August 20th, 2025.

President Donald J. Trump created a firestorm yesterday

when he said that the Smithsonian Institution,

the world's largest museum, education, and research complex,

located mostly in Washington, D.C., focuses too much

on how bad slavery was. But his objection to recognizing the horrors of human enslavement is not

simply white supremacy. It is the logical outcome of the political ideology that created MAGA. It is the same

ideology that leads him and his loyalists to try to rig the nation's voting system to create a one-party

state. That ideology took shape in the years immediately after the Civil War,

when black men and poor white men in the South voted for leaders who promised to rebuild their shattered region,

provide schools and hospitals, as well as desperately needed prosthetics for veterans,

and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to work hard and rise.

Former Confederates committed to the idea of both their racial superiority and their right to control the government,

loathed the idea of black men voting. But their opposition to black voting on racial grounds ran headlong

into the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which, after it was ratified in 1870, gave the U.S.

government the power to make sure that no state denied any man the right to vote on account of race,

color, or previous condition of servitude. When white former Confederates, nonetheless, tried to force their black neighbors from the polls,

Congress in 1870 created the Department of Justice, which began to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan members

who had been terrorizing the South.

With racial discrimination, now a federal offense, elite white southerners changed their approach.

They insisted that they objected to black voting not on racial grounds, but because black men were

voting for programs that redistributed wealth from hardworking

...