Celebrating America’s Great Achievements
It’s not just crime in DC that is facing a transition. In what could be titled, “Happy Birthday, America,” President Trump is trying to give cultural and educational institutions back to America.
With his executive order, “Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History,” Trump has his sights aimed at countering the “revisionist movement” in our cultural institutions that have sought “to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
When asked to explain further, Roger Kimball, never at a loss for words, uses in Spectator US the Smithsonian Institute as exhibit #1.
As you probably know, the Smithsonian is a sprawling agglomeration of museums, libraries, historical landmarks, and assorted educational centers in and around Washington, DC, with affiliate institutions in 47 states.
Dating back to 1846, the Smithsonian was supported by luminaries like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Quincy Adams, to “promote science and the useful arts.”
Founded at a time when money made a “physical impression,” the Smithsonian was founded by British chemist James Smithson, whose fortune was bequeathed to the United States in order “to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men.”
President Andrew Jackson deputed the diplomat Richard Rush to retrieve the pelf, which he did in 1838: 105 sacks containing 104,960 gold sovereigns, worth about $500,000 at the time – $15 million today.
Although the Smithsonian was created to promote knowledge, that was long ago. Today, argues President Trump, the Smithsonian comes “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
In other words, Roger Kimball uses the exhibition – The Shape of Power: Stories of American Sculpture – as an example. This exhibition purports, asserts Mr. Kimball, to show how “societies including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”
What it really does, corrects Kimball, is undermine any sense of patriotism and shared American identity.
Critics are free to argue that executive orders are one thing. Quite another is to enact and enforce an EO. Donald Trump’s order aims at restoring “truth and sanity” to the institutions charged with preserving and disseminating American history.
Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian, just received a potent letter whose subject line reads “Internal Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions and Materials.” The letter is signed by Lindsey Halligan, Special Assistant to the President, Vince Haley, Director of the Domestic Policy Council, and Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
… the letter announces a “comprehensive internal review” of the Smithsonian, its exhibitions and curatorial procedures.
“This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”
Mr. Kimball explains how this will happen.
… the administration will review “exhibition text, wall didactics, websites, educational materials, and digital and social media content to assess tone, historical framing, and alignment with American ideals.”
It will interview curatorial staff “to better understand the selection process, exhibition approval workflows, and any frameworks currently guiding exhibition content.”
Making America Great Again
The administration will focus on how the Smithsonian plans to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary next year, continues Mr. Kimball
Out will go the divisive anti-American racialist rhetoric that has disfigured so much official cultural patronage in recent years. In will come affirmative exhibitions that acknowledge America’s many achievements and that emphasize the traditions and historical realities that unite us.
MAGA, the Project’s Center
Donald Trump understands something that the left has grasped at least since the 1960s that conservatives have grasped dimly if at all. If you want to restore society, you must commandeer the institutions that represent elite culture. Over the last several decades, those institutions have gradually become captive of a woke ideology that denigrates America while simultaneously celebrating the entire radical menu of racialist redress, sexual exoticism and political intransigence.
Last January, Roger Kimball wrote an article that he admits initially “occasioned a fair amount of ridicule.” Months passed as Trump moved from one triumph to the next, “doing beneficent things that no previous president would have thought possible.”
Roger Kimball feels that his description seems more apt:
Trump is not only making Americans safer and more prosperous. He is also moving on several fronts to give them back their cultural and educational institutions. His actions at the Smithsonian are the tip of that liberating spear.
