If the National Archives Blurs Anti-Trump Speech From Its Exhibits, Is It Really an Archive?

By Zack Linly, The Root

20 January 20

here’s a large 49-by-69-inch photograph in the National Archives Museum in Washington D.C. which celebrates the centennial of women’s suffrage by depicting the massive crowd that filled Pennsylvania Avenue NW for the Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Viewed from another angle, it shifts to show a 1913 black-and-white image of a women’s suffrage march also on Pennsylvania Avenue linking momentous demonstrations for women’s rights which took place more than a century apart in the same location. The 2017 photo gives museum visitors an idea of how many Americans felt about the Pussy-grabber-in-Chief being elected to the highest office in the nation.

Only, not quite.

The Archives acknowledged in a statement this week that it made multiple alterations to the photo by blurring signs held by marchers in protest that were critical of Trump, the Washington Post reported.

In the original version of the 2017 photograph, taken by Getty Images photographer Mario Tama, the street is packed with marchers carrying a variety of signs, with the Capitol in the background. In the Archives version, at least four of those signs are altered.

A placard that proclaims “God Hates Trump” has “Trump” blotted out so that it reads “God Hates.” A sign that reads “Trump & GOP — Hands Off Women” has the word Trump blurred out.

Signs with messages that referenced women’s anatomy — which were prevalent at the march — are also digitally altered. One that reads “If my vagina could shoot bullets, it’d be less REGULATED” has “vagina” blurred out. And another that says “This Pussy Grabs Back” has the word “Pussy” erased.

The Archives claims the decision to obscure obscenities and anti-Trump speech was made while the exhibit was in development.

“As a non-partisan, non-political federal agency, we blurred references to the President’s name on some posters, so as not to engage in current political controversy,” Archives spokeswoman Miriam Kleiman said in an emailed statement to The Post. “Our mission is to safeguard and provide access to the nation’s most important federal records, and our exhibits are one way in which we connect the American people to those records. Modifying the image was an attempt on our part to keep the focus on the records.”

Okay, but, for the record: Fuck Trump!

Listen, besides the fact that the Archives are apparently fine with a sign that appears to read “God Hates” so long as Trump’s good name isn’t tacked onto it, it just seems strange that they claim it their mission to “safeguard and provide access” to federal records, but choose to omit, what many would argue, are key parts of said record. Why show us the Women’s March but obscure one of the main issues that fed the energy of that day?

The spokespeople also made it a point to note that David S. Ferriero, the archivist of the United States who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009, participated in talks regarding the exhibit and supports the decision to edit the photo, according to Washington Post. That sounds a little too “I have a friend who has a black friend and he says it’s totally cool” for my tastes, but Kleiman says the images from the 2017 and 1913 marches were presented together “to illustrate the ongoing struggles of women fighting for their interests.”

She added that the National Archives “only alters images in exhibits when they are used as graphic design components.”

“We do not alter images or documents that are displayed as artifacts in exhibitions,” she said. “In this case, the image is part of a promotional display, not an artifact.” But, like myself, many historians remain unmoved by the justification.

“There’s no reason for the National Archives to ever digitally alter a historic photograph,” Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said. “If they don’t want to use a specific image, then don’t use it. But to confuse the public is reprehensible. The head of the Archives has to very quickly fix this damage. A lot of history is messy, and there’s zero reason why the Archives can’t be upfront about a photo from a women’s march.”

Wendy Kline, a history professor at Purdue University, also weighed in via email saying, “Doctoring a commemorative photograph buys right into the notion that it’s okay to silence women’s voice and actions. It is literally erasing something that was accurately captured on camera. That’s an attempt to erase a powerful message.”

It’s also worth mentioning that Archive officials didn’t respond to a request from The Post to provide examples of previous instances in which the Archives altered a document or photograph so as not to engage in political controversy. 

Let me find out this has only been done for 45. 

"Electability" Is a Poisonous Political Shibboleth

By Osita Nwanevu, The New Republic

19 January 20

If this recursive way of thinking about politics captures our imagination, it will imperil America's future.

e are several days now into a spat betweenBernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—the Democratic primary’s two progressiveswho, as has been widely reported, have observed a pact of nonaggressionagainst each other for the majority of the primary campaign. That arrangement collapsedamid two controversies. The first was brought about by the leak of a Sanderscampaign canvasser script that had volunteers challenging Warren’s viabilityin the general election based on the composition of her coalition in theprimary—a kind of argument, it should be said, that has been made againstSanders throughout the race. The second, more serious controversy was broughtabout by Warren’s allegation that Sanders had privately confessed to her hisbelief that a woman cannot win the presidency.

Both of these controversies, in their own way,touch upon the question of electability, which polls have told us is front ofmind for Democratic voters. As far as Warren’s gender is concerned, even thosewho argue that Sanders deserves criticism if he made the remark concede thatmany ordinary Democrats are themselves wary about nominating a woman. “It can be hard to shake the tickle in the back of yourbrain,” The New York Times’ Michelle Cottle wrote Wednesday, “that Mr. Trump’sretrograde brand of politics—his naked appeals to sexism, racism and otherforms of old-school bigotry—can be weaponized all too easily against a womanopponent, who, fairly or not, already faces generic, gender-based hurdles.”

It is clearly true thatperceptions of female candidates can be tinted by sexism and that women facemore obstacles to success in politics than men. But our last presidentialelection was instructive. It’s often pointed out, appropriately, that HillaryClinton won three million more votes than Trump in 2016. It should also benoted that Clinton’s share of the popular vote was not markedly different fromthe shares won by losing male candidates past—she won a slightly largerproportion of the vote than Mitt Romney and John McCain had previously managed;a slightly smaller proportion than Al Gore and John Kerry.

Her performance, in short,was statistically unremarkable—any additional handicap she might have faced asa woman simply cannot be found in the vote tally. It’s possible that her gendermight have cost her some support in the regions of the country critical to anelectoral college victory. But the margins in those places were extraordinarilyclose—to believe that female candidates are doomed to fail is to believe,implausibly, that there were no conceivable scenarios in which Clinton mighthave garnered the few thousand more votes necessary to carry her to victory.The lesson some Democratic voters have internalized stands opposite to thetakeaway that the figures actually offer. Clinton’s narrow loss is hardly evidencethat a woman can’t win the presidency. It proves that a woman can.

But received wisdom aboutelectability is powerful precisely because it defies reason and is resistant tocritical scrutiny. Like many of the other concepts that shape electoralpunditry and political discourse—charisma,qualification, momentum, authenticity—electability is a shibboleth of apolitical mysticism that “tickles the brain” only because it cannot fullyengage it—a drab, gray astrology, maintained by over-caffeinated men.  

The whole idea muddles more than it clarifies. Consider the leaders of the 2020field. The candidate most favored by voters who prioritize electability is Joe Biden:a moderate, appealing to middle of the road voters who want our partisandivisions bridged and political norms restored much more than they favor anyparticular policy program. He also has considerable baggage. Beyond whatevercontroversies Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine might bring to a generalelection, Biden can also expect intense scrutiny over his mental fitness andany gaffes he might make on the campaign trail. He could also face the same struggleto juice turnout among the Democratic base as his primary rivals.

Turnout, of course, iscentral to the electability case for Bernie Sanders, who believes theDemocratic electorate can be expanded with disengaged voters, young people, andsome Trump supporters, all drawn to his candidacy by ambitious policies likeMedicare for All, which would materially benefit the working class. But it’soften said that Sanders’s leftism might turn off the middle-class suburbanitesand moderate voters who were integral to Democrats taking the House in 2018.Elizabeth Warren, just to the right of Sanders on policy, does better with moreaffluent voters but is thought to be too progressive for some and is wrestlingwith the aforementioned worries about gender. Pete Buttigieg, a man and amoderate, isn’t, and has demonstrated real pull with the same sort of more affluent,educated voters with whom Warren is strong. His lack of experience, however,could fuel doubts about his competence, and he has struggled, moreover, to winblack voters—a hurdle some have shakily tied to his sexual orientation. Thoseworried about this might be willing to consider another white, male moderate—astraight one, with more support among African American voters. This, naturally,brings us back to Joe Biden … and so on.

This is a discourseincapable of producing anything beyond recursive guesswork—hypotheticals withinsuppositions that send us pacing in circles over questions that no electioncan actually resolve. The victory or defeat of any given candidate does notforeclose the possibility that they might have performed differently underslightly different circumstances and cannot tell us conclusively whetheranother candidate might have done better or worse. The 2016 election race drewus close, but not close enough, to understanding this. Any politically engagedperson today can rattle off a list offactors that might have tilted the race: Russian interference,irresponsible coverage of the Clinton email scandal, Trump’s omnipresence oncable television, James Comey’s eleventh-hour machinations, the Clintoncampaign’s inattention to the Rust Belt. Yet the politically engaged have also taken to believing thatelectability is a stable and perhaps even measurablequality innate to the candidates themselves. This belief persists despitethe victory, in that election, of a man who was widely considered one of themost unelectable candidates ever to seek the presidency. Now many of the sageswho rendered that judgment have reconvened to tell us Donald Trump can only bebeaten by someone matching a profile—white, male, moderate—that has not wonDemocrats the presidency in 24 years.

It might work this timearound. It also might not. All we can be reasonably sure of is the persistenceof a dynamic that Trump’s nomination and election brought into relief—givenpartisan polarization, and assuming the absence of a strong third-partychallenge, just about any candidate from one of our two major political partiescan reliably expect to win the support of about half the electorate. Differentcamps within the Democratic Party have put together plausible theories on whatmight put one candidate or another over the top in the states and regionsnecessary to prevail in the electoral college. But these are hermetic argumentsthat could run up against a variety of competing factors—from unforeseeable worldevents to the state of the economy to the competence of each campaignorganization—once the general election leaves the world of abstraction. Theextremely early relevant numbers that we have, the candidate favorability andhead-to-head matchups, don’t tell us anything more than what we should alreadyknow: We are in for a close race, and the leading Democratic candidates arecompetitive with Trump.

If this dissatisfiespundits and voters alike, we should ask ourselves how and why they came toagree so closely. Last week, Democratic strategist Jared Leopold made anobservation that has been repeatedly echoed by reporters on the ground in theearly states. “Cable news has warped voters’ brains and turned everyone intomini-pundits,” he told Politico. “That means candidates need to win not just onpolicy but on process.” This seems like a product of both the uncertainty thatTrump’s election created among voters and shifting norms in politicaljournalism—in which fixed characteristics and variables granular enough to beplugged into statistical models have largely supplanted the naïve horse-racejournalism of yesteryear, with its focus on narratives and assumption of closecompetition. It’s ironic that this mode was dominant within a period when electoralmargins were wider and victories were more decisive. That era is now fading—evenas candidates run neck and neck more often, and even though it has become moreplausible that a specific event or misstep could nudge one candidate or theother just over the line.

In many ways, the newanalytical mode has left us better informed. But it is also driving us mad. Forover a year, the Democratic primary had been defined by novel policy proposalsand theories of change. Now, electability as a concept, a runaway monster, hastorn it all down—not just by seizing much of the oxygen and attention availablein the discourse but also, as a second-order impact, by distracting and fuelingenmity on the left. Until last week, the debate between supporters of BernieSanders and Elizabeth Warren had been centered around the records of bothcandidates, their strategies for achieving their political goals and thesubstance of those goals themselves, given meaningful differences inperspective on topics like health care and American foreign policy. What we havenow is a drearily conventional political slap-fight that grew from competingideas about who can win the election and how. 

Our elections should neverbe about elections. A voter who hastaken to a narrow model of political possibility cannot be told much about themerits of proposals and candidates that aren’t fitted to it. It’s alwaysclarifying to consider just how many of our freedoms have been extended and howmany lives have been saved by people and policies that prevailed againstperceived odds. The more that ideas like electability arrest our politicalimagination, the less likely those outcomes will become—an entirelyself-fulfilling dynamic that cedes our agency to the judgments rendered byblinkered pundits and jury-rigged algorithms. The democratic principle rests onthe assumption that the votes the people cast on candidates and the proposalsat hand are, in fact, votes truly for or against those candidates and proposals—thatour votes are based not on what we suppose might win, but on what we believe isright. That assumption has always been flawed. But we should work to bringreality as close to it as we can.