Back in February, when I wrote about the first few deranged actions the MAGA regime took against cultural agencies—”Il Duce Redux: Art Under Trump“—I focused specifically on art, as my title said. One of the things that tends to convince artists of the significance of our work is autocrats’ reliable tendency to go after it first. They perceive the power source others may miss.
In the 80s, for example, Ronald Reagan failed in his efforts to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, but what with the “Moral Majority” flooding the zone with panic designed to drive right-wing fundraising, by the time 1989 rolled around, artworks by people like Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe were censored and grants to the “NEA Four” were vetoed by the Republican Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), igniting a national controversy pitting anti-censorship forces against an increasingly censorious and puritanical right. The moral panic was drummed up over the idea of spending taxpayers’ money on indecent art (which made it really funny that while in the normal course of events, almost no one would have seen these avant-garde works, almost everyone got a copy delivered directly to their mailboxes courtesy of the far-right fundraising machine). But the biggest, bitterest laugh had to do with proportionality. The number of person-hours politicians like the late and egregious racist Jesse Helms spent protesting the few cents per capita spent on the NEA was mind-boggling.
Just so, Trump got a lot of mileage out of his opening anti-art salvos, firing the Kennedy Center board and rescinding NEA grants, as I wrote in February. On Friday, continuing the destruction, the MAGA regime’s budget proposal included eliminating the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the same thing he tried and failed at in 2017.
Countless groups that had been promised funding for mostly community-based projects just received form letters rescinding them. Here’s the main text:
“The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President. Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities. Funding is being allocated in a new direction in furtherance of the Administration’s agenda.”
“Your project, as noted below, unfortunately does not align with these priorities.”
What does align? The MAGA regime is using NEH funds to commission artists to create statues for Trump’s “Garden of American Heroes.”
Here’s the crux: when an authoritarian points to a problem that will trigger attention and says “Over there,” people look. More than almost anything else, Trump wants to corner the attention economy, and he has been very successful at it. One result is that when I gaze around to see who is responding to the MAGA regime’s depredations and how, a lot of people seem to have a kind of tunnel vision, seeing the things they feel directly impinge on their world and missing the big picture.
I am a cultural policy wonk. Let me explain. Nearly twenty years ago in my book New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, I offered a definition of culture:
Culture in its broadest, anthropological sense includes all that is fabricated, endowed, designed, articulated, conceived or directed by human beings, as opposed to what is given in nature. Culture includes both material elements (buildings, artifacts, etc.) and immaterial ones (ideology, value systems, languages).
With that understanding, here’s how I defined cultural policy:
Cultural Policy describes, in the aggregate, the values and principles that guide any social entity in cultural affairs. Cultural policies are most often made by governments, from school boards to legislatures, but also by many other institutions in the private sector, from corporations to community organizations. Policies provide guideposts for those making decisions and taking actions that affect cultural life.
Universal public education is a cultural policy. One person, one vote is a cultural policy. English as an official language is a cultural policy (one that Trump declared by executive order a couple of months ago). If you only feel connected to things done explicitly to affect artists and arts organizations, you are missing the scope of the MAGA cultural project and the need to oppose it as a whole.
Here are some things that the MAGA regime is doing in the cultural policy realm that, while alarming to many artists and culture-bearers, and undoubtedly motivating protest, are not being seen in their entirety because tunnel vision is blocking the view.
Attacking higher education. I’ve written plenty of critical things about the excesses of elite higher education in this country, but my aim has been to make it better, not punish it. Everyone should read or listen to Masha Gessen’s recent comments on the chilling similarities between the MAGA regime’s higher ed attacks—canceling research grants, threatening to end tax exemption, blackmailing them into a kind of receivership, and so on—and what she experienced in the Soviet Union and saw in Eastern Europe. Just a taste:
“[O]ne person I talked to described the net knowledge loss that occurred in the Soviet Union over its 70 years of totalitarian rule. After the Bolshevik Revolution, there was systematic and intentional destruction of the old intellectual class.
As a result, this one economist told me, economists who were trained in Soviet universities in the 1970s lacked the sophistication and knowledge necessary to read Russian economists who had worked in the 1920s. So in a rapidly developing field such as economics, they actually knew less. They had less language, they had fewer tools of self-understanding than people who had worked 50 years earlier.
That’s an extreme but a perfectly realistic example of what happens when you have an autocratic president who wants to destroy knowledge production.”
The cultural policy being asserted? Believing in and obeying the regime is primary; dialogue, study, and development of ideas are nothing but trouble and should be eliminated.
Attacking documentary filmmaking. As noted earlier, as part of his budget plan announced on Friday, Trump called for the elimination of federal cultural agencies. But even before that, the regime terminated active grants, many of them funding films and publications. These grants are structured so that filmmakers spend money and get reimbursed. In one fell swoop, projects (and perhaps people) are bankrupted. Documentary groups have protested. Here’s a compilation of what each region of the US will lose from the Doge-led termination of all grants to state humanities councils, another source of funding for independent media projects.
The cultural policy being asserted? Culture is what I say it is and only what I say it is. There is no public interest at stake. Those who think so deserve to suffer.
Birthright citizenship and illegal deportation. The Supreme Court is soon to hear oral arguments on the executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants, promulgated on Trump’s first day in office. In issuing that order, Trump was attempting to enact just one part of the cultural program he hopes to establish via deportations without due process, closing the border, and many allied actions.
The cultural policy being asserted? The United States exists for the privileged, largely white, and often compliantly biddable population; the rest have no human rights.
I’m not claiming that climbing out of the tunnel and seeing all these actions as attacks on culture will suddenly open the eyes of vast numbers. But I do think it can help to defeat the balkanization that treats immigration as one issue, education as another, arts funding as a third, and so on. Artists and culture-bearers, who are often able to see patterns in occurrences that may otherwise seem to random, and who often have capacity to share what they see in ways that capture attention, I am talking to you. There’s light at the end of tunnel vision, shining on the relatedness of all we do as a society. Let it shine.
Daniel Lanlois, “Shine.”