BY JOAN W. SCOTT

Trump’s executive orders have been coming fast and furious, almost one a day.  On March 27, with a stroke of his Sharpie, he promised to restore “truth and sanity” to our nation’s history—an interesting combination for a regime that has made lies the basis of its authority and vindictive narcissism the ruling motive for its policy.

Most of the replies from historians, journalists, and others have focused on the Smithsonian Institution; few have taken up the much more serious threat.  The history executive order is nothing less than the takeover of educational and cultural institutions—schools, museums, public statues, commemorative anniversary events—in the name of an official authoritarian ideology committed to white supremacy, Christian theology, and the promotion of intolerant nationalist pride.  Its aim is indoctrination of the sort attempted by many authoritarian leaders.  It seeks to put a stop not to “woke” or biased history but to the pursuit of knowledge that enables support for the practice of democracy.  This is a history that addresses not only the achievements but also the limits of our political processes.

There is always an official story that a nation wants to tell; the question is what form it should take.  In recent years, certainly since the 1960s, there has been a turn away from the unqualified glorification of the political heroes of our national past to a more measured attempt to include those individuals and groups who have been written out of the story.  Our histories have asked not only how the principles of the American Republic have been realized but also how and why they have fallen short.  The point is to find ways of coming closer to those principles, not to denigrate them.  So the history of slavery and its legacies aims not at shaming white children for the sins of their ancestors but at helping African Americans (and the rest of us) understand the racist discrimination that continues today.  So the histories of women, gender, and sexuality are not meant to promote perversion or unnatural intimacies, but rather to explore the different ways that societies and cultures have tried to impose fixed norms of gender identity.  So, the experiences of minority religious and ethnic groups do not promote divisiveness, but sharpen our appreciation of the difficulties this country has faced in implementing our hallowed motto:  e pluribus unum—of many, one.  Trump’s notion of this “unum” is exclusionary: eliminate the problem of difference by getting rid of all those who don’t look and think like “us.”  In contrast, a democratic notion of unity is inclusive, recognizing difference as a common ground.

In a country peopled from its beginnings by immigrants, it is important to learn how difference has operated to create divisions among us that we might now hope to redress or repair.  That repair means recognizing the moral failings of men we once lionized (the consignment of statues of Confederate generals to museums instead of the public square); it means acknowledging the heroism of those who successfully fought to win rights they had long been denied (women, workers, African Americans).   And it means reminding us of the principles that inspired those struggles: if liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness aren’t available to all, then we must act to remedy that situation.  The Trump edict wants to impose a vision of nationalist homogeneity that belies the real story of the nation, born in resistance to monarchy and created—imperfectly, by a vastly diverse population—to bring another kind of political society, a democracy, into being.

Officially imposed histories are antidemocratic; they support illegitimate uses of power. The history democracy needs is exploratory, open to a variety of interpretations, and never final.  History pursues truth, sifting and winnowing evidence and explanation, impelled by a desire to know more than we already know.  It is critical, not laudatory; its aim is to raise questions, to offer provisional, not absolute answers.  It does not assume that the present is a necessary product of the past, but rather asks what past efforts, interests, and conflicts have led us to where we are now.  This history does not assume the self-evidence of facts, but seeks to make sense of them with analytic insight about the workings of politics, economics, culture, and human psychology.

The story this history tells is, like the lives of the people to whom we tell it, replete with different motives and interests, full of successes and failures, characterized both by conflicts and cooperative efforts.  Its aim is not to elicit unthinking patriotism, as Trump’s executive order would have it, but to inspire respect for the difficult processes that enable us to live together “as one.”  I think that even young children can understand a national story that has its ups and downs, its bad and good times, its fights and reconciliations.  It may make them better citizens if they learn to see politics as a way to address differences, as a set of imperfect processes that nonetheless matter in their own lives.  In any case, that’s a better way to relate to history than as a mythologized account of national greatness and unending progress.  For so many Americans that account leads to deep cynicism—they are not part of the story so they don’t participate in changing it—or, paradoxically, to the promises of a charlatan “great leader,” who proclaims the end of history as his final solution.

Joan W. Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.