Press releases from the federal government aren’t the most exciting documents around, as a general rule, and those from the National Archives are even less promising than most. But they’re getting more interesting all the time, as the Archives continues its exciting transformation from a dusty repository for the nation’s written patrimony into an engine of left-wing agitprop.
Thursday’s press release bore the headline: National Archives Selects New York to Host “National Conversation on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality.” This particular conversation (the talking starts on October 21, if you want to mark your calendar) is only one episode in the larger National Conversation on Rights and Justice that the Archives is sponsoring even as we speak, so to speak. Already there have been chinwags about “Civil Rights and Individual Freedom” and “LGBTQ Human and Civil Rights.” You probably didn’t even know you were in the middle of a national conversation, much less one about rights and justice. Well, now you do.
There are so many national conversations these days. At the federal level, President Clinton started the jibber jabber back in the 1990s with a National Conversation on Race, which was going to transform race relations in the United States. (How’s that working out for us?) President Obama is a huge conversation starter, too, predictably enough for a president whose answers to press-conference questions can average upwards of six minutes. A couple years ago the Washington Post‘s Carlos Lozada counted at least eight ongoing national conversations—one each on gun violence, immigration, gay marriage, debt, climate change, obesity, and bullying.
Note that two of these conversations, on gay marriage and climate change, are now declared officially closed, often by many of the same people who insisted we start the conversations in the first place. For gay activists the conversation about “marriage equality” had gone on quite long enough, so they got Justice Kennedy to make the rest of us shut up. On the issue of climate change, the president himself has announced that the “argument is over.” So it’s back to obesity. And rights and justice, too.
A skeptic might conclude from these unilateral shutdowns that a “national conversation” is merely a holding action, put in place until one side figures out how to do what it always wanted to do anyway. Indeed, for the Archives’ new national conversation, one side seems to be all there is. The conversation in New York next month, on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, promises to be a festival of nodding heads and back patting. The press release lists the conversationalists: the founder of Feminism.com, a lawyer from the Center for Reproductive Rights, an editor from Ms. magazine, the executive director of Equal Rights Advocates, and a poet with the improbable name of Aja Monet. Oh, and Soledad O’Brien. Not a Republican in the bunch. I’m guessing.
The Archives’ one-sided conversation perfectly reflects its newfound institutional role, which has been shaped by academic historians and curatorial faddists. Its signature museum, on the first floor of the Archives on Constitution Avenue in Washington, treats visitors to a pitiless catalogue of injustice and human rights abuses, which the curators seem to believe were uniquely American. Each of the three galleries is consumed with the oppression of a different group: women, African Americans, and immigrants. By the time a credulous visitor works his way through the museum, he’s unlikely to be impressed by our founding documents, displayed in the gallery upstairs. Like a National Conversation, it’s a sure conversation-stopper.
