Over the past year, the Trump administration has pressured the Smithsonian to remove progressive ideology from museum exhibits and the various supplementary materials it puts out (e.g., its press releases, the guides it makes for educators, and so on). Many Smithsonian officials feel besieged.
One striking feature of this dispute is the widespread appeal to the idea of expertise on the part of the Smithsonian’s supporters. They think that since the museum exhibits are curated by experts, their content is legitimate, and the President’s meddling is an outrageous attack on settled truth. In this way, they fail to notice how the issues at stake in this dispute are fundamentally moral and cannot be solved by expert decree.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s recent book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, has a good chapter on Trump’s efforts last year to change how the Smithsonian operates. Haberman and Swan take the side of the Smithsonian and frame the conflict so as to suggest that the administration has no business challenging expert judgment. For instance, they write with implicit approval that “potential exhibitions had traditionally been assessed through a committee system to ensure accuracy, that the subject matter was appropriate and the content unbiased. These committee reviews were driven by scholarly research and peer review from experts in relevant fields.” They also write sympathetically about Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch, who thinks that decisions about the Smithsonian’s content should be made by the institution alone.
In July of this year, the administration put out a massive report titled “Saving America’s Story.” It documented progressive ideology at the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian’s principal history institution. Many professional historians and historical associations spoke out against the report, and they, too, appealed to expert judgment. In its statement of protest, the Organization of American Historians wrote: “Who has the authority to determine how American history is told? The President, or the historians, archivists, educators, curators, and museum professionals whose training and evidence-based methods have always governed that work?” The binary is remarkable, and unfortunate: these decisions are either made by the President, or they are made by the historical experts. What about ordinary citizens, the people whom the Museum is meant to serve—do they have no say at all?
These arguments are part of a broader and well-known pattern, whereby elite progressives try to settle disagreements by reference to expert opinion. But this is a dispute about how we Americans should understand ourselves; about which parts of our past we ought to emphasize; and about the sorts of emotions we should have, when we contemplate our history. It’s doubtful that one can even be an expert about these kinds of questions.
The Smithsonian’s defenders seem to think of historical experts rather as Plato thought of philosopher-kings: as people who understand the Good so thoroughly that they are entitled to make decisions for the rest of us. Historians and museum curators certainly have much more factual knowledge about the past than ordinary citizens. But their access to moral knowledge is no better than anybody else’s—or at least, it is not made better just because of their profession.
There are many attempts to explain why elite progressives so often appeal to expert knowledge to justify their views. Perhaps part of what’s happening here is that elite progressives are subtly aware that if they were pressed to defend their views about how we should present our history, they would struggle to rationally justify their perspective. The appeal to expert judgment might therefore play an important psychological function, namely that of insulating elite progressives from having to think through their first principles. It is after all easier to point to a supposed expert consensus than to come up with reasons for why one’s moral judgments are true.
To be clear, it’s not that I think their views about how the Smithsonian should be run are stupid or irrational, though I do disagree with them. It’s just that offering rational justifications for one’s moral judgments is in general very hard, for all of us. The appeal to expert judgment saves elite progressives from having to confront that difficult task.
Rather than thinking of their moral judgments as originating from some position of intellectual superiority, the Smithsonian’s defenders should join the rest of us in the fray. We are all trying to figure out what is good. Many elite progressives think it would be good for America’s historical memory to focus on the injustices of our past. Conservatives on the whole think we ought to emphasize our moral achievements. Let us hash out this dispute without supposing that there is a class of human beings who have already figured out these tricky questions of morality.