The retirement of Lonnie G. Bunch III as the 14th secretary of the Smithsonian is a significant blow to democracy, according to scholars Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley. Bunch, the first historian and first African American to lead the institution, announced his departure on Tuesday, amid mounting pressure from the Trump administration to adopt an agenda of “patriotic” education.
Interior Department letter challenges museum’s mission
On 28 August, the Department of Interior issued a letter to the Smithsonian, declaring that “action must be taken” against “a radical institutional ideology” that threatens “to permeate … the operations” of the National Museum of American History (NMAH). The letter challenges NMAH’s longstanding commitment to demonstrating history’s relevance by tying the presentation of American history to “the core issues of our time”.
The administration’s attack on the Smithsonian, Crenshaw and Stanley argue, is far more than a conflict over imbalance. It is an effort to weaponize history to undercut the very terms of democratic existence. According to the 24 July executive order “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution”, its role should be to “present American history as a shared national inheritance to be taught and celebrated”. In the language of an earlier executive order on K-12 education, the administration declared that the purpose of American history in museums and schools should be to create a shared American identity, grounded in “a patriotic admiration for our incredible nation” and praise for the great men who founded it.
Historical record vs. feel-good narrative
By this measure, the Smithsonian—and Bunch in particular—exist in a state of non-compliance. The historical record in its collections, ranging from acknowledging that founders such as Benjamin Franklin enslaved African Americans to the fact that Europeans originally moved to the United States as a colonizing force, doesn’t feel good enough to inspire patriotic admiration either for the great men who created the nation or its current ideology.
But the belief that history and the institutions responsible for curating it must be beholden to a feel-good narrative is not a feature of a democratic system but its opposite. Historically, it is democracy’s enemies who have called for a “patriotic education” that focuses on lauding the great leaders and founders of the country. For example, in Mein Kampf, Hitler criticizes the historical education of Weimar democracy as failing to provide “a real national enthusiasm”. In its place, Hitler calls for history to be replaced by a system of education that makes “the really significant men of our people appear as outstanding heroes in the eyes of the present, to concentrate the general attention upon them, and thus create a unified mood”. The education under Weimar, Hitler complains, was “not able to raise what was glorious for the nation … above the level of objective presentation, and fire the national pride by such gleaming examples”.
Fascist overlap and the threat to democracy
Crenshaw and Stanley warn that the educational goals of fascism so clearly overlap with the agenda of the Trump administration. They argue that the accusation of “indoctrination” is readily deployed against a more inclusive American story, and that this is not immediately seen for what it is: a force-fed and blinkered vision of how we’ve come to be, the only terms available to be a true American.
It is also hard to take seriously even the demand for “patriotic education” from an administration that is aggressively restoring decidedly traitorous white supremacists (Confederates) to places of honor. The authors question what exactly is the American identity to which such an education is asking us to be beholden.
Underlying the muted response to the alarming rewriting of the historical record is an ill-defined understanding of the role of government-supported institutions such as the Smithsonian in safeguarding democracy. Democracy is based on political equality, which means everyone’s perspectives are given equal recognition. Central to this essential democratic ideal is a system of education that exposes all citizens to the perspectives, experiences and histories of the different groups who make up the polity. The purpose of democratic institutions such as museums and universities is to defend history in all of its difficult complexity. In the case of NMAH, as well as the different historical museums of the Smithsonian, the goal should be to present an accurate version of the histories of all the peoples of the United States, without erasure. Without such an education, there is no hope for the political equality that is the basis of democracy. Citizens will fear each other, rather than understand each other, and their votes will be based on this fear.
Erasure of voting rights history and its consequences
It is not a coincidence that the administration stoking this fear is also attacking democracy head-on with some of the very practices that it seeks to diminish and even erase from its version of patriotic education. The rich pro-democracy history of the battle over voting rights, for example, is a history worthy of celebratory reflection, but not so if the record of disenfranchisement and the racial tyranny it unleashed is sanitized out of historical memory, with the help of the Supreme Court.
The consequences of this erasure are far greater than hobbling democracy with inaccurate or partial understandings of the past. As WEB DuBois notes in the final chapter of Black Reconstruction, “The Propaganda of History”, the rewriting of history in a way that made for “pleasant reading for Americans” was part and parcel of a counterrevolution against democracy—one that dismantled Reconstruction and restored white supremacy in the south with the acquiescence of the federal government. DuBois’s point was that so-called patriotic education that erased and distorted Black history was central to the justification of the transition from freedom “back towards slavery”.
Central to the point of education for both countries and individuals is to carry forward the lessons of the past to help us better navigate challenges in the present and future. An educated citizenry is essential to a fully functioning democracy, which is precisely why the Trump administration’s attack on history and democracy are different fronts of the same war. It is often said that those who do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it. But for those who refuse to teach that history accurately, repetition is precisely the point.
