The Smithsonian Institution removed references to President Donald Trump earlier this year from its exhibit on the impeachment of presidents. This small change, reverting the exhibit to its pre-Trump form, highlighted the important fact that a museum can change when or if it wants to.
The removal of Trump from the impeachment exhibit was no doubt an attempt to draw White House scrutiny away from the museum network and its decadeslong embrace of leftist projects, particularly historical revisionism. This seeks to portray the United States as the primary villain in a simplistic and self-hating narrative that casts white Christians as oppressors and ethnic and religious minorities as victims.
Trump was not mollified. He wrote on Truth Social, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”
For decades, the Smithsonian, like so many other institutions that are supposed to offer educational resources, has embraced this rewriting of history. Rather than celebrate the nation’s progress in ending slavery and segregation, it has instead adopted fashionable, culturally Marxist ideas that the nuclear family and a good work ethic are a product of “whiteness.” The National Museum of African American History and Culture has shamelessly and divisively neutered the idea that the normalization of white culture must be overcome. The director of the National Portrait Gallery once expressed the bitter resentment of radical egalitarians, saying the museum she ran needed to stop being about “the wealthy, the pale and the male.”
Examples abound across the entire system. As the Washington Examiner’s Jeremiah Poff wrote earlier this year, a food exhibit at the National Museum of American History tries to cast doubt on the notion that obesity is harmful to health, while another sneered that the Monroe Doctrine, which informed the nation’s foreign policy for two centuries, was “used to justify future U.S. military invasions.”
If the U.S. is to survive as a nation, it must revive the teaching of a coherent, honest, and inspirational history. A people, any people, including Americans, will fall apart without a unifying history, without shared legends, morals, stories, traditions, celebrations, holidays, and culture. It should acknowledge and recognize its failures and faults, but not flagellate itself with them. Those who have overturned our culture during the past 70-odd years, including the curators of Smithsonian museums, are dragging our nation. They should be celebrating its successes and triumphs and imparting a sympathetic understanding of our history and how we got here. They should, like our political leaders, have an open-eyed and honest, but nevertheless steady, prejudice in favor of their own country.
That means an honest account of the American founding, the revolution, and the timeless principles that inspired the flawed but great men who made it happen. It means an honest accounting of the evils of slavery, but also of the tens of thousands of men who gave their lives to end that horrific practice. It means an honest accounting of segregation and racism, but also of the clear and indisputable progress that led to the election of the first black president in 2008.
THE AMERICAN HISTORY MUSEUM: AN EXHIBITION FOR DEI
The Smithsonian today does not do that. Its museums, which should be centers of learning that instill a sense of patriotism and belonging in its people and wonder and admiration in the rest of the world, instead try to diminish and destroy the culture and society of America. Rather than celebrate the great things America has offered its people and the world, it has sought to denigrate and delegitimize them and reject President Abraham Lincoln’s opinion that the country is “the last best hope of man on Earth.”
If the national museums are to restore respect and honor to the history of America, the housecleaning Trump demands is sorely needed. It is, indeed, long overdue. To allow cultural Marxists to enmesh with and drag down the Smithsonian institution would accelerate national decline. As Lincoln also said, “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”