MAGA Is Revising the Past to Create the Future They Want

The Washington Post has reported that the Trump administration has ordered changes at National Historic Parks across the country in order to remove or obscure details recording the history of American slavery and other content related to different minority groups that the administration feels are prejudicial against white Americans. As Jake Spring and Hannah Natanson have detailed:

The Trump administration has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks, according to four people familiar with the matter, including a historic photograph of a formerly enslaved man showing scars on his back.

The individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media, said the removals were in line with President Donald Trump’s March executive order directing the Interior Department to eliminate information that reflects a “corrosive ideology” that disparages historic Americans. National Park Service officials are broadly interpreting that directive to apply to information on racism, sexism, slavery, gay rights or persecution of Indigenous people…

The latest orders include removing information at Harpers Ferry National Historic Park in West Virginia, two people familiar with the matter said, where the abolitionist John Brown led a raid seeking to arm slaves for a revolt. Staff have also been told that information at the President’s House Site in Philadelphia, where George Washington kept slaves, does not comply with the policy, according to a third individual.

Historical revisionism has a long tradition in the United States, most notably due to the efforts of Lost Cause historians who helped propagate a sanitized, genteel version of the antebellum and Confederate South. For a long time, our popular culture reflected this. Books and movies like Gone With the Wind dominated our national imagination of the past. As scholar Sarah Churchwell argues in her book, The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells:

Denial was the fundamental mechanism of American reconciliation, as white America agreed to pretend, in effect, that it had all been a dreadful mistake. Insisting they fought not over slavery but over principles of sovereignty, confederate leaders actively rewrote history to suppress the sordid truth of how hard they fought to perpetuate slavery.

The efforts of the current administration appear all the more ridiculous because of how nakedly they show their prejudices. It’s galling, after decades of Americans becoming more and more aware of our own thorny past, for Trump and his henchmen to try and brute force American historiography back to the turn of the 20th century. 

But what I am interested in here is not the specific details of the historical distortions but rather the ongoing efforts to change America in fundamental ways and the challenges this could present to us for years to come. 

In 2021, the Harpers Ferry site alone had just shy of 310,000 visitors. Moreover, national Historic Parks are fundamental learning experiences for many school age children across the country. Those kids will now be reliant on some other adult to hopefully fill in the gaps—and it might not be their teachers, considering the curriculum crackdowns being applied by state and local MAGA officials.

It’s important to consider the implications for what these children might think about the world as they age into voting, politically active adults. 

I’ve written previously about how a decade of Trump and MAGA has inured younger Americans to his excesses and abuses. Young voters do not necessarily like Trump, although he has made real gains with younger men, but they also do not see him as abnormal. The entire field of play in American politics has shifted. And, as the current administration transitions our republic into a competitive authoritarian system, it is worth asking just what sort of electorate our rising tyrants want to cultivate. 

Jason Stanley writes in his book Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, “Erasing history helps authoritarians because doing so allows them to misrepresent it as a single story, a single perspective.” 

This isn’t just a matter of corroding knowledge. It’s a matter of civic and political instruction. As Stanley stresses:

 …representations and practices can be mutually reinforcing. Representations can make practices that would otherwise be unacceptable seem normal and justified, while practices can make representations seem retrospectively apt.

Political movements need to create broad intellectual and emotional alignment with their goals in order to succeed. determined to retrench . Reducing sympathy for other groups by erasing the histories of their oppression helps to manufacture a white electorate that is at best indifferent and at worst hostile to pleas for fair treatment from those same groups. This supports the goals of retrenching white prestige and eliminating programs that help members of different minority groups.

Analogies with Hungary are everywhere now. But, as a longtime observer of Orbán’s regime, this is an especially useful point of comparison. 

One of the most interesting sites in Budapest is a museum called Terror Háza, or House of Terror. The museum catalogues the oppressions of the Hungarian people under 20th century fascism and communism. To be sure, Hungary did suffer enormously at the hands of the Soviets and their collaborators. And fascism did indeed cut a violent swath through the country, including the desolation of Budapest’s once-vibrant Jewish community. 

But what is absent from the story told in this lavishly funded and visually stunning national museum is any sense of Hungarian complicity in any of the century’s atrocities. It stands as a central part of what Vivian S. Walker has called “the Fidesz effort to recast Hungary as a martyr.” The very building in which the museum is housed is part of that enterprise, having previously been the headquarters of the Arrow Cross Part, Hungary’s Nazi counterpart, and then the Hungarian Communist Secret Service. 

It’s important to understand that bad history can be done in compelling ways. That, after all, is its propagandist function—to be believed and internalized. The Terror Háza does this, as academic Marcell Bardós emphasizes: 

A good example is a large room in the basement called the "Hall of Tears," completely lit in red, displaying a number of metal crosses with lamps, and the names of those who were executed for political reasons between 1945 and 1967 on the walls (House of Terror Museum, "Hall of Tears"). 

This installation showcases the museum curators' method of using technology and symbols stripped of context to create an atmosphere that moves the visitor emotionally but does not enrich their knowledge of history.

The truth is that Hungary wasn’t simply victimized by these regimes. Hungarians participated in both the fascist terrors and the communist oppressions of 20th century Europe—perhaps most notably against their fellow Hungarians. In contemporary politics, Orbán trades on the victim narrative to set Hungary against the European Union decision-makers in Brussels and to wage war against institutions like the Central European University. Orbán has used these methods to consolidate and hold power, remaking Hungary into an “illiberal” and now “Christian” democracy that is among the most hostile in Europe to immigrants and LGBTQ+ individuals. 

We have seen MAGA revisionism become more common at the state and local level, perhaps most notoriously with Oklahoma State Superintendent of Education’s insertion of Big Lie claims about the 2020 election into school curriculum. Nationally, Trump and his allies are looking to push far-right programming from Dennis Prager’s PragerU Kids as an alternative to material from PBS. 

My concerns in January were about how a generation of younger voters now no longer have reason to believe that the rancorous, hate-filled, and mendacious politics of the Trump era are anything other than the norm. My growing fear is that millions of Americans will not only grow up seeing a deteriorated, hybrid authoritarian system as the American status quo but will also come to engage politics having imbibed MAGA’s distorted version of American history. 

The road back from a true descent into unfreedom is winding and arduous. The effects on the minds of the population can be complex and confusing, not necessarily straightforward. As Hannah Arendt observed in her report from post-war Germany, living in a society structured by rules and facts that do not comport with truth creates a disorienting reality:

The deep moral confusion in Germany to-day, which has grown out of this Nazi-fabricated confusion of truth with reality, is more than amorality and has deeper causes than mere wickedness…The German example shows that help from the outside is not likely to set free indigenous forces of self-help, and that totalitarian rule is something more than merely the worst kind of tyranny.

Totalitarianism kills the roots.

The misrepresentation of the past is an exercise in myth-making, but it’s in service of nation-building. The sort of nation being created can be found in what is expressed as well as in what’s concealed. For Trump and MAGA, it’s an idyllic story of white America, sinless and without any cause for criticism. And the goal is to bend a population to this false reality, raising up a generation of true believers and subduing dissenters in a haze of unreason and irrationality. Then, we’ll be great again. 

Featured image is Terror Háza Múzeum, by Fred Romero