When I was in first or second grade at St. Ignatius school what I could have told you about George Washington was that when his father confronted him with a fallen cherry tree he told the truth and accepted the consequences. What I could have told you about Abraham Lincoln was that he walked miles to return a few extra pennies in change owed to a customer at a store where he worked. And all I knew of John Kennedy was that he was a good father and a recently martyred Catholic president soon to be recognized as a saint.
I’m here to tell you that these fictions were not all bad.
As young minds and morals are shaped it’s not bad to look up to people who take responsibility, are honest to a fault and take care of their families. These are parables. The lessons are right even if the facts are shaky.
Every nation — every community — has an origin story, a narrative of its history and a view of where it came from, what it became and what it stands for. Those things are always rooted in carefully curated history, embellished stories and, now and then, outright falsehoods. A national narrative can have foundational truth in its meaning even in the face of questionable historical accuracy.
So, what does it mean to a country to lose its heroes? What does it do to our view of what America is to change Washington’s story from ‘honest and responsible’ to ‘slave owner and what else do you need to know?’
As William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” What he probably meant was that we tell our own history based on what we want or need to hear at the present moment. And therein lies the key distinction: what we want or need to hear in the moment.
The left has long demanded that the ugly side of American history get dragged from the closet. The left has insisted that we be force fed inconvenient truths. Now Donald Trump is insisting that we go back to hearing only what we want about our past. Trump wants to air brush our national family portrait while the left wants to take the picture in the harshest light amid the most unflattering angles.
They’re both wrong.
Even when Trump is right about a thing he always takes it too far. He has only a sledge hammer. He’s never met a scalpel. So, he’s correct that the left has taken over the telling of American history and that it has all but vanquished the idea that we are exceptional or even good. In the hard-left’s telling we are nothing but a nation of settler colonialist oppressors and their benighted victims.
Now, if you really buy into that narrative — especially if you’re a kid being taught that version of our history — this is a recipe for nihilism. Some of us are irredeemably bad, based not on what we’ve done or will do as individuals but on what we were born into, while others are victims as a matter of their birthright. No chance at redemption. Nothing to be proud of in either case. Nothing to fight for. Nothing to defend. Might as well just let it all go to hell.
A startling example of how bad it got came after the police murder of George Floyd. Outrage and reform were justified responses. Hysteria was not. But in that period the Smithsonian (perhaps the primary keeper of the American historical flame) put out a graphic on its website that was beyond comprehension. I’ve pasted it above. The graphic lists human traits like hard work, delayed gratification, self-reliance, objectivity and linear thinking, proactive decision-making and majority rule as part of “White Culture.” I don’t know. Could have fooled me. But all that strikes me as “Healthy Culture.”
The nadir of all this probably came with the New York Times’ odious “1619 Project” which seeks to redefine America as founded in slavery and not in freedom. Slavery, while horrible of course, was not invented by America. Modern liberal democracy was.
The important thing to keep in mind with just these two examples is that they’re not the product of some fringe group. The Smithsonian and the Times are the very definition of the American establishment. So, Trump’s not wrong when he says that the left had taken over the narrative and that the story it wanted to tell was unjustifiably and unrelentingly unflattering.
While the left may be right in some of its details, it’s wrong in its overarching narrative. While for far too long we’ve cherry picked happy facts, glossed over hard truths and told America’s story from a heavily northern European perspective, the truth is that America really has been, to this point, a noble experiment in democracy and freedom. We really did take Enlightenment values of reason and tolerance and build a whole country around them. We really did try to export those fundamental human values across the globe. We have been, when it’s all said and done (and it looks to be pretty much done now), a tremendous force for good in the world.
Individuals can reach a level of maturity in which they can handle the truth. But as a nation we’re not there yet. Too many of us seem to believe ‘America, right or wrong!’ while others believe, “America, always wrong!’
It’s possible to know a lot about American history, to acknowledge the awful parts, and still come away with a balanced view of a flawed nation. One that doesn’t always keep the promises it makes to itself, but one that makes promises like no other country. The left wants to talk only about how we’ve fallen short. Trump wants us to see only where we’ve succeeded.
The fight over our history won’t end anytime soon. The left went too far in its correction and now Trump is overcorrecting the correction. But I’d say, given world history and human nature, we’ve done much better than you would have expected when we started out. The world is better, freer and healthier than it would have been had America not existed.
The irony is that Trump is destroying Enlightenment America and replacing it with Blood and Soil America in large part with the robust assistance of the hard-left, which provided him with yeoman’s service in weakening our foundations.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
It’s interesting to see people who are advocating for a factual telling of history painted as equivalent extremists as those advocating for a dishonest telling of history. Myths are fine and good, but not if people think they’re literally true. I don’t agree that history or our national origin story should be falsified to make us feel good. There are enough honestly great events and people in US history that we don’t need to employ lies, and we shouldn’t make infallible gods out of people – people have flaws, that’s ok. And if a historical figure proselytized something they they didn’t themselves practice, I’d like to know it.
You claim that slavery was not invented by America, but that common talking point deliberately white-washes the unique and unprecedented approach of Euro-Americans. Elevating human trafficking and slavery from a practice to an industry was incredible. Those that were involved in this effort were quite proud of their unique accomplishment, why should we deny them credit for it? I’m not aware of another human trafficking effort in history that generated the profits and capital that the Euro-American system did.
It’s as comical to assert that the US was founded on freedom as it is to assert that the USSR was founded on communism. Those are just PR campaigns… sure, I suppose that both terms made people feel good, but both those lies came at a human cost.
Your claim that “the left” is teaching that people “are irredeemably bad” is also false. Being honest about history and the consequences of it does not demand that anyone feel any way at all, and says nothing about me being good or bad. If learning the truth makes anyone feel bad, so be it. People should feel bad sometimes- if they don’t, there’s something wrong with them.
It’s also not strange to say that there are defining characteristics of cultures. The problem is when people believe that Euro-American culture is the “natural human” culture, or worse, a culture superior to other cultures. For all the good things that Euro-American cultural dominance has brought the world over the past centuries, there are also bad things. In fact, these bad things have a strong probability of making humans extinct!! If we can accept that the ways of knowing and being that other cultures practice (or practiced) are also valid and useful, we can work our way out of the existential threat we’re in the middle of.
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