A populist’s guide to using museums

‘The battle of the museums continues and it’s a battle very much worth having,’ Matt Walsh solemnly declares. Walsh is one of the big names in America’s new conservative media sphere; in six months, his 18-minute YouTube video about ‘wokeness’ in museums has got almost 50,000 views. Most of the 850 comments are along the lines of: ‘The truth makes them cry,’ ‘Black Lives Matter and other Social-Marxist ideologies have no place in museums,’ ‘Museums, textbooks, media … have an agenda. And it’s not (not!) spreading the truth.’

The battle Walsh was referring to was sparked by Donald Trump, who in March 2025 accused the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum complex, of negatively portraying the nation’s history. The US president called on several museums to revise their exhibitions and present a history of America that would make citizens proud rather than divide them with ‘woke ideology’.

However, the battle for the museums did not begin with Trump, or even in the US. After the Law and Justice (PiS) party came to power in Poland in 2015, it began replacing museum and gallery directors with ones more to its liking, in order to make these institutions more docile. The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has demanded the dismissal of the director of the Egyptian Museum of Turin after he allowed Arabic speakers free entry. In Fidesz’s Hungary, some museums have removed all references to Hungarian fascists and the fact that the country fought alongside the Axis powers in World War II.

Authoritarian governments have long been at war with museums and the knowledge they hold. In this war, they try to obfuscate anything that does not contribute to the image of a glorious past, to which they promise the country can return if the people trust them. Does this sound familiar?

Nothing happens in a vacuum. By understanding the methods politicians in other countries use to manipulate how we tell and understand history, we can better prepare to defend ourselves against such attacks in our own countries. History tends to repeat itself, especially if it is insufficiently analysed and questioned.

During communist totalitarianism, Romania experienced firsthand the transformation of museums into places where one had to conform to the party’s truth, not the historical truth. From the marginalization of ‘bourgeois art’ to inflating the Communist Party’s role in our national history and the promotion of Dacianism, the influences of that period are still felt today in the Romanian society’s relationship with its own history.

Romanian political parties such as AUR have used historical figures such as Michael the Brave and Vlad the Impaler in their electoral campaigns. We have seen politicians justify and make excuses for the crimes committed and the hateful ideologies promoted by Ion Antonescu and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. Călin Georgescu, a politician who mystifies and falsifies Romanian history, almost became president.

Wrestling with the nation’s museum

The average museum visitor goes to the Smithsonian three times in their lifetime: the first time as a child, on a school trip or with their family; the second time as an adult with their own children; and finally, as a senior citizen, often accompanied by their grandchildren. That’s according to Michael Peter Edson, cultural strategist, director and museum founder with 30 years of experience in the global cultural sector. He himself first visited the museum as a child. He started working there as a window cleaner, then rose through the ranks to become director of web strategy and new media, a position he held until 2015.

The Smithsonian Institution is the largest museum complex in the world by many measures, including display space, budget and number of visitors. It comprises 21 museums, 21 libraries, 14 educational and research centres, and a zoo. Most of them are in Washington, D.C. The centre was established in 1846 following a donation from British mineralogist and chemist James Smithson. He was a researcher with diverse interests, including the chemistry of coffee, human tears and snake venom. A passionate mineralogist, he also gave his name to the semi-precious stone smithsonite.

Although he never visited the United States, Smithson donated his fortune to the US government. It is not known exactly why he did this. One theory is that, as the illegitimate son of an English nobleman, he admired the absence of an aristocracy in American society. After some hesitation about how to use the money, which amounted to 1.5% of the entire US federal budget at the time, the government decided to create a museum. In doing so, it combined the philosophy of Smithson, a self-taught chemist who believed that everyone should study the science, with that of the nation’s founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin argued that a well-educated population was essential for democracy.

‘It’s remarkable that the very Enlightenment ideas underlying the Smithsonian – promoting science and innovation and challenging questioning authority and doctrine with fact-based evidence – are today being attacked by the party in power,’ says Edson.

The attack came in March 2025, in the form of an executive order signed by Donald Trump. Titled ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’, the order talks about how, in recent years, museums have set aside historical truth in favour of ‘a distorted narrative driven by ideology’ and focused on portraying US history in a negative light. ‘Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centred ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and western values as inherently harmful and oppressive,’ the order states.

The first example given in the executive order is the sculpture exhibition, ‘The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture’ that ran last year at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. According to the order, the exhibit ‘promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct’. The order seems to ignore the scientifically proven fact that, beyond physical appearance, humans do not differ biologically according to race.

Trump goes on to say that his administration’s policy is ‘to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing’.

What is Trump asking for? Among other things, the removal of ‘inappropriate ideologies’ from the Smithsonian and a ban on financing exhibitions or programs that ‘degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy’. Museums must ‘celebrate the achievements of women in the American Women’s History Museum and … not recognize men as women in any respect’ – in other words they must not recognize trans women as women.

How can Trump do all this? Well, the Smithsonian has a hybrid status that is unique even in the American landscape. Officially, it is a so-called trust instrumentality and not controlled by any branch of government. But it is still a public institution, whose annual budget of about $1 billion is approved by Congress. This money, received from the federal government, only covers salaries and ongoing expenses. Funding for research, exhibitions, educational projects and other initiatives comes from its own sources: sponsorships, donations and partnerships. This means that Trump and his administration cannot dictate the contents of exhibits, or the scientific direction taken by the Smithsonian; but they can exert pressure by cutting public funding.

‘What’s been happening is part of a broader effort to “sanitize” what parts of American history are told and what parts the public can learn about,’ says Sarah Weicksel, a history researcher and director of the American Historical Association, the largest of its kind in the world, with over 11,000 members.

The second Trump administration is targeting not only museums, but also American public-school curricula, from kindergarten to high school, as well as what colleges and universities teach. According to Trump himself, American students are being subject to ‘leftwing indoctrination’ and a leftwing force that hates America is seeking to ‘destroy’ its cultural heritage.

‘The White House has said that there’s too much focus on slavery and not enough focus on the things that are wonderful about our country,’ says Weicksel. ‘They have accused the Smithsonian of displaying, “improper”, “divisive” or “anti-American” ideology. That is simply untrue. It misrepresents the work of those museums, as well as the public’s engagement with their collections and their exhibits. And it also completely misconstrues the nature of historical work.’

Historians always try to analyse different perspectives, the researcher explains, to understand things in the context of their times, but the ‘gold standard’ is historical evidence. The artifacts and information displayed by the Smithsonian are based on evidence that contextualizes their place in history.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is another of those institutions that, according to Trump’s order, present an ‘anti-American’ ideology. Established by Congress in 2003 and opened in 2016, the museum is the newest addition to the Smithsonian Institution. Its founding was seen as a historic moment for the African American community – a belated but important recognition of the community’s contribution to the larger history of the nation. It houses artifacts such as Emmett Till’s casket and Louis Armstrong’s trumpet.

The two exhibits at the African American History Museum, the trumpet and the casket, show the ambivalence of the relationship between America and its Black population over time. One tells a story of how talent can overcome adversity, of a true self-made man, while the other speaks of the history of racial hatred that breeds violence and death. Both are historical evidence of their times, and for history to be accurately represented, both must be accessible to the public.

‘I think that in order to appreciate the significant achievements of a country, to feel patriotic in the United States, you have to understand both the terrible things that occurred as well as the very positive things,’ says Sarah Weicksel. Slavery was one of the driving forces that shaped America’s economy, society, and culture.

When you understand how much violence was necessary to maintain this oppressive system, you can better appreciate the important work of abolitionists who were anti-slavery advocates, as well as the accomplishments of people who were enslaved and were able to create vibrant lives even within slavery,’ argues Weicksel. ‘If you only have in mind an idealized version of American history, you’re always going to be holding the past up to this standard that never existed.’

What we choose not to remember

‘There’s a subset of American society that believes in American exceptionalism. We were created by God to be the perfect nation,’ says Edson. ‘Museum professionals, however, have been educated to believe that we can become a better nation through self-criticism, introspection, and the balance of powers.’ This difference points to a thorny issue in the battle between governments and museums. What is the duty of museums and history: to show us what we did right, or where we went wrong?

Theoretically, museums should show both sides, but in reality the answer is more complicated. How much space do you give to mistakes and how much to achievements? How much detail do you go into? As a visitor, you know from the outset that Armstrong’s trumpet will evoke positive feelings, while a lynched child’s casket will raise an array of emotions: guilt, anger, sadness, or helplessness.

A useful concept in this discussion comes from Croatian researcher Ljiljana Radonić. In her article, ‘“Our” museums vs. “inherited” museums: PiS and Fidesz as mnemonic warriors’, she analyses how some museums in Poland and Hungary dealt with the memory of the Holocaust after political parties with revisionist and authoritarian tendencies came to power in the two countries. Radonić uses the concept of ‘negative memory’ to refer to how a community remembers the crimes committed by its own members.

Often missing from museums, she says, is ‘the element of complicity in committing the crimes’. Or, if it is present, then ‘only at very low level in what I call the hierarchy of visibility’. The researcher gives the example of the Jasenovac concentration camp museum, the largest in Croatia, where some 100,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma, and anti-fascist Croats died. The names of those who committed the atrocities were initially only available on the museum’s website and in the additional digital information area, almost completely absent from the museum’s permanent display. In 2023 updates were made, and the names of the camp commanders are now visible.

The hierarchy can be even more subtle. The Warsaw Rising Museum presents in detail the city’s fight for liberation from German occupation in 1944. For the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, however, there are few details that would humanize the Jewish participants. The entire museum speaks about the Polish experience, Polish courage, Polish solidarity, Polish victims and Polish pain. ‘All these ideas are tied to a very specific mode of national mobilization – one that doesn’t raise critical questions but sketches a very black-and-white story. As Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the Law and Justice party, put it: ‘It must be about Polish truth, not Polish shame.’

The battle in Europe

In 2015, the right-wing populist PiS came to power for the second time. It immediately instituted conservative and reactionary policies, such as the abortion ban, and took a series of measures aimed at undermining the independence of the Courts. But while these decisions were hotly debated in the international media, those with a direct impact on cultural institutions received limited coverage.

‘By steering financial flows, reorganizing institutions, and filling leadership positions with loyal appointees, the government emphasized those aspects of culture it deemed important while marginalizing others,’ explains the Polish cultural journalist Jakub Dąbrowski. ‘PiS sought to reshape state cultural policy according to its rightwing, conservative agenda. In some respects, it succeeded; in others, it did not.’

In his article, ‘Polish cultural institutions during the PiS era and in its aftermath’, Dąbrowski shows that the Ministry of Culture used the most readily available lever at their disposal: the power to appoint the directors of public museums. Between 2016 and 2022, individuals with conservative political views were assigned, without any selection process, to management positions at the National Museum, the Centre for Contemporary Art, and the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, and the National Museum in Krakow. For institutions that required official selections for leadership positions, the committees were politically controlled.

When Donald Tusk’s liberal government came to power in 2023, there was another round of replacements. Dąbrowski is critical of these changes too, arguing that they demonstrate a tendency for liberal governments to use some of the same tactics of their less democratic colleagues:

‘Liberal parties tend to have a more open approach to culture. Yet even they rarely abandon the sector entirely, for the same ideological, political, and pragmatic reasons as rightwing populists. What differs is style: the intensity, legality, and methods of intervention, as well as the approach to cooperation with artistic communities. PiS acted ruthlessly, while liberal parties have generally operated with “kid gloves,” maintaining a softer, more collaborative touch.’

I asked Dąbrowski how he sees PiS’s legacy in culture, trying to understand how deep the party’s mark on museums really is. ‘When it comes to culture itself, the legacy is not particularly significant. Once again, we have learned that art created to meet party expectations is usually poor art.’

But Polish museums’ work of de-mythologization is by no means over. Karol Nawrocki, an independent supported by PiS, won the 2025 presidential elections by a narrow margin, showing that a significant part of the country still has some form of affinity for the values promoted by conservatives. ‘The PiS government pursued a deliberate policy aimed at strengthening national pride, both through culture and education,’ Dąbrowski says. ‘As a result, any curatorial project that critically examines official narratives now risks being labelled “anti-Polish” or even “traitorous.” These accusations find fertile ground among voters anxious about regional instability or migration pressures – making it increasingly difficult for museums to foster open, self-reflective dialogue about the past.’

What happens when you stop hiding the history?

The Gdańsk Museum learned this the hard way when they presented an exhibition on Polish soldiers in World War II in collaboration with the Museum of the World War II of the same city. ‘Our Boys’ tells the story of Polish citizens from the Pomerania region forced to join the Nazi army. Their history was hidden after Germany lost the war. It remains controversial among conservative politicians and their voters, for whom Poland was nothing but a victim of history. The controversy sparked protests in front of the museum building, with over 100 participants denouncing the exhibit as anti-Polish.

The historical reality is, as usual, more complicated.

Pomerania is a border region between Poland and Germany that passed through the hands of both states. After 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, Pomerania was transformed into a German province. Unlike other regions, whose status as occupied territory allowed residents to retain their citizenship, most Poles in Pomerania were forced to take German citizenship. As a German citizen, you had to join the army if the government demanded it. Otherwise, you risked imprisonment, camp deportation, or other punishments. According to research cited in the exhibit, it is very likely that around 200,000 men from the region were forced to join the army.

After the war ended, the former soldiers avoided talking about it. To speak meant to admit that you had ties to Germany, considered at the time to be the Soviet Union’s greatest enemy. ‘In the region,’ According to Andrzej Hoja, the curator of the exhibition, ‘there is some memory in some families, but there are a lot of gaps they don’t understand. So they are worried: what actually happened?’ Some feared that their family was the only one in this situation or that their grandparents had voluntarily joined the German army because they believed in the Nazi cause.

The exhibition, which opened in July 2025 and runs until May 2026, aims to bring clarity and peace to the people of the region, Hoja explains. ‘We wanted to show that there is no reason to hide all these memories because you are not alone. It’s not an exceptional experience. It’s very common. Your neighbour has the same experience and the other neighbour also and so on. I hope that after seeing this exhibition, they don’t need to worry about their experience. They know that in most cases there was no other alternative when it comes to joining the army. So, they also have some better knowledge about their relatives.’

In this respect, the exhibition has been a success. The organizers were surprised by the volume of positive responses to their call for donations from personal archives. Visitors came from hundreds of kilometres away. Since the exhibition opened, the team has received more than 2,000 messages of feedback, almost all of which are positive.

Outside the region, however, reactions have been mixed, especially after politics entered the picture. Former president Andrzej Duda posted a message on X accusing the exhibition of ‘relativizing history’. Duda wrote that ‘presenting the soldiers of the Third Reich as our own is not only a misrepresentation of history, but also a moral provocation’. The scandal was picked up by the national and international press. ‘It angered them that we call the exhibition, “Our boys”,’ says the exhibition’s curator. ‘These men were our relatives, they were obviously ours.’

For Hoja, the politicians’ reactions to the exhibition are symptomatic of how Poland’s political fights transformed history into a battleground. The curator believes that the way people relate to national history mirrors the way they relate to current politics. ‘Especially for conservatives, the way they see history is the way they see the future. That’s why it’s so important. That’s why you have so many clashes. And that’s why it’s possible that one small exhibition becomes a reason for a huge fight in the country.’

Warriors against history

Politicians who manipulate history for populist purposes are what Ljiljana Radonić calls ‘mnemonic warriors’, i.e. individuals who attempt to control collective memory. ‘These actors manipulate democratic checks and balances to enforce their version of historical truth,’ she says.

And collective memory, the blend of experiences and memories we share about the groups we belong to – from our family to our nation – is extremely important.

‘Memory is power, and whoever owns memory owns power,’ said one participant in a workshop, when analysing the capacity of Romanian museums to become spaces where Roma history and culture are discussed more openly. It may sound bizarre – after all, don’t we all have memories? Beyond individuals, however, museums are institutional spaces that not only preserve the collective memory but also define it. What we choose to exhibit is what we choose to remember. The stories we tell in museums are the ones that define us.

When the stories of women, ethnic minorities, or of the LGBTQ community are missing from museums, the message conveyed is that their experiences are not worthy of being preserved in the collective memory.

‘Preserving memory well is about remembering the past right. You can have a selective memory, where you emphasize certain parts of the past and, and shove aside others,’ explains Sarah Weicksel of the American Historical Association. ‘If parts of that memory are erased, through the erasure of exhibitions, through hiding objects, through the destruction of materials, etc. then don’t you end up with a false memory? And what does that do in relation to power?’

Although mnemonic warriors may not be able to erase historical aspects and consequences that do not suit them, they can control how we remember them. And that is extremely dangerous. ‘Ideologically, it allows a party to disseminate and reinforce a specific discourse in the public sphere. The more authoritarian a party, the more it is concerned by any ideological deviation and the more it seeks to eliminate it,’ says Jakub Dąbrowski. ‘Politically, taking control of cultural institutions sends a message to society: “Look how effectively we are defending the values we cherish.” In the context of a cultural war, this message is particularly important to core voters, even if they never visit a museum.’

In the context of a physical war, instrumentalization becomes even more transparent. Ljiljana Radonić told me that in 2017 she visited a museum in Moscow whose narrative already included the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by the Russian Federation, which had taken place just three years earlier. The illegal occupation was explained in the museum as a manifestation of the democratic will of the province’s inhabitants. This was five years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, one informed by historical and political falsehoods, and responsible for the deaths of over 14,000 civilians, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The battle that is worth having

To return to Matt Walsh and his comment that ‘the battle of the museums continues and it’s a battle very much worth having.’ While I strongly disagree with Walsh’s ideas, I do agree with this statement. Regardless of the regime, museums cannot be perfect institutions, free from political interference and devoid of ideology. But in a democratic society, where there is dialogue and room for criticism, they are perfectible.

‘A museum stands for something that ought to be good,’ says Michael Peter Edson. ‘And that is honest. It’s thoughtful, it tells difficult truths, it seeks the truth. It isn’t perfect, but it’s transparent about what it does. It makes a promise in society that it will be there to be accountable.’

‘Museums are places that bring people together to learn about people who are both like themselves and unlike themselves,’ says Sarah Weicksel. ‘They are places where people build historical empathy and understand the context in which people of the past made decisions and help people think about their own place in the present.’

It can be tempting to want to give up on these complicated things, and to tell a unified, uncontradictory narrative that makes you feel safe. But looking at mistakes is a sign of courage. ‘One of my proudest moments as an American was on the 200th anniversary of our Constitution,’ Edson tells me. The American History Museum put together an exhibit about the camps where Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. ‘Being a strong nation also means questioning your mistakes.’

Conversely, an unquestioned history can only offer a false and illusive sense of security. When I asked Radonić why it is important for museums to contain the complicated and ‘ugly’ parts of our past, she gave me the example of the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. Around 140,000 people, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and others, died as a result of conflicts motivated by nationalist hatred.

She explained to me that the memory of the civil war and of the massacres during World War II had not been confronted or discussed in Josip Broz Tito’s socialist Yugoslavia. Immediately after his death, it resurfaced more fiercely and violently than ever. Each side used the symbols of the enemy from the past: for example, the Croats, who called themselves ustaši, meaning rebels, described the Serbs as cetniki (a military group in Serbia, active between 1941 and 1945, which committed massacres against Croats and Bosnians).

‘Everyone was reusing these images of the enemy, while uncritically reproducing the identities of their own ethnic group from World War II. In a way, that was a major factor in triggering the Yugoslav wars – because socialist memory politics had tried to put a lid on the past, and in doing so enabled it to be violently reawakened.’

With authoritarianism and populism in the ascendant, the future of museums and historical research is uncertain. Even in democracy, museums in Romania still hide a lot. There is no official museum of communism, of Roma culture and history, or of the LGBTQ+ community. The enslavement of the Roma people and Romania’s role in the Holocaust are topics that remain largely absent from museum institutions.

The way we avoid talking about our less glorious history drives us apart. It makes us more hateful and more vulnerable to the lies of extremist politicians. That is why museums must be spaces where we approach our history in true honesty, so that we can better understand our present and prepare for the challenges of the future.