A venerable institution is taken over by leftists who loathe America, free enterprise, religion, and the founding ideals of the institution itself. Plucky conservatives expose the stunning coup. Elites fire back: “It’s all lies and hysterical exaggeration. We’re harmless nonpartisan custodians of tradition who just want to keep up with the times.” Within a decade, more or less, it’s so obvious that the institution has been co-opted by the hard left that no one bothers to argue anymore. The only questions are just how extreme things will get, and how damaged the rest of society will be.

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Who now doubts William F. Buckley Jr.’s warnings of encroaching leftism and irreligion at Yale? Who now accepts the soothing reassurances of Stanford’s administration that the study of Western civilization remains safe? Who now bothers to deny the political biases of the networks or the New York Times? Who now wastes breath insisting that conservative ideas can be freely expressed on campus? Who now claims that America’s cities are safer and cleaner than ever? For that matter, who now contends that socialists are in no position to take over the Democratic Party? Yet these were great debates in their day.

Would that this were a cyclical problem, a perpetual tug-of-war between right and left. The blight has been cumulative instead. This is our problem. Dueling political parties struggling within a shared cultural consensus are devolving into warring cultural camps acting on antithetical first principles. First the academy was seized. From there, cultural radicalism was injected into the wider social bloodstream.

That’s why I like President Trump. Like Reagan, but more so, Trump fights back. You can say that the economy and foreign policy are more important than these cultural battles. Over the long haul, however, that’s simply not true. And most everyone around today has lived that long haul. Everyone’s worried about America’s social fabric, albeit from opposite sides, and for good reason.

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And now, the Trump White House presents us with a meticulously detailed, 160-page report called “Saving America’s Story.” The White House Domestic Policy Council, headed by Vince Haley, has exposed the takeover of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History by radical political activists. No surprise, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Organization of American Historians (OAH), among others, are issuing the usual deflections, condemnations, and denials. And because the Smithsonian is a semiautonomous arm of the federal government, a much-needed change of leadership is anything but guaranteed.

Yet this is a blessing in disguise. Precisely because Trump has been forced to expose, rather than immediately replace, the Smithsonian’s leadership, the public is being treated to a chapter-and-verse account of modern cultural madness. From Saving America’s Story, we learn how ideologically partisan activism metastasizes under a veneer of bipartisanship. We see how slick and condescending elites selectively disclose and disguise their true intentions. And we discover just how crazy-radical these educated elites truly are. This is a fight whose importance goes well beyond the case in question. The battle over the Smithsonian is a prototype of the wider cultural clash we’re facing — and will continue to face into the indefinite future. How it gets resolved will have broader consequences. So, let’s jump into the report.

Saving America’s Story has two big complaints: (1) The National Museum of American History (NMAH) refuses to tell America’s core story; and (2) the NMAH substitutes political activism on behalf of contemporary leftist causes for America’s well-established core historical narrative.

At NMAH, the report says, the story of America’s Founding — of the Declaration, the Constitution, ordered liberty, natural rights, and the divine source of those inalienable rights — is never systematically told. The history of America’s incomplete but courageous struggles to form a more perfect union around its founding principles is either omitted, downplayed, or reduced to a focus on slavery and little else. Too patriotic, too Anglo-centric, and too white are the museum’s evident complaints about the standard account.

This claim that NMAH shortchanges America’s central story is what has received the most pushback from historians, journalists, and liberal opinion writers. They argue that focusing on America’s........

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