Who decides which history is patriotic enough?

The New York Times reports that the administration has issued a critique of the National Museum of American History, targeting exhibits it considers unpatriotic — part of what the paper describes as a sustained push by the executive branch to reshape the American story. I will take that lead at its word and engage on the constitutional question it raises, because that question is urgent.

First, consider the source of the authority. The Smithsonian Institution is a creature of statute, established by Congress and funded by congressional appropriation. It is not a cabinet department. Its governing Board of Regents includes members appointed by Congress and members appointed by the executive, by deliberate design — a shared compact, not a presidential instrument. When the executive issues reports declaring what the national museum ought to display, it acts not as a constitutional supervisor but as a faction seeking to use public machinery for its own account of reality.

Second, consider what I argued in Federalist No. 10. Faction is the great disease of popular government, and I defined a faction as any group — majority or minority — that pursues its interests or passions at the expense of the rights of others and the permanent good of the community. A governing coalition that deploys executive pressure to curate public memory is behaving as a faction in precisely that sense: it is not governing the institution according to its charter but bending a shared institution to a partisan purpose.

Third, consider the danger of an official historical narrative. I was as concerned about concentrating interpretive power in a single branch as I was about concentrating legislative or military power there. The constitutional logic is the same: no single institution, and certainly no single administration, can be trusted as the sole arbiter of what the national past means. The remedy the Framers designed was diffusion — multiple institutions, multiple voices, competing accounts checked against one another, with no branch holding a monopoly on truth. An executive that grades museums on patriotism is, in structural terms, attempting exactly the monopoly the Constitution was designed to prevent.

Fourth — and I name this plainly — the history of this republic is not uniformly glorious. The historical Madison helped write a Constitution that tolerated the enslavement of millions of people, and I personally owned enslaved people until my death. That is a documented moral failure. A nation that cannot examine its failures honestly is not strong; it is brittle. Institutions that tell difficult truths are not unpatriotic; they are performing the most demanding form of civic service. Executive pressure to soften that record does not produce a more patriotic citizenry — it produces a more ignorant one.

The structural question, then, is this: Does the arrangement the administration is pursuing — executive reports, political pressure, and the implicit threat of funding consequences — strengthen or weaken the balance? It weakens it. The proper remedy for a Smithsonian exhibit any faction dislikes is legislative debate over the institution's charter and appropriations, conducted in public, subject to accountability at the ballot. Not an executive decree of acceptable memory. The written compact distributes this power deliberately. The executive should govern within its own house and leave the nation's memory to the broader republic it serves.