As is true of autocracies everywhere, this Administration demands a mystical view of an imagined past. In late March, Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Its diagnosis is that there has long been among professors and curators “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” It continues:
Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame.
The Smithsonian, the vast complex of museums that millions of Americans visit every year to see Lincoln’s top hat, the Spirit of St. Louis, Harriet Tubman’s shawl, a moon rock, and Dorothy’s ruby slippers, is at the center of the executive order’s indignation. The order takes particular issue with a sculpture exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum called “The Shape of Power,” saying that it pushes “the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct.”
Perhaps it is rude or “revisionist” to question the scholarship of an executive order, but the curators got it right. As a wall text at the exhibit points out, human beings are “99.9 percent genetically the same.” The opposing view, racial essentialism, is hardly benign; it is the underpinning of virulent bigotry, from the description of Jews as vermin in Der Stürmer to the assertions in white-nationalist manifestos that Black people are cursed with inferior I.Q.s.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture—which, until recently, was run by The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Kevin Young—comes in for particularly splenetic denunciation. Trump, in his first term, expressed a modicum of admiration while visiting what is affectionately called the Black Smithsonian. It is a spectacular museum, one that richly represents the story of African American struggle, suffering, and achievement. Daily, adults and schoolkids take in exhibits about chattel slavery and Jim Crow, Reconstruction and the civil-rights movement, and leave with a deeper understanding of American history in all its darkness and its promise. But in a culture war that demands that political opponents be branded, en masse, as “woke revolutionaries,” there can be no complexity. And it will be the job, according to the executive order, of Vice-President J. D. Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian’s board, to make matters simple. Vance is charged with leading the effort to remove from the museum what is called, in exquisite Orwellese, “improper ideology.”