https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-inauguration-speech-biden
The 1619 Project is routed, at least for now.
“Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneers,” declared Donald Trump in his second Inaugural address. “The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. . . . Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on earth. . . . Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted billions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand.”
Anyone steeped—voluntarily or involuntarily—in the critical historiography that culminated in the New York Times’s post-George Floyd hit job on America was thinking at that point:
“Wait! You can’t say that! What about the Indians? What about instituting slavery—not just allegedly “ending” it [insert ironic air quotes]? What about the three-fifths and the fugitive slave clauses of the Constitution? What about the oppression of women, LatinX, gays, and every manner of “marginalized Other?” What about environmental rapine and imperial conquest? Surely one needs to acknowledge the many sins that the just-departing president insisted are written into America’s (or at least white Americans’) very soul?”
Nope.
Those days are over, at least in official Washington and its tributaries throughout the federal and state bureaucracies.
Trump aims to make America patriotic again. Many Americans never stopped being patriotic, but their patriotism was viewed as a mark of ignorance by the coastal elites and the academy.
In fact, it was the reflexive left-wing critics who were ignorant. They are seemingly untouched by any awareness of how hard-won was the vast catalogue of Western achievement, whose roots were laid millennia ago, before accelerating during the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, until today modern man takes for granted the freedom, affluence, comfort, and health that were unthinkable for most of human history.
