Restoring a positive vision of America will be no easy task after years of neglect, those involved tell NR.
A cultural reckoning has reached the Smithsonian Institution.
As the Trump administration goes on the offensive to rid one of the nation’s leading cultural institutions of partisanship and racial essentialism, the goal seems clear: Free the institution from personnel intent on using their perch to advance a left-wing agenda. But firing people is just the first step; the challenge begins when the cleanup crew is finished.
While conservative politicians play catch-up to a culture they abandoned in the ’70s, those in the arts fields say that it’s no easy task to restore quality and a positive vision of American values to arts and culture institutions.
The divisive question is the ongoing debate over the place of race and racism in the study and interpretation of American history, according to Jerald Podair, a professor of history and American studies at Lawrence University. Podair’s research centers on 20th-century American urban history and racial and ethnic relations.
There are basically two positions regarding race relations in the history of the United States, according to Podair: structural and aberrational.
“The first regards racism in American history as institutional, ‘hard-wired,’ if you will, into our governance, society, and experience,” Podair told National Review. “The other views it as an aberration from our nation’s founding ideals and values, but not an inherent element of our past and present. One demands a root-and-branch excision of our racist structures. The other demands only that we live up to the egalitarian principles that underlay American history, without the need to revise them.”
The structural approach holds sway at the Smithsonian, Podair said. The Trump administration, on the other hand, wants to steer the Smithsonian toward the aberrational approach.
Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, issued a public statement on June 9 announcing a full review of the Smithsonian’s personnel and content to ensure nonpartisanship. Bunch will spearhead the effort, overseen by the museum’s governing body, the Board of Regents. The board includes Vice President JD Vance, Chief Justice John Roberts, as well as six congressional regents and nine regents from the public.
“The Board of Regents has directed the Secretary to articulate specific expectations to museum directors and staff regarding content in Smithsonian museums, give directors reasonable time to make any needed changes to ensure unbiased content, and to report back to the Board on progress and any needed personnel changes based on success or lack thereof in making the needed changes,” the statement announced.
In an internal email the same day, Bunch admitted that some of the institution’s work “has not aligned with our institutional values of scholarship, even-handedness and nonpartisanship.” The review follows a March executive order directing the vice president to ensure the removal of “improper ideology” from the museums.
No reasonable person wants to ignore the truth of race relations in the United States, according to Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation — but he added that history should be represented fairly in our national museums.
“Getting the balance right is important,” Gonzalez told National Review. “We have to tell the American story without washing over slavery, discrimination, Jim Crow. I don’t know anyone who wants to ignore the bad parts of history. But we also have to be clear that every country has practiced slavery.”
The occurrence of revisionist history and harmful woke ideology within the 21 museums and numerous libraries and research centers of the Smithsonian Institution is evident, according to Gonzalez.
Asked for evidence of partisanship, Gonzalez cited several examples: a sympathetic exhibit on the ANSWER Coalition, which is tied to the Chinese Communist Party, at the National Museum of American History; multiple items that favorably portray American Marxist Angela Davis at the National Museum of African American History and Culture; and a canceled exhibit planned for the Museum of the American Latino that sought to highlight the radical Puerto Rican youth movement known as the Young Lords. According to Gonzalez, the exhibit currently previewing at the National Museum of the American Latino reduces the Hispanic experience in the United States to a Marxist struggle against oppression.
“When you go to the Smithsonian, one of the first things you notice is that you’re surrounded by children, adolescents, and young adults,” Gonzalez said. “We should make sure that they’re not being indoctrinated by a left that wants America to be seen as hideous and ugly and oppressive.”
When it comes to these games of identity politics, the Smithsonian is a microcosm of cultural and educational institutions in the country as a whole, according to First Things magazine senior editor Mark Bauerlein. The problem isn’t new. Rather, conservatives are waking up to the importance of the educational and cultural institutions they abandoned decades ago.
The first step in restoring quality to institutions such as the Smithsonian is the proposed cleanup operation, according to Bauerlein — getting identity politics out of the arts.
“Politicization always inevitably produces a decay of intellectual quality and of aesthetic quality as well,” he told National Review. “Politicized art is just hackery.”
Bauerlein suggested offering tradition without criticism. “We set up some different norms, apolitical norms, first of all, such as insisting upon Americans learning about the foundations of their country, the civic, religious, and social and artistic foundations of their country, which leads back to the foundations of Western civilization,” Bauerlein said. “That’s the base. That’s where we go to, and we teach those materials without the resentment and cynicism and what used to go by the name of ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’ applied to those materials.”
In other words, give the people history and tradition and save critique for the classroom.
In terms of tactics, the kinds of reforms the administration is pursuing are not totally new to the arts world, according to Alaine Arnott, president and CEO of the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. When any responsible CEO of a museum or business comes in, he reevaluates the organization’s faithfulness to its mission and goals, she said.
Arnott said those in the museums and cultural spaces should focus on their roles as educators rather than try to advance a political agenda of either extreme.
Identity politics has infiltrated arts institutions the same way it’s infiltrated academia, Baurlein argues. Correcting this trend will require many of the same solutions, possibly implemented by the same people.
“The Trump administration needs experienced people, people who have been engaged in ideological warfare on campus — people who have the savvy to understand how liberal-left language operates,” Baurlein said.
Baurlein was one of a group conservative trustees called in to take charge of the New College of Florida in 2023 under Governor Ron DeSantis and turn the college into a classical liberal arts university. They fired the president, abolished DEI programs and gender-studies programs, and announced a vision for reform.
Reform to the arts institution will take more than methods, strategies, and tactics, he said. It will take spine and stamina.
It will also take governmental support, at least initially.
“I don’t know if there is a conservative movement that can maintain a conservative vision in these spheres if you don’t have federal power, governmental power backing them up,” Bauerlein said. “It’s an open question.”
The changes at the national level reflect a greater reckoning in the cultural space that the administration is trying to tap into and guide, Arnott said.
“[As a cultural space] we have gone to a certain political direction, and we’ve alienated the other side,” Arnott said. “Our job should be to instill trust. We are one of the last entities right now that people still see as trustworthy. How we continue to gain that trust is to bring people back to the table that maybe haven’t been there in a while.”
According to Arnott, much of the long-term success of the administration’s project depends on the response of the arts community.
“We have to be brave enough to come to the table, and that’s challenging. . . . I think it’s a very emotional topic for folks, so it’s hard to sit and hear somebody else’s perspective and validate it and say, ‘I may not agree with you, but if we get all these perspectives out, we’re going to better understand the future of what the arts and cultural sector could look like in a positive way,’” Arnott said.
While the executive order gets the ball rolling, it also threatens to wipe out much of the good that the Smithsonian does, Podair said. From the Smithsonian’s perspective, positive and lasting change will depend on the appointment of individual museum directors by the secretary and the board, he added. Personnel, after all, is policy.
“The goal is not blanket cheerleading or disparagement, but a balanced — and yes, nonpartisan — approach to American history that offers our citizens an honest account of America’s successes and failures over the past 400 years without editorializing or political posturing,” Podair said. “Give Americans the facts and trust their judgment as to what to do with them.”