandemic-caused changes in the procedures of those states violated federal law. So, just throw out what the people voted for.

Under what’s called “original jurisdiction” any state suing another must go through the high court. It was called a publicity stunt by Michigan’s attorney general and Wisconsin’s AG said, “I feel sorry for Texans that their tax dollars are being wasted on such a genuinely embarrassing lawsuit”. It can’t be overlooked that The FBI is investigating allegations made by eight of Paxton’s former top aides that he illegally used the power of his office by intervening several times in legal matters involving a friend and real estate investor who donated to Paxton’s campaign in 2018.

Nothing should astonish us anymore, but it did when the attorneys general of 17 Republican states immediately filed a brief in support of Paxton. At least Republican Sen. Mitt Romney called it “madness”. More stunning still, 106 Republicans in the House — more than half of them — filed their own brief to the Supreme Court. Apparently only the top line of ballots — the vote for president — was corrupted by fraud. The lines lower down on those same ballots that got those 106 House Republicans elected or re-elected, that part of the illegal mailed-in ballots was just fine.

Trump joined the suit. “We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case. This is the big one. Our country needs a victory!”, he tweeted.

This happened on a day when more people died from Covid-19 than on 9/11. The nation was experiencing a 9/11 death toll every day, yet this is what Trump and 18 state attorneys general and 106 in Congress view as the nation’s priority.

The attorneys general and Congress members have parallel support from a list that includes Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, pro-Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, and retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, all of whom are now endorsing a military coup. Powell and Flynn have been on Fox since calling for it. We are in the midst of what one brief against the Texas action called “seditious abuse”.

That Republican leaders in the states and in Congress remain silent, avoiding acknowledgment that Biden won the election, only serves to persuade Trump supporters that there must be something wrong with the election, proof unneeded. The reticence of these politicians to speak out is viewed on the left as fear for their political future should they take on a man whom their cowardice these four years has elevated to the status of a tyrant. But the rush of states and Congress members to embrace an attempt to reverse the election says something well beyond.

What stands suddenly revealed by these authoritarian actions is that Republicans no longer want a democracy. They foresee an America less than 50% White by 2040. They have been working for years to choke off immigration and repress the vote of those who are, for them, undesirable so as to preserve minoritarian rule for themselves. “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again”, said Trump in March about Democratic steps to make it easier to vote.

Biden had said, “Incredibly damaging messages are being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy functions. It sends a horrible message about who we are as a country.” The messages may be perceived as a signal that half of America is abandoning democracy. That our two-party system will be democratic versus authoritarian.

After World War II we told ourselves, “It can’t happen here”. It is happening — right now. If we had thought that Americans were of a sort that would stand up to a tyrant, we now find we were mistaken.

Feb 2 2021 | Posted in Takeover | Read More »

Trump’s Parting Advice? We Need a Patriotic Education

One could hardly imagine a greater dichotomy than Donald Trump setting up a commission to espouse “patriotic education” to restore American reverence of the nation’s fundamental mores, versus same Donald Trump a few months later inciting an insurrection to overthrow the newly elected president so he could retain power.

The president announced in September the formation of the “1776 Commission” charged with developing a “pro-American curriculum”
that would put an end to the “twisted web of lies” taught in our schools about slavery, racism, the sordid episodes of our history, saying that “teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse”.

Trump demanded that the commission turn in its report before he left office, which it did with no moments to spare, despite its members having been named only a month earlier. None were historians.

The commission’s title gives away that the motive was to counteract the New York Times’ “1619 Project”, born in a special August 2019 issue of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine and filled with essays to make the case that the nation’s founding was really in that year, when the first slaves were landed on these shores in Virginia. First, a look at that.

“The 1619 Project” starts out aggressively, opening with

“Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle America would have no democracy at all.”

Slaves on the plantations growing rice and cotton at world competitive prices were the foundation of American capitalism. The “strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans” helped the young nation pay off its Revolutionary War debts, built “vast fortunes for white people North and South”, and fueled the Industrial Revolution. “1619” tells us that Blacks are highly patriotic, proud of America, and of their people having contributed “to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world”.

backlash

The Project drew heated criticism. Historians called out its inaccuracies. There were objections to its “monocausality” — the absolutism of its editor (who is white) stating in the report’s preamble that “out of slavery…grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional”. Particularly objectionable was the claim that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery”. That and other claims drew fire from historians who brought forth detailed historical accounts to defeat revisionist claims, calling “The 1619 Project” a thesis searching for evidence to support it.

that cannot stand

“1619” rankled conservatives and just plain Americans who were less than thrilled with replacing the heroic fight for independence and the founding of the first democracy in the West with the grim story that the nation was given birth by the arrival of the first slaves.

In announcing “The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission”, Mr. Trump made no pretense of it being other than political. Speaking at the National Archives, he warned that “The 1619 Project” was “a radical movement”, that “the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country”.

His report, more an extended essay than a fact-finding report, wants an American history that is “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling”. To accomplish that, it must first try to explain away slavery. First, we need realize that there had always been slavery in the world, but “the foundation of our Republic…the movement to abolish slavery that first began in the United States…planted the seeds of the death of slavery in America” [italics theirs]. That’s evidenced by the Declaration’s decree that “all men are created equal” (except it makes no mention of slavery). And the Constitution “set the stage for abolition” despite having to compromise by counting slaves as three-fifths of a person as a concession to southern states’ demand for more population-based representation in Congress. Except, without that compromise, they would not have been counted at all, we are not told.

“1776” prefers to tell us how opposed to slavery the founders were — while nonetheless owning them. Washington “freed all the slaves in his family estate”. Except, he did not. He waited until his death and even then legal and ownership complications prevented their release. None of the other founders made a move to emancipate their “chattel”. And “1619” reminds us that 10 of the first 12 presidents were enslavers. Mr. Trump prefers that school children not be taught the whole story. He might like that the report avoids the horrors of the Civil War, calling it only a “conflict”, dispensing with it with the single sentence, “This conflict was resolved, but at a cost of more than 600,000 lives.”

“1776” lays out five “Challenges to America’s Principles”. One is “Progressivism”, a movement dangerous for its belief, as this account has it, that America’s founding documents — its “software” — are no longer up to the task of operating the nation’s “hardware”, the complex industrial society that their authors could not have foreseen. To adapt, progressives advocate a “living” Constitution of moral relativism that leads variously to granting new rights while taking away the old, and to a fourth branch of government, an administrative state that “never faces elections and today operates largely without checks and balances”. The commission cites Woodrow Wilson, before he was president, positing a different system wherein “the functions of government are in a very real sense independent of legislation, and even constitutions”. The authors are seemingly oblivious to how much that sounds like Trump.

That fascism” and communism are two other “Challenges to America’s Principles” won’t stir much controversy, each given a section of the report, but “1776” likens progressives to the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini for wanting to centralize all power — corporate and political — under “so-called experts”. There is no mention, in the discussion of fascism or anywhere in the report, of the threat white supremacists and white nationalists pose to the country; the commission is more concerned that anti-Americanism from the Cold War era “still pervades much of academia and the intellectual and cultural spheres”.

John C., Calhoun, who in the “Slavery” section had been singled out as the progenitor of separating Americans into groups, appears again in the fifth challenge, “Racism and Identity Politics”, where “group rights”, explicit group privilege and preferential treatment of “protected classes” such as affirmative action, are blamed for reversing what this article claims had been “color-blind civil rights” for their being uniformly applied to all. The result is identity politics.

reforming education

The report’s authors are irate about education in America. Our anti-American universities “generate in students…outright hatred for this country”.

“Historical revisionism that tramples honest scholarship and historical truth, shames Americans by highlighting only the sins of their ancestors, and teaches claims of systemic racism that can only be eliminated by more discrimination, is an ideology intended to manipulate opinions more than educate minds.”

Needed is a national renewal brought about by patriotic education that teaches the truth about America, “viewing our history clearly and wholly, with reverence and love” banishing that “twisted web of lies” that concerned the former president so well known for truth. It is a odd attempt at doublethink because it is precisely the “wholly” that includes “America’s sins” that the “1776” authors want expunged.

Trump’s commission wants to reverse a movement that began some 50 years ago with books such as “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” that recounted our history in the west from the American Indian’s point of view, that no longer kept hidden Thomas Jefferson’s relations with slave Sally Hemings — two quick examples from a long list. This more honest exploration has been viewed as a new maturity, a societal truth and reconciliation undercurrent, but not for Donald Trump, who, in this sudden interest in history, wants only “enlightened patriotism” to be taught.

It is notable that near the very end of the paper, under “Decline of American Education”, we read that “distorted histories of those like Howard Zinn or the journalists behind the ‘1619 Project’ have prevented their students from learning…with a rich repository of cultural, historical, and literary referents”. Of course Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and “1619” do not present a rich repository. They are written to fill in our untold history absent from the scrubbed and sanitized textbooks approved for the nation’s public schools. As Zinn said, “There is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is often written by the privileged.” The underside is what “1776” seeks to eradicate.

christian nation

It is inevitable in a polemic of this nature that it ultimately turn to religion. The report goes on for 2,600 words in its contemplation of religion and morals. Under its “Faith and America’s Principles” heading, families need to pray together where they may acknowledge “the providence of the Almighty God who gave them their sacred liberty”.

“Overwhelming importance” is ascribed to religious faith that we learn is “indispensable to the success of republican government”. And, of course, they mean the Christian religion. “The American Revolution might not have taken place or succeeded without the moral ideas spread through the pulpits, sermons, and publications of Christian instructors”. A “Civil and Religious Liberty” segment summarizes Christian history with a lengthy proposition that the founders, by preventing in the First Amendment the establishment of a state religion, made room for moral teachings of religious faith. “The separation of church and state” is usually misunderstood to mean a complete separation of religion and politics.

The authors then tear anew into identity politics. The Civil Rights Movement started it by abandoning equal opportunity for all in favor of “group rights”. Then came the radical women’s liberation movement. Black nationalists “reimagined America as a white supremacist regime”. Then Hispanics. Then Asians. All with the effect of teaching Americans to identify themselves as member of groups more in some cases than as Americans.

outrage

“Trump’s 1776 Commission Critiques Liberalism in Report Derided by Historians” ran the headline of a typical news article. James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, said the report was not a work of history, but “cynical politics.”

“This report skillfully weaves together myths, distortions, deliberate silences, and both blatant and subtle misreading of evidence to create a narrative and an argument that few respectable professional historians, even across a wide interpretive spectrum, would consider plausible, never mind convincing”.

Nicole Hemmer, a historian and the author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics,” wrote in an email that “The report seems to draw heavily from a rhetorical trick now quite popular on the right of reassigning slavery, racism, and fascism to the left”. David W. Blight, a historian of the Civil War at Yale University, said that the report falsely portrays slavery not as a core part of American history and society, but as a global institution “that had all but been imposed on Americans”. “The 1776 report is a puerile, politically reactionary document,” stated David Blight, author of the biography “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom”. “No legitimately trained historian or teacher will even be able to read through it all without nausea”. “The biggest tell in the 1776 report is that it lists ‘progressivism’ along with ‘slavery’ and ‘fascism’ in its list of ‘challenges to America’s principles’,” Thomas Sugrue, a historian at New York University, wrote on Twitter. “Time to rewrite my lectures to say that ending child labor and regulating meatpacking = hitlerism.”

Perhaps the ultimate rebuke was how rapidly the White House revoked the 1776 report. It was apparently taken offline from www.whitehouse.gov on the same day Joe Biden was inaugurated.