Biden's Day One Executive Orders – Disbanding the 1776 Commission

As part of the raft of executive orders promulgated by the new president on his first day in office, President Biden signed the Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government. In Section 10, paragraph (c) of the order is the mention that “Executive Order 13958 of November 2, 2020 (Establishing the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission), is hereby revoked.”

The 1776 Commission, a late innovation of the Trump era, was intended “to better enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776.” At the heart of the project lay the idea of “a restoration of American education grounded in the principles of our founding that is accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling,” to which it gives the name “patriotic education.”

Far from having been created in a vacuum, the 1776 Commission was designed to rebut what Trump’s executive order called:

a series of polemics grounded in poor scholarship [that] has vilified our Founders and our founding. Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this Nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains.

Although not named explicitly, the most prominent example of these “polemics” was the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which sought to reframe American history through the lens of slavery in America. The 1776 Commission was instituted to rebut this approach and to recast American history in a more positive light.

The commission’s report stated in its introduction that the facts of our founding are not partisan. They are a matter of history. Controversies about the meaning of the founding can begin to be resolved by looking at the facts of our nation’s founding. Properly understood, these facts address the concerns and aspirations of Americans of all social classes, income levels, races and religions, regions and walks of life.

Accordingly, the report’s first three sections undertake to prove this thesis by considering the country’s history through the prism of its founding documents, and particularly with a view to the principle of equality. The fourth section of the report – “Challenges to America’s Principles” – examines several attacks on this brand of American equality: slavery, constitutional progressivism, fascism, communism and, finally, the thorny questions of racism and identity politics.

By no means a masterwork, the report has been heavily criticized for a lack of historical rigor, the same charge leveled at the 1619 Project. One should also bear in mind that the 1776 Report was written in less than a month by a lame-duck commission that must have been aware that it was about to be abolished and have its work became obsolete two days after it was set to be released on the Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. Although some sources maintain that the report was purged from the White House website as a result of Biden’s executive order, it remains available on the archived version of the Trump presidency’s website.

Disbanding the 1776 Commission is only a small piece of the executive order on advancing racial equity. In the same section that abolishes the commission, Biden revoked another Trump executive order from September 2020, the Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping, which, like the 1776 Commission, was a response to the view that:

many people are pushing a different vision of America that is grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual. This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.

That this baby, bathwater and bathtub were tossed out on Biden’s first day should come as no surprise. The order was replaced by one that seeks to advance the concept of racial “equity, which is defined as “the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment.”

The goal of the new executive order is:

to provide everyone with the opportunity to reach their full potential. Consistent with these aims, each agency must assess whether, and to what extent, its programs and policies perpetuate systemic barriers to opportunities and benefits for people of color and other underserved groups.

The nature of a new broom is to sweep clean, and the Biden administration, with its seventeen executive orders signed before the President had been in office eight hours, is no exception to the rule. The disbanding of the 1776 Commission shows an intentional move from the doctrine of equality to a new orthodoxy of equity. Whether that change represents a paradigm shift or merely a shift in signifiers, remains to be seen.