The ironies abound. As the United States looks forward to the 250th anniversary of American independence, the sitting president is pictured wearing a crown and describing himself as a king, apparently oblivious to the fact that he is proudly embracing the political identity of Britain’s George III.
Donald Trump can perhaps be forgiven his awkward gesture. He sings from an old songbook: “Don’t know much about history.” But the fact that Trump is embracing the title of monarch as we prepare to celebrate America’s dramatic denunciation of monarchy merits more than a passing smile.
Moreover, the conflict between the values of the American Revolution and the Trump political agenda goes much deeper. And that fact is likely to be fully exposed in the flood of books, op-eds, podcasts and a Ken Burns six-part documentary on the American Revolution, due out in November (full disclosure: I’m quoted in the series). Regard the following words as a preview of the coming attractions.
In addition to the explicit denunciation of monarchy, the American Revolution was founded on what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described as “a promissory note” contained in the Declaration of Independence. Here are the magic words of the American founding:
We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are established among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
This is the seminal statement of the American Creed, as sociologist and economist Gunnar Myrdal called it. Abraham Lincoln, who also knew how to make history with words, claimed that Thomas Jefferson was the original American oracle:
All honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth … and so to embalm it there, that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.
We can safely assume that Lincoln had a twinkle in his eye when he wrote “a merely revolutionary document.” His main point was to interpret Jefferson’s words as a bold attempt to plant an egalitarian ideal at the very start of American history that would, over the stretch of time, slowly but surely become a social and political reality. In effect, the American Revolution did not end when Gen. Charles Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington; it has been a living and constantly growing set of truths.
In the ensuing celebrations of American independence, once the July 4th fireworks die down, we see a robust debate among historians about Lincoln’s interpretation of Jefferson’s words and heated battles over the reasons why the founders consciously decided to defer the full meaning of the Jeffersonian promise, most especially to tolerate slavery, an institution clearly at odds with the core values of the Cause.
Here is where the Trump political agenda enters the argument. The current president not only intends to unravel the American republic, he also seeks to end the ongoing American Revolution that Jefferson launched and Lincoln described. His popular slogan “Make America Great Again” is deliberately ambiguous. For some it could mean before a man who looked like Barack Obama occupied the White House. For others, residents of the former Confederacy, it could mean before the Civil War.
In between it might mean: before MLK Jr. had his dream, before the Voting Rights Act of 1995, before Roe vs. Wade, before Brown vs. Board of Education, before Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, before FDR’s New Deal. The list could go on, but an overarching pattern is clear. The significant reforms of the 20th and 21st centuries, the movements that mobilized government powers to support racial and gender equality in keeping with Jefferson’s vision of the founding, must be relegated to oblivion. In effect, the American Revolution must end, erased from the history books.
The commemoration of the 250th anniversary of American independence is destined to generate a spirited debate over who and where we are as a people and a nation. Will Trump and his devoted followers be right to celebrate the end of the American Revolution? Or is the idealism of Jefferson and Lincoln still alive and the American Revolution poised to enter a new chapter?
While historians are great at predicting the past we are no better than everybody else at predicting the future. The jury is still out.
Joseph J. Ellis is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. His latest book, “The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding,” will be published in October.
