I have argued that the New York Times’ 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones was a devious attempt to undermine and obliterate Americanism by reconceiving America’s Founding as a 1619 slave state rather than the free nation that was intended in 1776. In 2021 I wrote a post titled The 'New American Socialists' Dilemma: The Declaration is as much anti-Socialist as anti-Slavery. In that post, I wrote of that project:
But maybe that’s the point. If, as the line of thinking expressed [in a WAPO column] by [Joe] Heim and the NYT [1619 Project] goes, slavery is key to prosperity, then slavery must be good. The only question then becomes, how to implement slavery equally and “fairly”. To repeat the question, why the reactionary urge to elevate slavery over freedom as the defining characteristic of America? After all, if freedom is good, why not fight to spread freedom to every individual, leaving no one out, as urged by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Ayn Rand, Martin Luther King, and Harvey Milk? The answer is simple. It’s the freedom, not the slavery, that the reactionaries want to evict. The rise of socialism in 21st Century America can not proceed on the basis of American ideals rooted in individual rights. In the same way and for the same reason that the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution are anti-slavery documents, they are also anti-socialist documents. Socialism holds that the individual belongs to the state, as the slave belongs to his master. The Declaration holds that the individual’s life is his and hers alone. So the collectivists of the Left have to ignore those ideals; or more precisely obliterate them as if they never existed. Why? in order to bring about the most broad-based form of master-slave system--a socialist America. You can’t radically transform a capitalist nation into a socialist nation without obliterating capitalism’s foundation. That foundation is the same philosophical foundation of America’s Founding--the inalienable liberty rights of the individual, all individuals, equally and at all times. It’s not equality per se the socialists oppose. It’s equality of individual freedom they oppose--to be replaced with equality of slavery--universal slavery, except for the ruling elites, the sociopaths who are to be more equal than the rest.
Hannah-Jones has now come out with a new book doubling down on her original theme The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Phillip W. Magness has a great review and commentary on that new book for Reason, The 1619 Project Unrepentantly Pushes Junk History. I want to cite one portion of Magness’s essay that seems to confirm my proposition. All italics are mine:
On the surface, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (One World) expands the short essays from The New York Times print edition into almost 600 pages of text, augmented by additional chapters and authors. The unmistakable subtext is an opportunity to answer the barrage of controversies that surrounded the project after its publication in August 2019. "We wanted to learn from the discussions that surfaced after the project's publication and address the criticisms some historians offered in good faith," Hannah-Jones announces in the book's introduction, before devoting the majority of her ink to denouncing the blusterous critical pronouncements of the Trump administration after it targeted The 1619 Project in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. Serious scholarly interlocutors of the original project are largely sidestepped, and factual errors in the original text are either glossed over or quietly removed.
While the majority of the public discussion around The 1619 Project has focused on Hannah-Jones' lead essay, its greatest defects appear in the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond's essay on "Capitalism." Hannah-Jones' writings provide the framing for the project, but Desmond supplies its ideological core—a political charge to radically reorient the basic structure of the American economy so as to root out an alleged slavery-infused brutality from capitalism.
Hannah-Jones' prescriptive call for slavery reparations flows seamlessly from Desmond's argument, as does her own expanded historical narrative—most recently displayed in a lecture series for MasterClass in which she attempted to explain the causes of the 2008 financial crisis by faulting slavery. "The tendrils of [slavery] can still be seen in modern capitalism," she declared, where banking companies "were repackaging risky bonds and risky notes…in ways [that] none of us really understood." The causal mechanism connecting the two events remained imprecise, save for allusions to "risky slave bonds" and a redesignation of the cotton industry as "too big to fail."
Making what appears to be a muddled reference to the Panic of 1837, she confidently declared that "what happened in 1830 is what happened in 2008." The claimed connection aimed to prove that the "American capitalist system is defined today by the long legacy and shadow of slavery." This racist, brutal system "offers the least protections for workers of all races," she said, and it thus warrants a sweeping overhaul through the political instruments of the state. To this end, Hannah-Jones appends an expanded essay to The 1619 Project book, endorsing a Duke University study's call for a "vast social transformation produced by the adoption of bold national policies."
"At the center of those policies," she declared, "must be reparations."
If Capitalism "offers the least protections for workers,” then what social system would logically offer the “best” protections? The obvious answer would have to be Capitalism’s opposite, socialism. Well, the Confederate intelligentsia made the exact same argument against Capitalism, defending slavery as “the very best form of socialism.” Matthew Desmond and Confederate slaveholders agree—slavery offers the best protections for workers of all races.
Of course, the best protection for workers is articulated in the Declaration of Independence—the universal equality of inalienable individual rights promised in America’s true Founding. Capitalism, the logical outgrowth of those Foundiung principles, inherited slavery—and then, in the face of thousands of years in which slavery was accepted as normal, abolished it. The Declaration of 1776 is the genesis of modern Capitalism. It is also the ultimate anti-slave philosophy.
Enter the 1619 Project. The Enlightenment principles summarized in the Declaration of Independence are as much anti-socialist as anti-slavery. And that points to, in my view, the root purpose of the 1619 Project. The 1619 Project is a creation by and for socialists—and reactionaries against America, Capitalism, and individual freedom.
Socialism runs contrary to America's Founding principles of individualism. Socialism is the political manifestation of collectivism. A socialist America can’t be built upon a foundation of individualism. So America's Founding principles must be abandoned. But those principles can't be refuted honestly and intellectually. But they are too powerful to be openly challenged, let alone defeated. So, America’s individualist Founding must be discredited and ultimately obliterated as if they never existed.
That is why the socialists need "A New Origin Story" of America—an origin that cuts out the 155 years between 1619 and 1776, a period that includes The Enlightenment and its thinkers that generated the true Foundational principles that led to the Founding of the United States of America, and that spawned the death warrant for all manner of tyranny of men over men, including slavery. Magness’s analysis strongly implies that this project is really an attempt to demolish Capitalism and Americanism and pave the road to the ultimate slave plantation, a socialist America. Hannah-Jones’s claim that reparations are “At the center of those policies'' is a smokescreen. A mere policy of reparations simply does not explain the need for the “vast social transformation . . . through the political instruments of the state.
Enter The New Origin Story.
The 1776 Founding of the United States of America emerged out of ideas that gripped the British colonies in the middle of the 18th Century, and which grew out of the Enlightenment of the late 17th/early 18th centuries. This revolutionary philosophical earthquake has been well-documented by scholars, including Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, and C. Bradley Thompson. By seeking a revision of history that airbrushes out the meaning and true ideological origins of 1776 and the anti-slavery political/social system that it spawned, Hannah-Jones, the New York Times, Matthew Desmond, and their ilk would pave the way for the collectivist/statist ideology that socialism, and thus universal slavery, depends upon. So let me reiterate this bold claim: The 1619 Project is really a reactionary pro-slavery document, which ultimate aim is to obliterate not just Capitalism but Americanism more broadly, and replace it with a new slave system, which would feature a new Master in place of the plantation owner, the state. The name of this system is Socialism.
Related Reading:
America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson.
The ‘1619 Project’ Fraud Begins its Poisonous Infiltration into American Politics
A New Textbook of Americanism — edited by Jonathan Hoenig
The Collectivist Left Appropriates an Inhumane Christian Doctrine to Obliterate Americanism
The 'New American Socialists' Dilemma: The Declaration is as much anti-Socialist as anti-Slavery
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