The GOP Has Completely Surrendered to Big Stupid, and American History Will Suffer for It

5 min readWASHINGTON, D.C. — It was the ignorance Hour on Tuesday in the House of Representatives, and, yes, I know, the only time it isn't the Ignorance Hour in the House of Representatives is when everyone in the Republican caucus is asleep. But this Ignorance Hour involves all the rest of us and our common history. Dr. Anthea Hartig, the director of the Smithsonian Museum of American History appeared before the ... wait for it ... House Committee on Delivering on Government Efficiency. (Yes, Elon's cargo-shorts militia lives on in an actual congressional subcommittee.) Things started bleakly when subcommittee chairman, Rep. Tim Burchett, the famous UFO enthusiast, explained what this particular waste of time was about.The museum has strayed, I believe, from the original purpose for which it exists and receives federal taxpayer support. I feel like it's become infected by a woke ideology that's seeped into public displays, educational materials, and planning documents. The American story is the birth and growth of a great nation founded on powerful ideals on which we aim to fully achieve. But in the museum's current telling, history is just an ongoing power struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. Only the oppressed are celebrated, especially illegal immigrants. The museum promotes educational curricula that recommends teachers to avoid using the terms illegal alien and illegal immigrant while instructing them how to use the terms gender fluidity and gender nonconforming. It hosts staff discussion groups on how museums can be used to foster social action against white privilege and hetero patriarchy. A museum display even accuses Mickey Mouse of having racist origins. The many examples of politicization of the museum are well documented in the comprehensive report the White House Domestic Policy Council recently issued on July 4th, the nation's 250th anniversary. Oh, god, no. Things did not improve when he introduced Anthea Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, by turning the condescension up to 11.Chairlady Hartig, is that what we call you, or director? What director or doctor? You're a doctor. Okay. You got director there, doctor. I'll call you doctor. You earned it. I'll give you the title. How about that? One time I made the mistake of calling a coach Mr. and he reminded me he was a coach, so you earned that title and you get it. I do appreciate your constant, uh, land acknowledgments that were in the film. I'm wondering, have you ever planned on donating any of your personal property or property of the Smithsonian to any of these tribes."Christamighty, this is a question out of a fourth-grade cafeteria. "If you like the snickerdoodles so much, why don't you marry them?" It is unbecoming for a member of Congress. It is unbecoming for a subcommittee chairman. Hell, it's unbecoming even for Tim Burchett. But things inevitably got worse on the GOP side of the aisle. Rep. Nancy Mace had her moment to wax wroth about RuPaul and to ask Hartig, "When was your gender revealed? And Rep. Brandon Gill got to cherry-pick some quotes and pretend he doesn't understand the either the plain English and the obvious context. But nobody was better prepared to represent the Trumpian view of American history than Rep. Michael Cloud of the benighted state of Texas.In the exhibit, American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith, you turn the corner and the first thing you see is this, it's a wall and the two things that pop out are the words "privilege" and "slavery." Now, is that a part of American history? Sure. Should it be covered up? No. But what makes America unique and exceptional is not, for example, that slavery was part of our history. It was a part of almost every nation's history. What makes American exceptional is that we worked so hard to overcome it, and were leading on the world stage in getting rid of it.Is this worthy of an answer? Great Britain eliminated slavery in 1803, and it did so without a civil war that slaughtered 700,000 of its own citizens. Thank god for David Blight, the great historian of Reconstruction, who testified about the effect on the future that erasing the past inevitably has.In the founding of the National Museum of American History, its legislation and dedication speeches, the founding words and sentiments understandably breathed the rhetoric of Cold War triumphalism. How could it have been otherwise? The report offers no context for what might have invoked such expressions. The Soviet achievement of the hydrogen bomb, Sputnik, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the March on Washington, and the assassination of President Kennedy. Had the Domestic Policy Council consulted trained historians, they might have provided some context. They might also have consulted Edward R. Murrow's famous commentary in 1954, the year after the museum was conceived on Joseph McCarthy and his assaults on free speech. We can deny our heritage and our history, said Morrow. But we cannot escape responsibility for the result. Erase McCarthyism. And it will come back. Erase any other 50 difficult aspects of American history, they will come back. Triumphalist history cannot tolerate nuance, ambiguity, complexity. But they are lifeblood for real historians. Also in a deep Cold War context, James Baldwin wrote in an essay entitled, also 1962, “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” that the problem with the way Americans approach history is that, quoting him, words are mostly used to cover the sleeper. But not to wake him up. We do not write woke history, whatever that is, but we do try to awaken citizens. In recent decades, we sowed the wind with new kinds of history. Here comes the whirlwind. If we're not careful, we will end up with what the great writer Toni Morrison called statist history. And it will create what she called sanctioned ignorance. That's what's at risk. Later, Blight talked about the attempted erasure of Jackie Robinson and the Tuskegee Airmen from Smithsonian material.Well, if you want inspiration from history, you can't start any better than this. Delete Jackie Robinson and he'll come back. His name was Hank Aaron. His name was Frank Robinson. His name was Bob Gibson, and I could name 1000 more. Good luck trying to delete anything that people really care about in our history. They're going to find out about it. And the fact that you can even delete it is something they can take because they have some faith in institutions like the Smithsonian which they love. and want to go to Well, bring that story to them. What's lost is curiosity, understanding. You know, our job as historians is to understand the dead. Sorry, you become relevant when you're dead. But the reason we want to understand the dead is so that we can really understand the living. And to delete the dead because somehow they don't fit a category that we like in the present. is to soil the present. And all say amen.