A recent executive order allows government officials to censor Smithsonian exhibits that defy “American values.”
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on March 27, part of which empowers Vice President JD Vance to remove “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Museum and other institutions receiving federal funding with reasoning stated in the order.
This order more specifically targets the Smithsonian Museum, Independence Hall National Park and the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, declaring that the administration will work with congress to “prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”
Contained within this order are directives to restore Independence Hall National Park and monuments changed after 2020. The order also aims to ensure that monuments are not “inappropriately disparaging” and that they portray America’s achievements in advancing liberty and individual rights.
Granted, all of this may sound like the American government using its funding powers to ensure that people do not have to see negative messaging in historical sites, exhibits and monuments; in the past, however, this would have been called propagandist.
The United States is known for having advanced individual liberties and democratic values over time, but it also has a deep-rooted history of slavery, racial discrimination, homophobia, transphobia, colonialism and a recent hegemonic period in which we have funded wars in unallied countries. We have shed American blood on foreign soil in conflicts not directly threatening our national security and staged coups to create governments in foreign countries more aligned with our interests.
With this in mind, America has a mixed history like most countries, and a true democracy whose government does not believe it has a reason to be dishonest and fearful of its citizens has no reason to hide this history from public sight. Every country that has once existed on this planet has a mixed history; no nation is perfect, and no evangelism of American exceptionalism will change that.
The everlasting fight for government compliance to our ever-evolving definition of liberty and equality is what makes democracy great. How can you truly “Make America Great” if you whitewash its complicated history?
This order declares that these exhibits and monuments are telling lies and are misleading the American people; it then states that these monuments should only focus on the good that the memorialized party did. Did these men and women never sin, or did they do bad deeds that our government would prefer not to be publicly mentioned?
Nothing in the history of this world is two-dimensional. People are nuanced, and that deserves to be shared with the public. As a child I was always told, “those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it.” If we fail to learn from the fractures that caused past issues and conflicts, we will face them again.
History is continuous and reflective: no moment of time is separated from another in the timeline, and each is tangentially related to the other. We as a nation must learn from our past to work toward a more perfect union and the idealistic version of democracy we envision. No democratic system or nation is perfect, but with history teaching us, we can borrow methods and ideas that help to combat the issues on the horizon.
If nothing else, we must realize that willful disregard for our history is a conscious choice to jeopardize the future we desire.
