This shift is the result of deep, and perhaps inexorable, changes that contemporary Western leaders celebrated in the name of “diversity.”  Western societies have indeed become more diverse, but the process hasn’t been the product purely of Western openness, but also of structural forces. To wit, modern communications and mass immigration have shrunken distances, making Western countries less like their past as exclusionary metropolises of racially based sea empires, and more like the multiethnic Eurasian land empires like Rome, Russia, Iran, and China. 

Thus, the history of those empires has important lessons — and warnings — for us. Above all, the Eurasian empires were civilizational states, dependent for their success upon the strength of their inherited civilizations, and on respect for these civilizations by their multiethnic populations. By these standards, Western countries today are in increasingly poor shape. 

Civilizational decline is not so dangerous in ethnically homogenous societies. Like many formerly great peoples before them, the ethnic English of the future could squat contentedly on the steps of the half-ruined monuments of their ancestors, scratching for fleas while telling themselves stories of their great past victories, great past works of literature that they no longer read, and great buildings that they no longer have the craftsmanship to build. This is, however, unlikely to impress new residents of their island. 

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In a world in which new residents are a given, the historical distinction between oceanic empires and land empires becomes crucial. Western-European colonists traveled thousands of miles across the sea and encountered completely different cultures with whom they had had no previous contact, and which were generally at a markedly lower level of technological development. In the Americas, on top of this came the immense new commercial opportunities of plantation crops and industrialized slavery based on race. The result was institutionalized racist systems for social management. There were of course beliefs in imperial “missions civilisatrices”, but accompanied by an implicit or explicit assumption that the process of civilizing the natives would take a very long time and probably always remain incomplete.

The great land empires — Roman, Chinese, Muslim, and Russian, among others — couldn’t be like this. They had lived next to the peoples they conquered for hundreds or thousands of years. They had similar levels of technological development. Sometimes, the subjects were tacitly recognized by the conquerors to have in certain respects a higher level of “civilization” than themselves: Greeks over Romans, Iranians over Arabs, Baltic Germans over Russians. For long periods, moreover, the subject peoples had been the former rulers: several of the great Chinese dynasties were from “barbarian” peoples; several of the great Iranian dynasties were Turkic; the Russian principalities lived for almost 300 years under the “Tatar yoke.” 

In these circumstances, hierarchies based on racial origin and proportion were hard to sustain — certainly if the empires wished to expand and survive. Dynastic intermarriage was a regular thing. To secure imperial rule over conquered territories required the successful co-opting of large parts of their elites. These elites then merged into the existing imperial elites. Hence the Tatar surnames of some of the greatest Russian noble families, like the Sheremetievs and Kochubeys.  

The test was not race, but readiness to adopt the civilization, language, and, in the case of the Muslim and Russian empires, religion of the empire. The originally “alien” ethnic origins of writers like Ivan Turgenev (with his Tatar roots) in Russia have never affected their status as great national cultural icons. Given time — and the Iranians and Chinese had millennia — whole populations could merge into the imperial people. Thus a large majority of “Han Chinese” south of the Yangtse River are, in fact, of non-Chinese “tribal” origin. 

Or as a Russian friend exclaimed when I first explained America’s racial “one-drop” rule to her, “That’s ridiculous! By that standard, every Russian is actually a Mongolian!” Indeed, the quasi-racist charge that Russians are racially and culturally mixed with Asiatics and therefore “not really European” has always helped to fuel Western prejudice against Russia. British visitors to Russian-ruled Central Asia in the later 19th century were appalled by the levels of corruption — and also by the ease of intercourse between Russians and “natives”.

What are the lessons — positive and negative — of these imperial traditions for our increasingly multiracial societies today? The first is that equality of racial origin in the elites has never said anything at all about the social and economic position of the mass of the population, whatever their race or ethnicity. The second is that social stability depends upon the integration of new populations by providing them with tolerable lives and equal rights before the law; and this process depends, in turn, on there being rights and a rule of law to start with. 

Caracalla, who reigned AD 211-217. was one of the nastier Roman emperors. Even so, he was responsible for extending Roman citizenship to all free-born men in the empire. A great sign of progress in a brief moment of liberalism? Not exactly. His chief motive, according to the historical consensus, was to increase the tax base. It may have been the right direction, but it did nothing to slow growing tax evasion by the elites, and the intensifying slide of the mass of the empire’s population into immiseration and exploitation. 

By the fifth century, this had reached a point at which many preferred to be ruled by the “barbarians.” Equally importantly, the “Antonine Constitution” granting universal citizenship was part of the process whereby the last vestiges of the Roman republican tradition and its legal rights were extinguished and replaced by the absolutist, quasi-sacred monarchy of the later empire: “equality in misery” as the old Russian saying has it. A multiracial elite is very nice, but it is even nicer when it is not ruling over a population of impoverished multiracial serfs. 

Above all, the history of the great Eurasian land empires raises the question of whether our societies can maintain the combination of material success, elite ethics, and civilizational attraction that made the “barbarians” respect the empires and enabled those empires to assimilate not only their subjects, but even in some cases their conquerors. This is in large part a question of maintaining — or rather, restoring — widely spread economic opportunities and prosperity for citizens of all races; but it is much more than that besides. 

The success of ancient Rome also depended upon the ethics and values known as Romanita, emphasizing such virtues as loyalty, discipline and fortitude. Chinese states repeatedly failed and were repeatedly put back together by ruling elites united and strengthened by the values imparted by the different strands of Chinese cultural tradition. Core to both was a deep sense of loyalty to the inherited idea of the state, leading to duty to the actually existing state. When contemporary critics say — rightly — that present Western cultures think too much about rights at the expense of duties, they should remember what happened to ancient Rome when the elites lost their sense of duty. How can immigrants develop a sense of loyalty to Britain or America, if those countries’ elites themselves have lost it? 

When it comes to assimilating immigrants, Western civilization is being undermined from several directions at once. Capitalist demand for wage arbitrage and a “reserve army of labor,” legitimized politically by a fanatically utopian and historically illiterate Left, is producing a nativist reaction in much of the older ethnic population. Some of President Trump’s restrictions on immigration are thus a necessary corrective. 

But by abandoning the universalist values of American “credal nationalism” in favor of a chauvinist version of US identity, Trump threatens to wreck America’s version of Romanita, and destroy the cultural and ideological elements that made the successful assimilation of immigrants possible. In Europe, the populist Right’s growing insistence on the Christian basis of national identity worked well for the great universalist religious empires of the past but is unlikely to do so in an irreligious contemporary Europe, where the strongest religious allegiances are found among Muslim immigrant communities.

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Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, there is the need for a “great tradition,” a cultural core capable of assimilating other cultures. It has been said that “a language is a dialect with an army,” but it would be more accurate to say that a language is a dialect with a literature. Languages with a strong literary core have played a key role in preserving national identities and the idea of the state, for centuries or even millennia during which the state itself has vanished. This role has been most powerful when the literature is integral to a codified religion, as in the Jewish diaspora, or bound up with philosophies of state, as in China.

In the Middle Ages, the legends of King Arthur and his knights were called “The Matter of Britain,” as the legends of Charlemagne were called “The Matter of France.” In Persian-speaking lands, the Shah-Nameh (and the miniature art it generated) helped to preserve an idea of Iranian identity during long periods in which Iran was fragmented. The same was true of the “Knight in the Panther’s Skin” in the Georgian lands. 

The frantic attempts of late 19th century nationalist writers to “rediscover” and write down “national” myths — like Lacplesis in Latvia, transformed from a mythical half-bear into a “historical” national hero fighting the German medieval crusaders — has attracted a good deal of justified mockery. But these revisionists were onto something: national pride can bring us together. 

These are, however, specifically national and ethnic (or pseudo-ethnic) myths, rather than a literary corpus that can attract other peoples. Modern Russia has possessed, rather than one national myth, the corpus of great 19th-century Russian novelists and poets, whose work has been central to Russian civilizational identity. Being secular in form (if religiously-influenced), this core body of work has attracted many people of non-Russian ethnic origin to the Russian tradition.

Britain and France — and the United States, in a more complex and diffuse way — also possess such immensely prestigious inherited modern literatures, that exercised a powerful effect on colonial subjects who were educated in English and French.

For Britain and France to maintain the influence of their literary traditions within their domestic societies, however, requires a sufficiently large literate class interested in preserving them and reworking them for present and future generations. Quite apart from the apparent desire of much of Western academia to destroy this tradition, can such classes survive the era of AI and an atomized mass media? And when they do try to rework the classics, can institutions like the Royal Shakespeare Company in its present debased form carry a great tradition forward? All too often, the RSC’s “adaptation” looks more like woke Procrustean torture, and by the time they have finished stretching Shakespeare and cutting bits off there is not enough left to see him at all, let alone sense his part in a great tradition. Or can the Smithsonian in America, with its present insistence on curatorial self-flagellation over the misdeeds of the past, now transmit an American tradition?

I hope that the picture I have drawn is too gloomy, and that our sea-faring societies will find the cultural and political strength to adjust successfully to new populations in the way that the Eurasian land empires did. Should we fail, we can derive some thin comfort from the fact that all states come to an end, and that in the end, perhaps the best they can hope for is to leave a good-looking cultural corpse to help fertilize the civilizations of the future.

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.