Who controls the past? No, really.
Who decides which stories are told, which are shortened, which become exhibits, which become footnotes, and which quietly disappear altogether?
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That’s the real fight taking place every time Americans argue about monuments, museums, school curriculum, or the Smithsonian.
The headlines tell us we’re arguing about history, but we’re not. We’re arguing about editors.
Every nation tells itself a story. The difference between healthy civilizations and declining ones isn’t whether they have flaws, but whether they’re honest enough to tell the whole story without turning it into propaganda for one political team or the other. That’s where we’ve gotten ourselves into trouble.
The progressive Left has spent years treating American history like a criminal trial. Every exhibit is another piece of evidence proving the country was fundamentally illegitimate. Heroes become villains. Complexity becomes oppression. Context becomes an inconvenience.
Predictably, many conservatives responded by grabbing the red pen themselves, and the temptation to create our own approved version of history—one where America’s failures are minimized because admitting them might somehow weaken patriotism—should be resisted.
As a black conservative, I find this entire debate strangely familiar because I’ve spent years listening to people insist that I must choose between two versions of America.
Version one says America is irredeemably racist.
Version two says America has always been a shining city on a hill with only a few unfortunate bumps in the road.
I reject both.
The America I love is infinitely more interesting than either caricature.
It is the nation that declared all men are created equal while simultaneously failing to live up to its own declaration. It is the nation that tolerated slavery yet produced an abolitionist movement powerful enough to destroy it. It is the nation where segregation existed—and where ordinary Americans eventually dismantled it by appealing not to foreign ideology but to America’s own founding principles.
That’s not hypocrisy; that’s struggle. And there’s a difference.
A mature civilization doesn’t erase its contradictions.
It learns from them.
The danger of editing history isn’t simply that people become uninformed. The danger is that they become emotionally dependent on a version of the past that flatters their politics. History stops being a teacher.
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That’s when museums stop asking questions and start issuing verdicts.
The irony is almost comical. Every administration promises to remove politics from public institutions, and then immediately begins appointing people who agree with its politics. Apparently, many of us decided objectivity is whatever happens to agree with us this week. (Human nature never disappoints.)
The Smithsonian shouldn’t exist to reassure Republicans, and it shouldn’t exist to reassure Democrats. It should make all of us slightly uncomfortable, because real history usually does.
Real history refuses to fit inside campaign slogans.
As someone who grew up in Memphis, I understand that history isn’t abstract. You can walk streets where extraordinary courage and extraordinary injustice occupied the same blocks. The answer isn’t to pretend one erased the other, but to tell the whole story.
Truth doesn’t become conservative or progressive because an election changed hands, but remains truth—and yes, conservatives embrace truth more often than not, so we can claim intellectual superiority. But we have to be beyond reproach, and that requires intense honesty.
One reason I’ve remained a conservative is because I believe conservatism is strongest when it’s confident enough to face reality without flinching. A philosophy rooted in truth shouldn’t fear historical complexity, but should welcome it.
If America’s principles are as durable as I believe they are, then they don’t require cosmetic surgery every four years. They can withstand honest examination. In fact, honest examination is precisely what proves their strength.
We can preserve the nation’s ideals while refusing to lie about the nation’s failures. We must teach our children that America has been both magnificent and imperfect—not because those ideas conflict, but because together they explain why this republic has endured.
History is too important to have it devolved into partisanism, and museums should not become temples dedicated to whichever political coalition happens to control Washington. They should remain places where Americans encounter the complicated, inspiring, frustrating, remarkable truth about themselves.
Once a nation starts editing its past to satisfy its present, the writing of collapse on the wall.
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