Pseudo-populism meets fantasy in Trump administration’s efforts to re-write U.S. history
Ham-handed efforts to package blatant whitewashing as the triumph of democracy betray their authoritarian motives
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
Given the current scope of horrors unleashed by the Trump administration — the economic chaos of tariffs and the safety-net shredding OBBB, the escalating threats against opposition politicians, the world-historical levels of graft, the sabotage of basic government services, the violent mass round-up of immigrants — its dogged jihad against American history might feel to some like quaint if obsessive overkill in comparison.
But efforts to cull official accounts of U.S. history of “improper ideology” clarify that a common malice unifies these less-showy exertions of power with the larger news of the day. This is a regime laser-focused on gathering authoritarian power at the expense of democracy, and on reinforcing discredited hierarchies of race and gender. Efforts to portray American history as pristine and perfect are closely tied to current-day efforts to present retrograde depravities as the way that things simply are supposed to be. In particular, an emphasis on suppressing recognition of civil rights struggles, whether they involved African-Americans, women, or gays, tracks closely with MAGA’s modern-day focus on elevating straight white (and Christian) males to the top of the social and economic pyramid.
A recent Washington Post article about sanitizing national parks of offending history provides a window into why we should pay attention to such schemes. In particular, it reports on the administration’s encouragement of government employees to identify materials that include discussions of “historic racism and sexism.” And so some workers have ended up suggesting for removal books about the Civil War and slavery, as well as a book about Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary. But that isn’t all:
Staff also flagged a book at the Washington Monument’s gift shop that discusses the first president as “an enslaver” as a potential violation of Trump’s order.
One park employee reported a book called “Wives, Slaves, and Servant Girls: Advertisements for Female Runaways in American Newspapers 1770-1783,” saying “the park is flagging it out of an abundance of caution.”
Employees at the Charles Pinckney Historic Site in South Carolina reported half a dozen books on slavery, plantation life and Black history. Pinckney was an enslaver who helped draft the U.S. Constitution.
In many ways, this is more of the same of what we’ve previously seen from the Trump White House. Accurate portrayals of American history are labeled as “ideological” for disparaging the United States; such disparagement is considered particularly intolerable if the history involves racism and sexism. The initiative is presented as a pushback against those who hate the United States and wish to dim its many glories.
But obviously it’s far more than a coincidence that an administration and a movement that want to implement racist, sexist policies in the present is simultaneously working to erase public perceptions that these were areas of conflict — and progress — in the past. This is not an abstract whitewashing: it’s a whitewashing with present political purpose. As scholars of fascism like Jason Stanley would say, they’re attempting to re-write our history in order to support their vision of America today.
While critics of Trumpism and MAGA have previously identified these strategies around re-writing the past, the push to suborn government employees helps us see more clearly the contradictions and authoritarian control at play. By leaning on Park Service employees to help do the White House’s work, Trump seeks to make them complicit in MAGA’s highly ideological take on American history. In other words, they are using non-partisan government employees to implement highly partisan goals, as part of an effort to pretend that these goals aren’t partisan at all.
This point is made even more clearly by the administration’s invitation to park visitors to file complaints about sites and language they feel are “negative about either past or living Americans.” Here, the approach is to garb their whitewashing in populist righteousness and democratic legitimacy: if American feel something is negative, then that is like an overwhelming popular vote to change it. It’s not just the Trump administration deciding how Americans should think about their history — it’s the vox populi rejecting discussions of slavery and women’s lib and genocide of Native American tribes. There is also a clear anti-elitist, anti-expert aspect to calling for mass input: who are you going to believe, those pointy-headed professors or your own gut check?
The invitation to criticize what makes park visitors feel bad or offended raises the prospect not just of rejecting something for that reason, but also ignoring the possibility that the same thing might well make another person feel good or informed. And while it’s true that sometimes history really should make you feel bad, it’s also true that history can also make you feel good, or gratified, or at least stimulated or intrigued at the turns of event and personality and luck and morality. In soliciting only bummer responses from Americans visiting national parks, the Trump administration is basically engaging in what it claims its ideological opponents do — encouraging people to feel bad about their country, though in this case in order for Trump to help lift that psychic burden. But a less visible but equally destructive message is also being communicated: you had better not love your country or be angry at it for the wrong reasons. Alongside the tacit forgiveness of prejudice and release from ambiguity for those who crave it, there is a parallel impulse to condemn forbidden thoughts and feelings — the authoritarian underside to a superficial deference to public opinion.
Reassuringly, Americans visiting national parks have generally declined to take the Trumpian bait, instead mostly choosing to “overwhelmingly praise the parks as beautiful national treasures, with dozens complimenting rangers for their knowledge and navigational help” — but the fake democracy and inadvertent exposé of MAGA’s populist darkness linger. After all, the fix is in: like an old-time ward heeler stuffing a ballot box, the Trump administration will almost certainly cherry pick the comments that support its goal of creating a preferred version of U.S. history.
MAGA seeks to eliminate any sense of a truth-based, multi-dimensional, collective history in favor of a supposedly patriotic one, but the latter is as much a fiction as they accuse the former of being. In fact, it’s not just a sanitized history that would result: it’s no history at all, a spectral scene of plantations crops just harvesting themselves and women never fighting to vote and factory workers never arguing for a minimum wage and 40-hour work week. It’s history clear-cut of certain people, who collectively add up to most people who have actually lived and died in our country. In this, it’s a mirror image of a present that Trump and his allies so avidly want to construct, where no progress or fairness is possible or conceivable, where we are all returned to a mythical time of blissful hierarchies, and whose unstable mirage can only be summoned into existence by repeating the violence and repression that so many earlier Americans struggled to overcome. Without history and its grounding in reality, we are at the mercy of fantasies of domination by the powerful.
MAGA’s efforts to seek pseudo-democratic legitimacy for its historical re-write are cynical, but also suggest paths for resisting and defeating them. There is a nugget of truth in their bad-faith critiques: history should not just be a matter for experts. And in fact, some of the most offensive aspects of their whitewashing run counter to baseline understandings among most Americans that are not easy to dislodge, in part due to millions of Americans having been exposed to essential facts about our country through education, popular culture, and personal experience.
In particular, the goal of trying to suppress the central role of slavery in American history strikes me as not just audacious but borderline insane. Certain facts are too well established to be easily disappeared, and it is around these in particular that defenders of a truer American history, and a better American democracy in the present, should strike particularly hard against the lies of MAGA reactionaries. Trump and his allies may have enormous resources, but they are fighting against commonly-held understandings both of facts and of basic morality. I would bet that they have bitten off more than they can chew in trying to persuade people that slavery was no big deal.