For nearly a decade, scholars of fascism have tried to explain the ways in which Trumpism reflects fascist ideology. Last week, two very clear signs came from the White House: An attempt to rewrite history; and the promulgation of the dangerous and debunked theories of race science.
Both were aimed at one of the most important sources of public knowledge in the United States, the Smithsonian Institution. Its museums are visited by millions of Americans from all corners of the United States, as well as hundreds of thousands from elsewhere around the world, and its websites and magazine reach millions more.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order last Thursday directing Vice President JD Vance to purge “distorted narratives driven by ideology rather than truth” from the Smithsonian museums, educational research enters, and the National Zoo. The order insists that there has been, “a widespread effort to rewrite history [which] deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame.” It is particularly concerned about their promoting a “divisive, race-centered ideology.”
One of the major “problems” the executive order identifies is an exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that claims that “societies including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement,” and that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism.”
There are multiple aspects of this order worthy of analysis and condemnation. First, its repeated insistence—beginning with its title—that it is “restoring truth” is belied by the order itself, which demands that the museums and monuments exclusively work to “remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.” In reality, of course, much of our history does not follow this story.
For example, contrary to the order’s complaint, sculpture has in fact been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism and, likewise, historically the United States has in fact used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement. As Adam Domby, author of The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory,wrote to me, “To say otherwise is to deny race-based slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation existed. It’s a wholescale erasure of American history as Confederates, segregationists, and Black activists would have understood it.”
Equally, the order demanded that public monuments, memorials, and statues removed or altered since January 2020 be reinstated. Clearly, they mean monuments dedicated to the confederacy or defenders of slavery but in fact built during Jim Crow to celebrate and fortify white supremacy. Those repackaged with new signage explaining the connection to slavery or oppression will have that signage removed and the original, false or incomplete narrative restored.
More interesting, and revealing, is the order’s condemnation of that sculpture exhibit for promoting the view that “race is not a biological reality, but a social construct.” This is for two reasons.
First and foremost, it is false. As the American Anthropological Association (AAA) explains in its 1998 statement about race, “Human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups.” Indeed, there is greater variation within “racial” groups than between them.
Moreover, even observable physical variations have no meaning beyond the social meaning imposed by people. Race itself, in other words, is an invention of pseudoscientists, especially in the 19th century, who imagined a “rigid hierarchy” of fixed races, whose inequality was either natural or God-given. This served as a critical justification for slavery and, later, other forms of structural discrimination throughout the world. “It became a strategy for dividing, ranking, and controlling colonized people …,” AAA said.
American history itself documents the shifting boundaries of racial categories, a legal as well as a social status in the United States. Colonial Americans equated whiteness with British heritage, for example, excluding Germans from that category. “Know nothings” in the 1850s feared the arrival of millions of non-white Irish Catholics, while nativists at the end of the century feared the arrival of millions of Jews, Italians, and Slavic immigrants as non-white invaders.
In 1922, the Supreme Court even ruled that skin color was irrelevant to the definition of “white person,” a status the Japanese-born Takao Ozawa was claiming to win naturalization. “The words ‘white person’ were meant to indicate only a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race,” the court concluded, “and the test afforded by the mere color of the skin of each individual is impracticable.”
A year later, the Court decided differently, ruling that skin color and not heritage determined race. It found that Bhagat Singh Thind was also ineligible for citizenship, even though as an Asian Indian he would have been categorized as a Caucasian, because he would not be considered “white” in the eyes of the “common man.”
Even Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, perhaps the court’s most conservative member, emphasized this point in his concurrence with the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions decision prohibiting affirmative action at Harvard. “That is because race is a social construct,” he wrote, “we may each identify as members of particular races for any number of reasons, having to do with our skin color, our heritage, or our cultural identity. And, over time, these ephemeral, socially constructed categories have often shifted.”
Trump’s executive order is revealing in a second way. Certainly, its focus on firm racial and gender boundaries is yet another area in which it contradicts itself. It claims to fight a “divisive, race-centered ideology.” Yet, that is precisely what it promotes.
Why does it do this? Why is this president so concerned about these boundaries?
The answer is that firm racial and gender boundaries and hierarchy are a critical feature of all fascist ideologies. “For fascists,” writes Professor Joel Swanson, “every identity category—race, gender, nationality—has to be imagined as rooted in biology and policed with hard borders.” Only by imaging them as real and frozen can they be managed and controlled.
For these reasons, the order also targets the American Women’s History Museum. It does this to push its campaign denying the existence of trans women in the name of scientific truth, despite this opposing the official position of the American Psychiatric Association.
More than this perhaps, as Sarah Halpern-Meekin, professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Wisconsin wrote to me, the attack had a broader purpose. “It was Women’s Studies that gave birth to gender as a category of analysis for understanding how and why spaces for men and women were created and how relationship power operated in this system.”
As Professor Sam Brody writes, “They pretend to respect the authority of science (“biological reality”) when and only when it can be marshalled in favor of their ideological view of “reality” as static and hierarchically ordered. If “science” appears to present a picture of reality as dynamic, they deny it.”
George Orwell famously wrote in 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” With this executive order, Trump seeks to assert his control over the past, ignoring and rewriting history to reassert the firm, racial and gender hierarchies that America has worked so hard to overcome.
Joshua Shanes is Professor of Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston. He has published widely on modern Jewish history, religion, and politics, as well as antisemitism and contemporary American politics, in academic and popular outlets including the Washington Post, Slate, and The Conversation.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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