What if History Died by Sanctioned Ignorance?

The primary aim of the political right, said the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, in early 2024, should be “institutionalizing Trumpism.” He and his organization meant this especially for the writing, teaching, and dissemination of American history.

On March 27, President Donald Trump, echoing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, issued an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The White House now believes it should pronounce on the nature of history and the purpose and substance of the nation’s treasures at the Smithsonian Institution. The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom and curiosity of anyone who reads or visits museums. In other words, Trump’s team has declared war on free minds and free education in order to erase more than a half-century of scholarship and replace it with official triumphal narratives rooted in a brand of pickled patriotism designed to force the past to serve the present.

We have opened the gates of historical knowledge to myriad new subjects and methods that have educated a largely curious and willing world. Now we have to mobilize to defend our profession not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion.

Public and political resistance to historians is nothing new; book bans, fights over textbooks and curricula, and battles over what a proper national narrative should be have long besieged our craft. Today, our foes like to wear red hats and rely on moral platitudes rather than research, ad hominem accusations rather than analysis, executive orders drafted at a think tank, funding restrictions, and a hatred of what they deem “liberalism” as their weapons in a war on traditional history. Trained historians and teachers are now the “traditionalists,” defenders of an honored practice, believing in evidence and research, against a barbaric effort to dissolve the institutional and moral foundations of those two important values. We have steadily opened the gates of historical knowledge to myriad new subjects and methods that have educated a largely curious and willing world. Now we have to mobilize to defend our profession not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion. And we cannot surrender!

In Richard J. Evans’s trilogy on the Third Reich, he shows indelibly how the Nazis achieved power because of eight key factors: One, the depth of economic depression and the ways it radicalized the electorate; two, widespread hatred for parliamentary democracy that had taken root for at least a decade all over Europe; three, the destruction of dissent and academic freedom in universities; four, the Nazis’ ritualistic “dynamism,” charisma, and propaganda machinery; five, the creation of a cloak of legality around so many of their tactics, stage by stage of the descent into fear, terror, and autocracy; six, the public manipulating and recrafting of history and forging Nazi mythology to fit their present purposes; seven, they knew whom and what they viscerally hated—communists and Jews—and made them the objects of insatiable grievance; eight, and finally, vicious street violence, with brownshirts in cities and student thugs on college campuses, mass arrests, detainment camps, and the Gestapo in nearly every town. All of these methods, mixed with the hideous dream of an Aryan racial utopia and a nationalism rooted in deep resentment of the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, provided the Nazis the tools of tyranny.

In 2025, our own autocratic governing party has already employed many, though not all, of these techniques. Thanks to a free press and many courts sustaining the rule of law, Trumpism has not yet mastered every authoritarian method. But it has launched a startlingly rapid and effective beginning to an inchoate American brand of fascism.