Trump aims to counter self-flagellation in the teaching of American history.

It's about time.

Citing “experts,” the Washington Post’s Paula Dvorak criticizes Donald Trump for “hiding historical truths.” “Grappling with the uglier parts of U.S. history is necessary for an honest and inclusive telling of the American story,” Dvorak’s experts say.

I emphasized the word grappling because I think it gives the game away. Learning about some of the uglier parts of U.S. history is fine. But “grappling” means more than just learning. It means struggling with, and that conjures Maoist-style struggle sessions — a reckoning with DEI-ideology in the forefront.

And this reckoning is, in fact, what many of those who teach history have injected into the study of our past. For example, when one of my daughters was in fifth grade, her class put Christopher Columbus on trial.

This ridiculous exercise is emblematic of how history is being taught to Americans. So is the battle over the AP U.S. History curriculum, which I discussed here and here (among other places).

When I was an undergraduate, a distinguished Dartmouth history professor told me that the historian’s job is to understand, not to judge. Judging is certainly not the proper role of fifth-graders or, for that matter, AP U.S. History students.

Dvorak and her experts don’t want students merely to learn about the uglier parts of U.S. history. They want students to wallow in them. And the experts themselves want us to obsess over them. In fact, they want to make the two ugliest parts, slavery and Jim Crow, the centerpieces of U.S. history. That’s what the infamous and dishonest 1619 project was all about.

It is this obsessing that conservatives need to push back against.

Faced, finally, with pushback, the left-wing history establishment has gone into a defensive crouch, the distinguishing feature of which is dishonesty. Do these historians aim to indoctrinate students in order to push an agenda favorable to blacks and other victims of the uglier parts of our history? Not at all, they say. They just want to prevent the whitewashing of these parts.

This bit of disingenuousness reminds me of what big law firms are saying, now that they’re on the defensive. Everyone deserves legal representation, they tell us, now that they are (improperly) under fire for having represented certain clients. Never mind the fact that some of these same firms discouraged their attorneys from representing conservative causes, or even prohibited them from doing so.

Similarly, elite colleges suddenly pretend to be upholding the spirit of free inquiry and resisting (improper) attempts to purge certain viewpoints. Never mind the fact that these same institutions discouraged the presentation of conservative viewpoints, often standing by passively when those presenting them were shouted down. Never mind the fact that these same institutions rarely hired any professors other than left-liberal or outright radically left-wing ones,

Left-wing historians like the ones Dvorak quotes in her article are being at least as disingenuous as these big law firms and elite universities. They aren’t ideologically-neutral transmitters of information about America’s past. Through the AP U.S. History curriculum, the 1619 project, and in countless other ways, they have accentuated America’s past misdeeds, downplayed or ignored our distinctive contributions to the betterment of mankind, and in so doing pushed an ideology that’s hostile to America.

As John Fonte shows, the history establishment has been peddling its ideologically-based condemnation of America for at least a decade.

It views American history negatively through the lens of “oppressors” (white males) vs. “oppressed” and “marginalized groups.” This ideology has been variously called political correctness, identity politics, social justice, and wokeness. We could use Wesley Yang’s term “successor ideology,” meaning it is the new radical, left-wing ideological successor to the old patriotic liberalism of politicians like Walter Mondale and historians like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Trump, then, was spot-on when he declared in his Executive Order regarding the presentation of American history:

Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.

This doesn’t mean that Trump won’t take things too far in the opposite direction and use his power to whitewash or unduly downplay the darker aspects of our past. I understand that there are excellent conservative scholars with White House connections who are trying to make sure this doesn’t happen — that, instead, a fair-minded balance will prevail.

However, I don’t have great confidence that it will. The tendency these days is always to over-correct, and this administration is not known for balance and nuance.

But if the choice is between a self-flagellating history and a self-congratulatory one, I vote for the latter. A country will always be better off over-estimating its virtue rather than exaggerating its flaws.

We’ve been wallowing in the flaws long enough. If the pendulum swings too far in the other direction for a while, the result will be better than if it doesn’t swing at all.