The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History has been in the news for disparaging our nation’s history and engaging in partisan activism. Addressing such charges, the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, testified at two congressional hearings. The most interesting thing about her prepared testimony is that she chose not to address a single exhibit that has opened under her seven-year watch.
Responding to a 160-page report from the White House Domestic Policy Council that details how the museum has strayed from its intended mission, Ms. Hartig’s response was to invoke the flag—specifically, the Star-Spangled Banner. In her prepared testimony, she referenced it multiple times. That flag, which so inspired Francis Scott Key, has been displayed at the National Museum of American History since 1964 and housed in its current gallery for 18 years. That exhibit is excellent and patriotic, but the newer parts of the museum are heavy-handed, dumbed-down and anti-American—the opposite of what a national museum should be.
I sat directly beside Ms. Hartig as a witness in her second hearing. I testified that the National Museum of American History increasingly is a museum not about American history, but about activists’ attempts to shape the future. The museum’s newer exhibits offer no coherent sense of a shared national identity, and they divide Americans into oppressors and the oppressed.
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What little the museum does provide on the founding and pre-founding eras is largely critical. In one exhibit, 1492-1776 is referred to as the period of “Unsettling the Continent.” Visitors are told, “Our world today grows out of that unsettling history.” Elsewhere, they’re told that our founding can either be viewed as a “complete, perfect, sacred event led by a great patriot who, as American children would learn, never told a lie” or else as “part of a wider, unfinished movement” that was “deeply imperfect.” Viewing our founding as one of the greatest events in world history, warts and all, apparently isn’t an option.
Americans deserve a National Museum of American History that expresses a love of that history and views it as the wondrous story of a nation conceived in liberty. They don’t deserve a museum that alternates between ignoring and condemning our extraordinary heritage.
Promoting education as a track to the middle class was another common-good policy. Government paved it with subsidies to attend college — guaranteed student loans and direct assistance — making a four-year degree the badge of advancement. Today, not only have these programs inflated the price of a college education, but they have also degraded its value. Half of college graduates naturally feel cheated when they end up working jobs that don’t require their degrees, which they just spent four years and many thousands of dollars to attain. Yet college has been made the norm, so not attending may be even worse.
Privileging unions was a common-good policy toward stable jobs. But unions could only maintain such jobs by protecting incumbents, thereby excluding younger workers from quality vocations. Tying health insurance to employment was a common-good policy to simplify family benefits. Until it obscured the true cost of health care, requiring ever more labyrinthine subsidies to afford.
Neighborhood schools with enrollment tied strictly to residence were a common-good policy to foster community. Now, they make attractive neighborhoods into closed enclaves. Property-tax breaks for seniors were a common-good policy to keep grandparents in their family homes. Now, the same incentive prevents younger families from moving in.
The story throughout is that interventions to fortify a certain way of life eventually sealed it off. Protections became barriers to entry; subsidies became effective taxes and transfers. The common good was made less accessible because it was defined and supported by state action.
Therein lies the basic conceit of the common-good form of politics. In an endlessly complex world, the competence of government to fabricate social outcomes, especially at scale, is profoundly limited. Tradeoffs are ubiquitous and unavoidable. One generation’s insulated good life may be another’s desperation. In that case, what is a benevolent government to do?
The conservative answer is for government to do what it can: Remove artificial barriers and distortions, and otherwise leave space for citizens to pursue the good life for themselves, comporting with the preferences of others as best they can manage. A society of spontaneous order will doubtless leave many people out in the cold. Yet fewer, perhaps, than a government so hubristic that it tries to entrench the common good.
Alfredo Carrillo Obregon reports on “how “Liberation Day” cost America its tourists.” A slice:
While survey and government data already pointed to declines in foreign visits to the United States (see figures 1 and 2), a recent working paper finds that the “Liberation Day” tariff announcements in April 2025 led to a significant decline in tourism to the United States, costing the sector over $1 billion in lost revenue per month.
Steve Hanke and Roger Koppl note that Anthony Fauci was a “big player.” A slice:
As we recently wrote in Fortune, Big Players are big because their words and deeds move a whole system. They are insensitive to any disciplinary mechanism in the system, be it profit and loss in a market or peer review in science. In addition, they are discretionary because they are not bound to any simple, understandable rule. They act on judgment, even mood or whim in some cases. Big Players make their words and deeds matter more than underlying fundamentals such as consumer preferences or scientific truth. Fauci’s diary provides no less than a confessional by a Big Player who is reveling in his unchecked powers and celebrity status.
The hysteria around “misinformation” assumes democracy runs on unvarnished truth. It doesn’t. It runs on persuasion, with rival camps making their best case to loud and stubborn voters, under procedures everyone can accept.
Political scientists established long ago that people have always leaned toward voting in line with their identities and loyalties. The era of machine politics did not destroy the republic, nor will social media. Those hell-bent on defeating “misinformation” are trying to re-create a system that never really existed.
The challenge today is that social media supercharges the factionalism that has always plagued the body politic. Rather than serving as a conduit for information, it becomes an echo chamber. Users choose whom they interact with, which typically means gravitating toward like-minded people. This is why anti-vaccine activists thrived on platforms like Facebook.
Newspapers play an essential role in reporting facts and publishing opinions, but the mainstream media’s gatekeeping power has diminished in recent decades amid declining trust across institutions.
Combating this problem, however, was never going to be as simple as taking down inaccurate content. The trouble with fighting “misinformation” is that someone must be a final arbiter of truth, and the fight over who gets to play that role ends up politicizing everything.
That’s why the best response to false speech, however odious, will always be more speech. The American system depends on vigorous debates forging public sentiment. Stifling unpopular ideas usually backfires.
Phil Gramm and I are honored that Arnold Kling is reading our book.
