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Some commenters on this article don& #39;t understand why Trump saying the Constitution is the culmination of "1000 years of Western Civilization" is, in my words, chilling. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/09/white-house-history-conference-curriculum.html
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I used "chilling" in that graf 2x, the second time noting that Trump& #39;s #1776Commission for "patriotic education" was "another chilling nod" to 1930s fascist regimes. So, a question for #twitterstorians and general readers alike... 2/n
Do have the sense that your average general reader has heard of the "thousand year reich" or no? Because not a damn thing happened in 789 AD of which the Constitution can be viewed as the culmination. 3/n
A callback to the Magna Carta would have made sense, and that would be "800 years." The speechwriters didn& #39;t round it up to an even millennium just for the hell of it. 4/n
The speechwriters went with "a thousand years of Western Civilization" to stir echoes of a thousand year reich. Otherwise we have this white supremacist White House arguing that Western Civilization is but a thousand years old, and that& #39;s not an argument they would make. 5/n
(Fun fact: the idea of "Western Civilization" as a coherent whole, a single tradition stretching from Ancient Greece to the shores of America, was invented in the 19th century.) 6/n
Anyway, I don& #39;t know if the Slate commenters are uninformed or are just pretending to be. But when I and the folks in my feed heard "a thousand years of Western Civilization," it sounded Hitleresque. Anybody else hear it differently? 7/7
Anyway, if somebody here has a Slate commentor account, feel free to share a link to this thread for those who didn& #39;t get the reference.
