Yet recent years have shown the commitment to be only on paper. And as the institution’s conflict with the Trump administration deepens this year, it appears that it likely can’t fulfill its important national function if current leadership is allowed to stay in charge.

“There is no definition of a national museum,” per the Library of Congress, but it is generally accepted that they act as repositories of a nation’s collective inheritance. The National Gallery of Art, for example, when it was conceived by the financier and philanthropist Andrew Mellon in 1937, announced a mission “to serve the United States of America in a national role by preserving, collecting, exhibiting, and fostering the understanding of works of art.” 

The National Palace Museum in Taiwan provides another example. It displays a permanent collection of some 700,000 imperial artifacts and artworks, most of them collected by Chinese emperors of different dynasties throughout the millennia. The fleeing nationalist movement, which settled in Taiwan after losing the civil war on mainland China in 1949, saved these treasures from Mao’s communists for Chinese posterity.

In post-colonial Africa, national museums, according to a 2013 scholarly paper, “became symbols of national unity, where the diversity and dynamism of new independent nations could be displayed and celebrated.” Likewise, the National Museum of the Prado in Madrid, replete with Velazquezes and Goyas, instructs Spaniards and foreign visitors on Spain’s rich inheritance. The Louvre fulfills the equivalent function in France.

The Smithsonian Institution no longer does so in America. It may get almost two-thirds of its funding from the US taxpayer, but it has joined forces with those engaged in the national tear-down. And the Trump administration’s war against the institution — which flared up again in late December, and now is headed to a showdown early in the new year — is a clash between defenders of American continuity, on one hand, and those who seek to change foundational aspects of national life and transmit a sense of shame, on the other. 

Recent outrages at the Smithsonian include deliberate use of the institution to “legitimize” the 1619 Project, wall texts that push ideologies on “settler colonialism” and “systemic racism,” and the collection of trash and paraphernalia from the BLM riots as art. 

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It’s in the face of such curatorial policies that the Trump administration has decided that the Smithsonian urgently needs an about-face, especially considering the 250th anniversary of America’s founding in July, and has argued that American continuity depends on this reversal. It has warned it in its National Security Strategy that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure,” and is acting to prevent such erasure at home, too.

Though drawing less attention than tariffs, ICE operations, and the takeover of Venezuela, the Trump administration’s approach to the Smithsonian has been one of its flagship policies. As early as last March, Trump demanded in an executive order that the Smithsonian stop “replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” In August the administration sent a letter to museum leadership demanding documentation on content from current and future exhibitions, 250th-anniversary planning, educational materials, and indexing of permanent collections from its top-eight museums. But the Smithsonian has been stalling for time, and when it has sent materials, they have fallen far short of what was requested. 

On Dec. 19, the White House posted a letter it had sent the day before to the head of the Smithsonian, Secretary Lonnie Bunch III, informing him that it was running out of patience, and giving him a deadline of Jan. 13, 2026, to comply with the order. The letter’s authors, Domestic Policy Director Vince Haley and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, said they wrote “with particular urgency and concern that the museums of the Smithsonian Institution be well positioned” for the national celebrations. 

The institution’s positioning to date can easily be gleaned from an opinion column that ran in August in The New York Times. Former Times editorial board member David Firestone, wrote, approvingly, of a visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, that “it’s impossible to leave its magnificent building on the National Mall without feeling shamed and haunted.” Much of the museum’s collection, he added, “is a rebuke to the notion of American exceptionalism, explaining that the United States became a global economic power by enslaving Africans.” Other Smithsonian museums performed the same function, he said. “The Portrait Gallery now has labels on many of its paintings of prominent early Americans that show how many people they enslaved…. And there is no harm in accepting that shame.” 

There is a lot of harm. For starters, it isn’t true. Slavery did not play a key role in the making of the American economic juggernaut; this is one of the many lies propagated by the 1619 Project, which the Smithsonian has closely tied itself to. The museum claims, for example, in wall texts and didactics, that the “the race-based system of slavery was fundamental to the founding of the United States,” that “the national economy relied upon slavery,” and that “profits from the sale of enslaved humans and their labor laid the economic foundation for Western Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas.” 

These are misconceptions propagated by the 1619 Project’s gross overestimation of the value of cotton to the US economy in the first half of the 19th century. As historians, including Leftist and liberal ones, have explained, the 1619 Project relied on the work of the Cornell academic Edward Baptist, who wrongly miscounted, and “with a wave of his wand” multiplied by a factor of 10 cotton’s share of the economy in 1836, from 5% to “almost half of the economic activity of the United States.” Historian Phillip Magness, who has also analyzed the numbers, has argued that the exaggeration of cotton’s impact has been intended to serve the political purpose of anti-capitalism. 

The Smithsonian’s swing to insurgent mode has dovetailed with the tenure of Secretary Bunch, who was the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture from 2005 to 2019, and has since been head of the entire institution. This evolution kicked into high gear in 2020, the year of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. And other museums have followed suit, especially the Smithsonian’s neighbors on the National Mall.

The National Gallery of Art’s mission statement was an early casualty. In October 2020, at the height of the woke revolution, an anonymous letter, which claimed the signatures of current and previous employees, began to circulate, calling the gallery “the last plantation on the national mall.” “White supremacy,” fumed the letter writers, “is written into the gallery’s mission statement, which calls for the literal preservation of US history.” (The “literal” preservation of history — imagine a national museum doing that?). The writers demanded action: “We call for the NGA to rewrite its mission in understanding the foundation of the nation and its art collection in racial capitalism.” The letter further demanded an apology from the Gallery “to all BIPOC, LGBTQ, and womyn-identifying former and current employees.”

The National Gallery of Art folded like a lawn chair. In May 2021, it ditched the old Mellon-isms in favor of “inclusive” language that transformed the gallery from “national” to “international.” A new mission statement affirmed that “the National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.” 

As early as 2014, two years before the new African American museum first opened, Bunch started acting in symphony with BLM, ordering his staff to collect debris left behind by the thousands who rioted in Ferguson, Mo., after police shot Michael Brown. According to an article in Smithsonian Magazine, Bunch “charged the museum’s curators and specialists with the task of documenting the Black Lives Matter movement. They needed to collect artifacts and ephemera of the campaign.” He did the same in Baltimore a year later, after Freddie Gray died there while in police custody, and riots again engulfed Charm City. 

In 2020, when the disturbances spread nationwide, Bunch sent a team of no fewer than nine curators from three different museums — he was by then at the helm of the whole Smithsonian — to Lafayette Square in front of the White House, where protesters had set fire to the basement of St. John’s Episcopal Church the day before. There, the specialists were to “collect mementos from the historic protests over George Floyd’s death,” so Bunch could store it in his museums’ vaults, as The Washington Post put it.

The Smithsonian explained that it had sent curators “to collect and preserve the expressions of protest and hope” because “the tragic killing of George Floyd has spurred a transformative time in U.S. history.” Thus, “the Smithsonian Institution is collecting today so that the world, in the present and future, can understand.” Smithsonian curators then fanned out across America digging for the new museum gold — or what people could reasonably call, well, trash. “Staffers will hunt down buttons, banners, hats and T-shirts, from the streets of Washington and from other cities where the protests have upended daily life and forced an unprecedented reckoning with the role of police,” explained the Post.

Everywhere BLM rioted, Bunch sent his specialists to collect the paraphernalia the rioters had declined to put in garbage bins and left behind to litter our streets. Or, to put it another way, the head of our main national museums embarked on a mission to record the trashing of America, both literally and figuratively, so he could transmit it to future generations.

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Bunch was essentially forcing a national institution to join an insurrection against that nation. BLM’s founders sought the transformation of America, not reforms that improved race relations. “Our laws, economy, education institutions and legal systems are infected by institutionalized racism. It is going to take complete transformation — at all branches of government — to change the fate of this country,” wrote BLM founder Patrisse Cullors and activist Darnell Moore in The Guardian, while Ferguson burned. BLM activist Alicia Garza told Maine progressives five years later that “we’re talking about changing how we’ve organized this country…. We all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society.” 

If pressed to put a definitive stamp on the moment when the Smithsonian switched roles from nation-preserver to nation-wrecker, one would have to pick 2019, when Bunch threw the Smithsonian behind the 1619 Project. He ordered his scholars to start curating and contributing materials for the scheme to rewrite American history, and to even co-author parts of it. He was explicit that he intended to use the Smithsonian to legitimize the 1619 Project, and celebrated that “everybody … saw that the Smithsonian had fingerprints on it.”

The 1619 Project sought to shift America’s birthday from 1776, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, to 1619, when a Portuguese ship arrived in today’s Virginia with a group of Angolans, the first slaves according to the project’s architects. This new birthday put a curse on America, making it appear irredeemably tainted by slavery from the start. The New York Times Magazine, originators of the project, have been explicit that its goal was, “to reframe the country’s history.” They were, subsequently and under enormous pressure from mainstream liberal historiography, forced to retract some of the project’s core claims. But that didn’t put an end to the Smithsonian’s devotion to the revisionist, ahistorical experiment.

All the Smithsonian institutions have succumbed to the woke virus under Bunch. Many exhibits at the National Museum of American History seem intended also to make Americans feel ashamed — of ill treatment of immigrants, of the unequal rewards of capitalism, of westward expansion, take your pick — and none makes you feel proud of an American story that the historian Paul Johnson described as “one of human achievement without parallel.” 

The National Museum of Natural History has recast its exhibits from the perspective of climate change, a perspective that targets capitalism. The National Museum of the American Indian has a classroom-resources website for grades four through 11 that discusses the ways that Indian tribes were pillaged and robbed, starting with the actions of George Washington.

Even museums that the Smithsonian hasn’t built yet, like the planned Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum and the National Museum of the American Latino, show every sign that they will be outposts of national wreckage. 

Bunch is a canny political operator. But he is now on a collision course with Trump. Haley and Vought wrote in their letter last month that “the American people will have no patience for any museum that is diffident about America’s founding or otherwise uncomfortable conveying a positive view of American history, one which is justifiably proud of our country’s accomplishments and record.” According to the Times, Bunch wrote to staff that it would be impossible to turn over the documents in the specified time frame.

To return to the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, the Smithsonian officials are not like the Chinese nationalists, collecting treasures to preserve for posterity, but more like the rampaging communist partisans. Our version of the Red Guards may not be vandalizing the works of Gilbert Stuart, John Singleton Copley, John Singer Sargent, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, or Andrew Wyeth, but they are preventing Americans’ ability to learn about the nation by interacting with them. Visitors are accosted by wall didactics with sneering lessons on “settler colonialism” and “systemic racism,” meant to discourage pride in the United States. 

National shrines should not be in the business of inspiring shame, even as they might prompt thoughtful, balanced self-criticism. The transmission of heritage across the generations is what a national museum is for, and America needs museums to take up this mission. Otherwise, American culture will not long survive.

Hackett Fischer, a professor of History at Brandeis University, notes that “with many important exceptions, the tone of much American historical writing turned deeply negative during the early 21st century. It remained so as these words were written, in 2021.” He complains of demands for political correctness on campus and laments a public discourse in which “we have seen a growing disregard for truth, and a cultivated carelessness of fact and evidence”. He argues that “ancient ideas of open inquiry and empirical truth have gained a new importance, in part because of hostile assaults upon them from many directions.”

African Founders has been years in the making. “My substantive work on this project had its beginning in 1955,” writes Hackett Fischer, 86, in the book’s acknowledgments. But, with the history wars raging, it arrives in the nick of time.

To set the scene, briefly, the 1619 Project aims to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very centre of our national narrative.” Since it was launched, 1619 has been rebutted and debunked by American historians of comparable or even higher standing than Hackett Fischer (a very select group). Among those who have pointed out its many distortions, lies and inaccuracies is Gordon S. Wood, perhaps America’s greatest living historian, who has said he was surprised the project “could be so wrong in so many ways”. When another esteemed historian, Leslie M. Harris, expressed her reservations about one of 1619’s core claims — that the American Revolution was fought in large part to preserve slavery in North America — to a New York Times fact-checker, she was ignored.

Since publication, The New York Times has stealthily edited contentious passages while Hannah-Jones seems to spend most of her time arguing on Twitter, accusing her critics of being old white dudes who Just Don’t Get It. In one swiftly deleted tweet, she appeared to revel in the idea that the violent eruptions of the summer of 2020 be called “the 1619 riots”. None of these problems with the 1619 Project as a work have dampened its impact on American public life.

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This is the fraught landscape into which African Founders arrives. A few asides in the introduction notwithstanding, Hackett Fischer’s rebuttal to the vogue for deeply pessimistic history is quieter and less direct than that of many of his colleagues. But that makes it all the more persuasive. African Founders is a devastating counter-example: a thorough, compelling work free from the didacticism of both 1619 and conservative attempts to set the record straight, such as the 1776 commission launched by Donald Trump in 2020.

African Founders is a successor to Hackett Fischer’s most lauded work, Albion’s Seed. Published in 1989, it described how settlers from different parts of the British Isles imported a range of enduring “folkways” — culture, religion, language, ethics and so on — to different parts of what would become the United States: East Anglican puritans in New England, southern gentry in Virginia, Quakers from Wales and the Midlands in Pennsylvania, and Scots-Irish border folk in Appalachia. (The enthusiasm of the descendants of that final group for Donald Trump caused many pundits to dust off their copies of Albion’s Seed after 2016.)  Taking the same regional approach, African Founders charts the migrations, cultures and political and social contributions of slaves, freed slaves and their descendants throughout America.

It is hard to overstate the scope of this 900-page work. Open it at random and you will find subheadings such as “How African School Children In Philadelphia taught Benjamin Franklin A Lesson About Race” and “Diversity of African Traditions Among Afro-Texan Cowhands”. Breaking up the demographic, social and political big picture are stories of many African Americans whose tireless work didn’t just win freedom for themselves but helped to expand the very notion of American liberty.

Many of the most pre-eminent such heroes came from Chesapeake Virginia and Maryland, foremost among them Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Hackett Fischer argues that this was no coincidence. The prominence of men from the region in the founding of the United States — George Washington and Thomas Jefferson being the two most obvious examples — left a lasting impression on a later generation of slaves-turned-leaders: “These former Chesapeake built on a regional tradition of leadership, and reached beyond it in creative ways. They learned from its strengths, corrected its weaknesses, and invented other new ways of leading from their own heritage and experience.”

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Hackett Fischer spotlights less well-known figures too. Juan Rodriguez, for example, was an enterprising “black mulatto” who became the first documented non-native settler on Manhattan: he liked the look of the island and blagged his way off a Dutch merchant ship in 1613. Rodriguez fought for his freedom, fended off an attempted enslavement, married an Indian wife, became a successful trader and a translator and go-between for the Dutch and American Indians. Several scholars have called him “Manhattan’s first merchant”.

In New England, the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatly, named for the ship on which she was brought to Boston in 1761, confounded racist expectations and won praise for verse that Hackett Fischer calls “a large-spirited celebration of a common spirit in all people everywhere”. As well as the racism she encountered in her own time, Wheatly would later be criticised by black nationalists, who weren’t especially keen on her short poem “On being Brought from Africa to America”: “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land/Taught my benighted soul to understand”. Hackett Fischer notes the irony in the similarities between the black nationalist critiques and the contemporary racist criticism, including from Thomas Jefferson.

Hackett Fischer is clear that none of this should detract from the cruelty of slavery or the racist violence that followed. His book is full of terrifying detail of the lives of slaves across America, including detailed accounts of how those experiences varied over time and geography. But he understands that lingering on the horrors of slavery only get you so far in understanding America’s past.

The story told by Hackett Fischer stands in stark contrast to the demotivating, almost paralysing lesson of the 1619 Project: slavery not as America’s original sin but something hardwired into its DNA, a past that cannot be escaped. It is a dispiritingly static view of the country. Rather than displaying a curiosity at the paradox that has animated so much American history — “How is it,” asked Dr Johnson in 1775, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” — the 1619 approach dogmatically sweeps aside everything other than the existence of slavery as minor details in the story of the United States.

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African Founders, by contrast, demonstrates that there doesn’t need to be a trade-off between “centring” the experience and stories of black Americans and an appreciation of the gift of American liberty. Indeed, the takeaway from Hackett Fischer’s work is that the latter cannot be achieved without the former.

“What if we told a story that centred slavery and Black Americans and, well, no one read it,” writes Nikole Hannah-Jones in the introduction to The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, remembering her fretting on the eve of The New York Times magazine special edition. She needn’t have worried. It was an overnight sensation. Indeed, measured by impact on the public conversation, rather than merit, the 1619 Project is a more successful contemporary work of opinion journalism or pop history than any other in recent history.

African Founders, by contrast, feels like a book out of time. Inconveniently heavy and equivocal in the age of skinny provocations. Moderate in an era of extremes. But closer to the truth than the divisive works that hog the limelight.

There’s something uniquely fascinating about the persona of the journalist who betrays his or her professional ethics. There is no medical malpractitioner of historic notoriety, no lawyer so inept or corrupt that their infamy elicits international derision a century later. In fact, it might be only in the field of espionage that we find a parallel. The reason is that, like a nation’s spies, a citizenry loans journalists its most precious asset: trust. This is even more true in secular societies where social institutions take on the characteristics of religious bodies, guiding belief and shaping public perception of reality.

In this context, no American journalist has endured the same level of historical contempt as Hannah-Jones’s most notorious New York Times predecessor, Walter Duranty. One of the reasons Duranty’s name still echoes in the halls of ignominy is because his betrayal was of such an epic nature. He was not only the Times’s top Russia correspondent during the most important period of Russian-American relations in a century (namely, the very early days of the Soviet regime) but a celebrity intellectual.

Duranty’s star had risen so high that when the United States government officially recognised the Soviet Union in 1934, he was chosen to accompany its soon-to-be ambassador to the US — and escorted the newly minted American ambassador from DC back to Moscow. Indeed, it was Duranty himself who had advised Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then at the end of his presidential campaign, that US recognition of the new Soviet regime was the correct course of action.

But that was no shock. Three years earlier, around the time that international headlines were beginning to report on a famine unfolding in the Ukraine, Duranty had reported the very opposite. It wasn’t simply that he downplayed the famine, which Robert Conquest estimated killed upward of five million people in two years; he actively denied it.

What’s often missed when discussing Duranty, however, is the intentional nature of his malfeasance. When the Times came under pressure from the Ukrainian-American community in the early Noughties to return the “Duranty Pulitzer”, the paper’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., went against the recommendation of a historian hired by the Times to assess the matter. The historian recommended (unsurprisingly) that the Times should return the prize. Sulzberger refused, chalking Duranty’s cover-up to nothing more than “slovenly” reporting.

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But Duranty, an Oxford-educated polyglot, was anything but slovenly. The truth of the matter could be far more disturbing, and can be found in a statement Duranty had made years earlier. In June 1931, while visiting the US embassy in Berlin to renew his passport, Duranty made a remark to a State Department official so significant that the official recorded it verbatim and entered it into the State Department record: “In agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities,” Duranty told the American diplomat, “[Duranty’s] official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet government and not his own.”

We might be tempted to think that a correspondent of a previous century would have little to do with the most celebrated journalist of the present day. Certainly, it is inconceivable that anything can compare with Duranty’s attempts to deny the Ukraine famine — and the deaths that followed. But the parallels between Duranty and Nikole Hannah-Jones seem hard to ignore. Like Duranty, Hannah-Jones has become the New York Times’s marquee reporter, her public profile taking on celebrity proportions. Hannah-Jones, like Duranty, is as often the subject of headlines as the creator of them. And, of course, there’s the Pulitzer Prize both she and Duranty won relatively early in their respective careers. But perhaps more than any of these factors, the tone and tenor of the subject matter each reporter covered set the stage for a spectacular rise and, at least in Duranty’s case (for now), an equally precipitous fall.

In her first major piece for the New York Times Magazine, where she was a staff writer, Hannah-Jones focused on school segregation — and did so through the lens of her own experience as a mother of a school-aged child. The 2016 article, “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City”, placed Hannah-Jones herself squarely at the centre of the all-encompassing topic of race relations in America.

The 10,000-word piece launched Hannah-Jones into that rare elite which consists of reporters who become the focus of a larger reportorial arc. Just a week after it was published, the Times covered Hannah-Jones in an article that was part of a “Times Insider” series. Called “‘Surreal’: A Reporter Is in the Center of a Story She Covered”, the piece was written in the first person by Hannah-Jones and offered a look into the sausage factory of producing a culturally resonant piece for the New York Times. By October 2017, the Times was trumpeting Hannah-Jones in rockstar-like terms, running pieces about her with headlines such as “The Best of Nikole Hannah-Jones”.

And then came 1619, which made her as close to a household name as a journalist can in America. From an Oprah-backed film and TV production deal to appearances on NPR’s Fresh Air and The Daily Show, a talk with Moonlight creator Barry Jenkins to a 1619 book and accompanying children’s book, Hannah-Jones experienced the dazzling embrace of America’s corporate culture machine.

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Crucially, like that of Walter Duranty, Hannah-Jones’s celebrity has had the effect of coating her journalism with a lacquer which shields it from the buffeting forces of criticism. What unites that criticism, from both sides of the political aisle, is something fundamental to any work of journalism: accuracy. While some conservative outlets have attacked the 1619 Project on ideological grounds, the dozens of academics and many journalists who joined the debate intoned with a simple and hard-to-dislodge idea: the 1619 Project was not simply factually flawed, but deliberately, as Phillip Magness, one of the Project’s most vocal critics, put it, it amounts to “the sacrifice of scholarly standards in the service of the ideological objective”.

In the New York Times Magazine issue dedicated to the 1619 Project, there are the subtle but significant problems, such as the mischaracterisation of America’s early economy, which the Project emphasises was built on slavery, when, according to scholars who participated in the debate, slavery played a relatively minor role compared to the Northern industrial and commercial economy. Then there are the arguments that, when taken at face value, are simply absurd, such as the causal connection the Project draws between slavery and modern-day traffic jams in Atlanta or America’s love of sugary treats.

It’s the deeper claims of the Project, however, and specifically those made by Hannah-Jones herself, which are the most problematic — and which most closely tie Hannah-Jones to Duranty. The publication of a piece by Politico by Leslie Harris, a professor of African American history at Northwestern University, months after the 1619 Project was launched, identified the rot at the heart of the Project: “On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.”

This claim, that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, is the fulcrum on which Hannah-Jones’s argument swings. The reason is that the 1619 Project was not simply predicated on the idea that slavery was of consequence to American history; that is a claim most (if not all) of the Project’s most vociferous critics would not have objected to. Instead, the thesis of the 1619 Project is that America is rooted in slavery. In pursuing this mission, what Hannah-Jones attempted to do is not simply “reframe” American history (as one of the introductions to the 1619 Project claimed) but rework reality.

It’s this attempt to edit history that most closely unites Hannah-Jones’s project with that of Walter Duranty. In both cases, historical realities were tarred over in order to make way for a new narrative. But beyond the personal failings of Duranty and Hannah-Jones, there is a larger and more significant connection between the two journalists. And that, of course, is the New York Times.

It is no coincidence that two largely successful attempts to alter history and edit reality have been carried out under the aegis of the New York Times. While Duranty and Hannah-Jones took centre stage, the platform essential to each was provided by America’s self-described paper of record.

As with any corporate-backed endeavour, a costly investment such as 1619 is undertaken only when there is a likely outcome of commensurately rich rewards. This is what we so often miss about major corporate news organisations such as the Times, which is far less significantly a newsroom built on a system of editorial practices than it is a reputation, a social construct, that produces trust — as well as a business mechanism that monetises that trust and processes it into power.

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This model applies equally to the denial of the Ukraine Famine and the creation of the 1619 Project. The case of the former is explained by the drive to be positioned at the very centre of the swirl of power, influence and profit presented by the nascent, rapidly industrialising economic power of the Soviet Union that was quickly modernising the agrarian economy of tsarist Russia. The USSR was a massive market of 150 million people that for nearly two decades since the revolution had been restricted to US corporate interests.

With the 1619 Project, the New York Times’s business interests are just as decisive a factor. The Times’s management is well aware that it has to replace its audience of ageing liberals with young adherents of progressive ideologies impassioned enough to pay for the digital subscriptions that are at the heart of its business model. For the Times, this is a matter of existential significance. As a New York Times Company vice president has explained, one of the aims of 1619 is, according to NiemanLab, to “convince more of its 150 million monthly readers to pay for a subscription”.

This makes good sense considering that over a third of the Times‘s revenue now comes from digital subscriptions — and nearly two-thirds of the Times’s American audience is made up of millennial and Gen Z readers. Print subscriptions, meanwhile, are in “steady decline”; advertising is falling by close to (and sometimes more than) double digits each year.

Like all dynasties, the Sulzbergers, the billionaire family that controls the New York Times, are, in part, motivated by financial self-interest. But in the current cultural environment, where a movement of ideological upheaval is at work, it is power as much as money that lies behind what is the most significant journalistic endeavour of the past decade. The Times’s progressive turn (like that of so many American brands) is more top-down than bottom-up; it is a quest for influence rather than principle. The Times knows which way the wind is blowing and in a raging storm why not sail downwind?

The only problem with this approach — in business as much as in life — is that it doesn’t work. As Captain MacWhir in Joseph Conrad’s novella The Typhoon shouts through the raging storm to the story’s young protagonist: “They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind.” In its cynical embrace of progressive politics, the Times runs the risk of capsizing in storm waters it mistakenly believes it can control.

The same may well be true about Nikole Hannah-Jones. To her credit, unlike Walter Duranty, Nikole Hannah-Jones does not appear to be a passenger enjoying the cushy ride of celebrity. From all appearances, she is a true believer who is not just willing but eager to make the necessary sacrifices to bring about her vision of justice in the world. Whether that makes her more or less problematic than Duranty, only time will tell.

A significant factor in the Democrats’ defeat, I argued, was a style of politics that prevented them from developing an ambitious vision of America’s future — one that was capable of inspiring people from all walks of life. Indeed, it seemed that ever since the 1980s, American liberals had gotten out of the vision business altogether. They redirected their energies from party politics to movement politics, focusing attention in particular on minority and gender identity movements.

While that shift was morally comprehensible, it made it harder for liberals to speak of the common good across group lines. It also ingrained the habit of forgetting large constituencies that did not fit into the liberal-Left identity narrative, such as working-class whites and evangelicals — the latter group making up about a quarter of the adult population. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. Otherwise you give your opponent the opportunity to, as Donald Trump did with great success.

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This movement politics mindset proved to be electorally suicidal. From the 1980s on we witnessed a massive transfer of political power, in large sections of the country, from the Democrats to an increasingly radical Republican Party. The most perverse consequence was that as Democrats ceded ever more geographical ground to Republicans, particularly in state and local governments, they lost the ability to protect the very identity groups they professed to care about — in particular, their right to vote. More than half of all African Americans, for instance, live in the deep red South.

Yet Democrats resisted the obvious lessons to be drawn from these developments: that you cannot help anyone if you do not hold institutional power. And you cannot acquire that power without a vision that transcends group attachments, without denying them.

Democrats have had four years to ponder their defeat as America crumbled around them. Now that hopes of a Democratic landslide have been dashed and defeat is within the realm of possibility, the question remains as to whether they have drawn the right lessons from their electoral performance. The signs are decidedly mixed.

The good news is that Democratic politicians, party functionaries, and most importantly donors focused their energies on addressing the common good and capturing the political centre. They had seen that in the 2018 midterm elections the seats the party gained were mainly won by centrist candidates who focused on building a suburban base, particularly among white women.

They also realised that while minority groups make up an important part of the base, many of their members are culturally conservative. African-Americans, particularly older ones, are more likely to have reservations about the LGBT movement. A significant portion of Latinos oppose abortion due to their Catholic faith and have more conventional views about marriage and gender roles.

That seems to have registered, because in the recent election Democratic candidates generally avoided cultural and identity themes (apart from police reform), despite the efforts of Republicans and Fox News to provoke them into it. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ran a rather old-fashioned campaign based on policy, competence, and basic decency, and pointedly did not portray the Democratic Party as a “rainbow coalition” of distinct groups. This bodes well for the future.

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Test article

By Gavin Haynes

The bad news is that the cultural Left is even more focused on identity than it was in 2016. In part, this is due to the Trump experience. What we back then genteelly called “populism” has degenerated on the Right of the Right into a reactionary force of poorly-educated whites with their own identitarian agenda. It is tempting to want to fight fire with fire.

But over the last summer, other events revealed just how large the gap has grown between the ambition and tactics of political Democrats and those of the cultural Left. Here I am thinking of elites whose power base is in universities, the media, Hollywood, the publishing and advertising industries, the art world, and philanthropic institutions. It also includes young activists whose notion of political engagement is identity-based, confrontational, and social-media driven.

This cultural Left has been behind the so-called “Great Awokening” on race of the past five years or so. I speak here not of economic and social policies intended to improve the condition of African-Americans, which is a historical duty. Nor of legal protections for gay, lesbian, and trans people. I refer to the focus on symbols and gestures meant to display one’s conformity with enlightened opinion on such matters.

Consider the aftermath to the impressive early demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd in May. There were massive, peaceful gatherings in cities and small towns across America (and the world). But very quickly the situation degenerated into conflicts over symbols. Countless cultural institutions felt compelled to make statements about racial justice, and some of their directors resigned after making acts of contrition.

Many businesses followed suit and announced requirements that employees attend “anti-racist” training sessions, run by highly-paid, self-declared “consultants”. Twitter mobs descended on people thought to hold impure views. Editors were fired for running controversial pieces, while a researcher was fired for circulating an academic study on racial attitudes. What began as a summer of civic solidarity ended with squabbles about “cancel culture” that contributed nothing to improving life for non-elite African Americans.

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What's the mood in Trumpland?

By Ian Birrell

A major force behind this wrong turn was the liberal media, which has fallen into bad habits during the Trump presidency. Feeling that they had not been hard enough on Trump in the 2016 election, reporters got used to calling out “lies,” of which there were plenty. But the distinction between demonstrable lies and differences of opinion has gotten lost in the process. The standard of journalistic impartiality is being jettisoned in the name of an undefined “moral clarity.”

Central to these efforts has been editorial pressure on reporters to emphasise the racial dimension to stories and to play an active role in rewriting the national narrative. For example, in 2019 the New York Times launched “The 1619 Project” to mark the date when African slaves first arrived in the United States. What began as a thought-provoking idea soon became a tendentious effort to make the crime of slavery the true founding of the republic. Historians complained about inaccuracies and the Times silently corrected them, while still standing behind the project’s editor, who won a Pulitzer Prize. Young reporters were left with the impression that such efforts will still help them to advance their careers.

While the Biden campaign was not overly distracted by these psychodramas, it would be a mistake for Democratic leaders to pretend any longer that they don’t exist. Right-wing media will keep the culture war over symbols before the public eye, which can only help the Republican Party. That means that the Democratic politicians must explicitly distance themselves from ideological “anti-racist” rhetoric and political theatre, such as efforts to tear down statues of American presidents. And they must resist efforts to distort American history in our schools.

Democratic voters care about racial justice but they are focused on the present and the future, not on litigating the past. They also believe in fair play, open debate, and legitimate differences of opinion. They want to build America, not indict America. Democratic leaders must make it crystal clear that they feel the same way. No matter what the final results of this year’s elections, they desperately need to do some housecleaning if they hope ever to build a durable Democratic majority in our lifetimes.

But help is on the way, for we now have the cure for this problem: Critical Theory. The goal of “Theory” is to overthrow the Force, liberating the disadvantaged from their mental slavery to usher in an epoch of perfect equality, or even — dare we hope — turn the tables on the white cis-het male oppressor. If you fall into a hegemonic category, you must repent of your privilege and become an ally to the oppressed. If from a victim group, you must wake up and fight against lies about “objective truth”, “free speech” or universal standards, which are oppressing you and erasing your identity.

If you have the temerity to disagree with this conspiracy theory, or demand evidence for its sweeping claims, you’re part of the problem, helping to reproduce the Force and uphold the System. Time for your re-education, otherwise known as diversity training.

Critical Theory is the philosophy which underlies Wokeness. It consists of layers of assertions, built up over time, with each new generation of theories building on the inventions of previous theorists. Using moral self-righteousness and the leftist monoculture of the soft social sciences to shield them from scientific scrutiny, its practitioners have founded a series of fields such as queer theory, critical race theory, fat studies and critical gender theory.

Gradually, these have intersected and morphed into an all-encompassing Theory, which today’s identity politics activists use to justify a ratcheting programme of language policing, Twitter mobbing and re-education. When challenged, they wheel out Theory buzzwords like “white fragility”, “heteronormative” or “microaggression”.

Critical Race Theory, in particular, has become such a concern that last month the US president issued an executive order barring its use in federal institutions, while yesterday in Parliament Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch condemned it as a “dangerous trend” in race relations.

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories is the most thorough attempt yet to unmask this Social Justice religion, or, to use postmodernist lingo, to “deconstruct” its “metanarrative”. It tracks the genealogy of critical race, gender, queer and fatness theory, painstakingly pointing out logical leaps and flaws. The two authors, along with a third figure, Peter Boghossian, came to well-earned prominence in October 2018 when they revealed the scandal that they were able to get seven hoax papers published in established gender studies, fat studies and queer studies journals.

These included a purported participant observation study of a dog park alleging that canines engage in rape culture and a paper on the penis as social construct. Though designed to be ridiculous, these studies passed peer review because they ticked the right ideological boxes and demonstrated proficiency in postmodernist jargon. One even won an award. Like Alan Sokal’s similar hoax in the 1990s, Pluckrose and company exposed the fact that these studies trafficked in ideology and faux-knowledge, and could thus be manipulated in a way no scientific journal dedicated to understanding the real world can be.

As a Masters student in Sociology at the London School of Economics in the early 1990s, I encountered the prelapsarian world in which high theory and activism were still separate. Coming from an economics background, I was stunned to find myself in a sociological theory seminar that felt like a séance, in which participants riffed off each other, tossing in morsels of jargon or fragments from canonical thinkers like Michel Foucault, Claude Levi-Strauss or Homi Bhabha, while shedding little to no light on the workings of the social world beyond our classroom.

The big thing was still postmodernism, the idea that modernisation and progress are a myth, along with its bigger sister, post-structuralism, which holds that language is just a bunch of words which gain meaning from each other and have no relationship to anything in the real world. Postmodernism was an art rather than a science, a play on words instead of a serious attempt to improve our knowledge of society.

Of course, there may be a grain of truth to Foucault’s untested idea that knowledge affects power relations, or to the post-structuralist claim that context has some effect on the meaning of words. Phrases like “astral world of signs” or “liquid modernity” really are a lot of fun. Yet, rather than make such claims measurable and modest, its contemporary practitioners have elevated the idea of knowledge as oppression onto the plane of sacred values, with reality and theory two non-overlapping magisteria that science cannot solve. Relativism insulates Theory from scientific scrutiny.

After the seminar, I noticed one especially humourless classmate dressed in proletarian gear flogging the Socialist Worker in the quad, having swapped his postmodernist theory for Marxist practice. Nowadays, his high theory and activism would be better coordinated, united in the form of a strident intersectional identity politics which manifests in the form of open letters to cancel professors, Robin D’Angelo’s White Fragility training or the New York Times’s 1619 Project. Indeed a key theme of Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book is that the political radicalism of the 1960s-80s has commandeered the pretend-expertise of postmodernism, invested it with seriousness and pressed it into action as Cancel Culture.

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David Lammy's double standards

By Eric Kaufmann

Just as Salafi Islam was a quietist form of fundamentalism that ignited when mixed with Marxist theories of action, Theory has now entered its activist phase. It has migrated off campus into government, the media and the corporate world. This is why the sane mainstream can no longer afford to ignore its abstruse nonsense and why, whatever we think of Trump, we should applaud his executive order banning Critical Race Theory in the US government.

The book’s intellectual history is vital, and I commend its plea for a return to what Jonathan Rauch terms “liberal science”. This said, the authors fail to grasp the liberal roots of Theory, and how Left-liberalism’s well-intentioned and sometimes protective attitude to minorities has overreached and helped make the problem worse.

They believe a sharp emotional line can be drawn between a nice “left-liberal” who “favour[s] the underdog” and a totalising victim-oppressor worldview. Unfortunately, it can’t. Once your default position is warmth toward supposedly helpless minorities and suspicion of majorities, you have stepped across an affective abyss which sacrifices your objectivity, and this makes it far harder to resist the leftist good guys just trying to protect the meek. After all, the hearts of activists fighting for the underdog are in the right place and you wouldn’t want to be associated with the dark side.

Theory is set up as a form of science but it rarely advances through logical argument, and it can only be countered if it rests on a pre-cognitive base of emotional neutrality.

While the principles of reason and liberalism are opposed to extreme egalitarianism, there is no appeal to the heart in contemporary liberalism to viscerally counter the powerful Woke metanarrative of “defending the weak against the tyranny of the majority”. Until such a thing happens, liberal science will continue to mock Theory the way Sokal did in 1996 — while wokeness barrels on, capturing the hearts of young, educated and “right-thinking” people.

John Ellis’s The Breakdown of Higher Education is a case study of what happened at the epicentre of Theory, the university. It provides a first-hand account of how the cultural revolution that institutionalised critical theory and Cancel Culture began and spread. As a British-born emeritus professor of English at the University of California Santa Cruz who has taught there since 1966, Ellis recalls an exciting time when staff and students learned the western canon, and used it as a jumping-off point to freely discuss ideas without fear of being shamed or disciplined. He recounts how Social Justice ideology has, over the course of his lifetime, driven the pursuit of truth and excellence out of the social sciences and humanities in American universities.

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Are young people turning to the Right?

By Eric Kaufmann

This cultural change began with demographic shifts and was consolidated through political discrimination. In 1969, the authoritative Carnegie faculty surveys found that 45% of the professoriate leaned left, 28% right and 27% in the middle. By 2004, a study of party registration data for Berkeley and Stanford university faculty showed an 8:1 left-to-right ratio, rising to 49:1 among junior faculty. Trend-setting California offered a clue as to what was happening. By 2016, another study found that the modest 2:1 left-to-right nationwide faculty ratio of 1969 had given way to a yawning 12:1 tilt. By 2018, Mitchell Langbert’s study of the party registrations of faculty in the top 50 US liberal arts colleges discovered that 39% had zero Republican registrations, with most of the rest in single digits.

Ellis remarks on the confluence of chance events that allowed this capture to take place. In effect, during the sixties, a combination of baby boom demographics and rising affluence resulted in the universities undergoing massive expansion. This occurred at precisely the moment that the Vietnam War and Civil Rights movement delegitimated the country’s traditional narrative, a conjunction that created an opening for radical students to enter the professoriate in large numbers, transforming it.

Once in post, the new generation deepened their ideological grip by controlling recruitment. Instead of being inculcated into the dominant truth-seeking culture of the university, the radicals now possessed the critical mass to escape Rauch’s “liberal science” and transform the entire mission of academia. Now truth-seekers would have to bend to orthodoxy instead of the other way round. Instead of their traditional motto of veritas, the university now stood for radical activism, with a focus on disadvantaged race, gender and sexuality groups.

Ellis draws on John Stuart Mill’s argument that “the opposition of the other… keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity” — bad ideas on the extremes are sidelined. Once academia becomes a monoculture, however, with conservative voices excluded or suppressed, there is no longer a battle of ideas at the centre, but rather a climate which empowers “the most extreme and exciting positions of the left”, in Ellis’s words, a group who come to exemplify the shared outlook of the campus. The result has been ever-more strident campus radicalism, culminating in disasters like the Evergreen State and Middlebury affrays, shoutdowns and no-platformings. Professors who fail to conform to campus orthodoxy face open letters, chanting students and Twitter mobs trying to end their livelihoods.

Meanwhile, says Ellis, the university is failing its students. A succession of studies show that graduateliteracy levels and general skills have slipped compared to past generations. In one study, 45% of students showed no skills development over their entire university course. Meanwhile, implicit racial quotas at leading universities have resulted in minority students with weaker results being improperly allocated to universities that don’t match their aptitude, producing high dropout rates or transfers to less rigorous courses — with their relative lack of success in prestige fields then blamed on a racist curriculum rather than a flawed admissions process.

Universities have stonewalled attempts to obtain data on graduation rates for preferentially-admitted students, Ellis writes, because “they don’t want anyone to know the damaging results of these policies…the harm they do to black students”.

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Is Critical Race Theory racist?

By Helen Pluckrose

The mushrooming of equity and diversity bureaucracies in recent decades has both increased the chilling effect on conservative and centrist scholars and replaced an ethos of excellence with one of “diversity”. Diversity training using Theory-inspired materials is now mandatory across most American universities, and some University of California departments are requiring job applicants to complete “diversity statements” outlining how they are advancing orthodoxy. Administrators, not scholars, weed the pile of applications, which is only then sent on to academic departments.

Ellis believes that universities have passed the point of no return and cannot be saved from within. The only hope is for outside intervention, from donors, trustees or the Government. However, time is short, for Social Justice is now taking root outside the campus, from K-12 schools to corporations. As new generations are raised to prioritise sensitivity to minorities (as interpreted by Theory) over truth, the common sense of the off-campus majority may no longer exist in sufficient strength to resist dogma.

Pluckrose and Lindsay, inhabiting the more intellectually plural world of commentary and journalism, believe good ideas will win out over bad. Ellis, who has seen the face of repression first-hand within the American university system, is, in my view, more realistic.

Conservatives and traditional liberals naively expected the political correctness and speech codes of the 1990s to fade away. They wasted their energy on economics and foreign policy, neglected the culture and are now in danger of losing it altogether. Only an active mobilisation, involving the intervention of elected governments, can hope to reverse Theory’s capture of elite institutions, the current slide toward collective unreason and the emergence of a truly Orwellian public culture.

Take the events of recent months. In almost all of the world’s democracies, the immediate reaction to the Covid pandemic was an uptick in public trust in, and support for, their governments. Countries like Britain — said to be hugely divided over recent years — suddenly turned out to have significant secret wells of public trust in the authorities. A consensus grew around what was the best way to deal with the outbreak, based on the advice of the country’s leading scientists.

The Government (and a Conservative one at that) ordered everyone to stay in their homes and the public followed its orders. The Government told all young people not in a committed relationship or living with their partner to engage in months of chastity. And they did. If you had suggested this time last year that a Conservative Prime Minister — and Boris Johnson of all prime ministers — could have successfully ordered the youth of Britain to take up celibacy for the summer you would have been adjudged mad. And yet they did it; as did the public in democracies all around the world. Except for one.

The consensus and unanimity we saw in the spring may be splitting apart now, but it is worth recalling how impressive it was while it lasted.

Only America was exceptional, a land where even the arrival of a deadly global pandemic could not unify the nation even for a moment. Indeed, from the outset of the crisis American society polarised along the same political grooves that it has been stuck in over recent years, and it got worse.

People who supported the President broadly went along with his strategy, if he had one. Those who opposed him — not least a near totality of the American media — continued to find new arguments and justifications for saying that he did not deserve to govern, or to blame him for every aspect of the disaster.

Of course, this is an election year in the US, so perhaps it was inevitable that the pandemic and politicians’ reactions to it would be judged in this light. It is conceivable that if Britain were on the cusp of a General Election, or another vote on our membership of the EU, the spirit of co-operation between front benches might have lasted less time than it did. Perhaps Ms Sturgeon would have been even more on manoeuvres than she was, had she spied another independence referendum in under two months’ time.

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Hollywood's hapless diversity bid

By Douglas Murray

But while it’s certainly arguable that Trump has aggravated America’s problems and divisions, he certainly didn’t create them. The divide long pre-dates him and has grown and grown in recent years, to the point where the different parties look increasingly irreconcilable. That is because these divisions go right to the core of what it means to be American.

When Eric Kaufmann recently carried out opinion polls on self-described “liberals” in the US, the results were startling but not surprising. For instance, around 80% of respondents said that they would approve of the writing of a new American constitution “that better reflects our diversity as a people”. A similar number said that they would approve of a new national anthem and flag, for the same reason.

And over the last few months, some of the more activist section of the American “liberal” tribe have taken matters into their own hands, with statues pulled down across the country, not just of Confederate generals or people associated with the divisive elements of American history, but men who once united the American public. Who once represented and defined their shared history as a great nation.

When statues of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are pulled down, this no longer looks like a critique of certain aspects of American culture: it looks like an attack on the American Founding story. When senior Democrats like Tammy Duckworth — who has served in her country’s military — refuse to condemn attacks on statues of the Founding Fathers it becomes clear that this attitude is not confined to some street-protest fringes.

Nor is it limited to the fringes of the American media. Last year’s 1619 Project aimed to move the founding of the America nation back from the moment when the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, or when the Pilgrim Fathers left England in 1620: instead, the true founding date of America would be when slaves from Africa were first brought into the continent.

The goal is obvious and stated: to make slavery the defining, foundational issue of the republic. It would force America to be forever mired in the subject, a wound picked open on a daily basis. The 1619 Project is a deeply radical — and not very rigorous — historical project whose founders have encouraged the pulling down of statues and other direct action against the founding images of the republic.

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Nicola Sturgeon's canny doom-mongering

By Douglas Murray

Yet 1619 is not some fringe obsession on some obscure anti-American blog, but a prestigious rolling project started by the New York Times. Although the Times spends a great deal of time obsessively attacking Britain — the latest piece bemoaning the state of bridges in the London area — its real target is closer to home, its aim being to unweave the fabric of America.

There was a time when American anti-Americanism of this kind (analysed by Jean-François Revel, among others) was the preserve of a relatively small group of people, largely products of a few liberal universities.

But the events of recent months have revealed to even the most complacent observer that once-fringe ideas have spread out across the nation. And unrest like that which occurs nightly in Portland, Oregon, is concerning not because it is pointless but because it has a point. It has an aim. The protestors who have managed to get away with criminal acts night after night justify their violence not just by claiming that they are hunting down the apparently vast number of Nazis who inhabit their ultra-liberal state. They justify it by claiming that the republic itself is irredeemable: irredeemable because it is racist and irredeemable because it is founded in slavery and oppression.

Time and again in recent months it has become clear that the aim of many of the protestors is not to upgrade America — but to completely change it. Such people appear to labour under the misapprehension that if only they could get rid of everything to do with the country that they inhabit then they would live in a state of equality, liberty and bliss.

It is tempting to compare this error of thought with the misapprehension enjoyed by Kant’s dove, but if the protestors in Portland were offered the comparison, they would doubtless shoot it down by identifying it as yet another example of white supremacy.

It is becoming harder to communicate across the gulf, as, increasingly, the two Americas cannot consort or discuss with each other. And if there is one reason above all why that should be the case it is because they no longer have a shared story.

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Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinos

A portion of the American people still revere their history, the Founding Fathers, the constitution, flag, anthem and much more. They see it as symbols of a glorious past, a country which has fought for its own and others’ liberty, and the once-admired idea of American exceptionalism.

Another portion believe that America is exceptional only in being exceptionally bad. Rather than thinking well of their country or their forebears they see the whole American experiment as unusually unfair and uncommonly unequal. When a poll came out earlier this week suggesting that a majority of Americans had very little idea of what the Holocaust was, many people highlighted it as an example of American ignorance. In reality, most populations are ignorant of what has occurred in other countries (and indeed the poll was largely misreported).

Nor is it unusual for a population to be ignorant about large chunks of its own history. What is unusual, and odd and unhealthy, is for a large portion of a country to only have one set of ideas about their country’s past, and for all of those ideas to be negative.

Between these two positions, it is exceptionally hard to see how any consensus can be achieved. People like to pretend that if their candidate wins the election in November, the divisions in American society will stop. But they will not, because the divide now lies at the most fundamental, tectonic levels of the republic, about who the country is.

Historically speaking, such a divide will inevitably escalate into increasing violence and even civil war, unless stopped by some great unifying force that goes beyond party politics or identity. But there is no sign of such a thing on the horizon.