Sorry, it was hard to hear you above the din of civil destruction.
Massive layoffs.
Mass deportations, even of people who are here legally.
De-funding Social Security.
Enacting enormous tax cuts for the wealthy.
Crashing the financial markets (worldwide).
Eliminating Medicare.
Destroying hope.
Raising prices.
Legislating inequity.
Jettisoning due process.
Lawmaking by monarchical decree.
Devout sycophants.
Fear of reprisal within the same political party.
Fear of reprisal within the other political party.
Categorical acceptance of falsehoods.
Performative (weak, petty, symbolic, meaningless) political resistance.
Corporate media echoing, if not giving talking points to the fascisti.
And, as always, the rich are getting richer. The only difference in that reality is that there are meaningful numbers of cultists who believe that’s not a bad idea.
- The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.
- Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
- Mind-altering practices (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines) are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).
- The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel (for example, members must get permission to date, change jobs, marry—or leaders prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, whether or not to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth).
- The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and its members (for example, the leader is considered the Messiah, a special being, an avatar—or the group and/or the leader is on a special mission to save humanity).
- The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.
- The leader is not accountable to any authorities (unlike, for example, teachers, military commanders or ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream religious denominations).
- The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members’ participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before they joined the group (for example, lying to family or friends, or collecting money for bogus charities).
- The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and/or control members. Often, this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.
- Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and to radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before they joined the group.
- The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.
- The group is preoccupied with making money.
- Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities.
- Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.
- The most loyal members (the “true believers”) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave (or even consider leaving) the group.
Sound familiar? Because that’s where we are.
When we’re all being forced to deal with long-building, hard-won cultist behavior, the only way to deprogram its members is to believe that, at the very least, they’ve been duped. That’s a tall order today. Cults like the ones running the United States right now tend to be loud, strident, and dangerous. Now, instead of brown shirts, they wear red caps. Instead of looking dangerous in grainy black and white, they smilingly live in your neighborhood, have cherubic looking kids, and watch Fox News.
And through all of this, are you trying to increase funding for the arts or, more specifically, your own arts organization? The arts are worth supporting, but it is not clear whether arts organizations are — specifically, large, flagship, goliaths sucking up the oxygen-cum-funding in most arts-mospheres while thumbing their collective noses at the idea that they are, in fact, charities.
Look, it’s not as though the arts are unimportant. But when corporate entities own them (or manage them, as more and more board members and their executive hires incorrectly use the financial bottom line as the only metric to success — it isn’t even in the top five), they tend to follow rather than to lead, not wanting to muddy the waters.
The commercial arts have a reason to act this way. Their primary goal is profit for their shareholders. If Broadway continues its decades-long choice of producing big budget children’s theater, musical versions of mediocre-but-popular movies, and revivals of revivals of revivals, it is because that’s what the public wants to buy. Commercial companies, dependent on investors first and ticket sales right after that, produce work that the public wants to buy. It’s strictly a money-centered business, and that’s okay; at its core, that’s what it’s supposed to do.
The nonprofit arts are not that. Currently, too many are acting like commercial operations, but the charitable designation forces them to receive altruistic donations rather than profit-based investments. Because of that, arts organizations are among the smallest chicks in the nest screaming into the air for funding at feeding time.
Even in calm times, they’ve never truly made its case to any but an elite (in all meanings of that word) few. Why would that change when all the systems around us are crumbling to wreak revenge on the enemies of the state?
Where that puts you, running or supporting an organization, is unclear. There are solutions, but they’re not snap-the-finger, poof solutions. This is not a movement that will suddenly disappear, even if the leader were dead and gone. It’s the final throes of unearned dominance (White males, for the most part, but women and non-Whites who seek to “win,” as well) and it’s ugly as sin.
One choice toward a short-term solution might be for your nonprofit to participate in the movement by producing this group’s propaganda until the war is over. Happy stories of White Protestants pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to wipe out all the brown people or Jewish people who want to replace them might sell well in certain parts of the country.
It would be understandable. And while sickeningly irrelevant and culturally insulting, it’s a commercial choice, I suppose.
It’s why the kind of wolf-in-sheepskin realities of overly influential nonprofit arts organizations threaten to kill the entire industry. The arguments and strategies for financing the nonprofit arts sector continue to be about ticket sales (and, secondarily, audience numbers), tourism, secondary economic impact, and schemes to game government sales taxes (which adversely affect the poor) to pay for that next production of that Broadway show that no one understands but the artist with that vision. None of that is charitable impact. The sector deserves to be failing at operating support in an anti-charitable environment like that.
I even read where a large arts organization in Portland is crowing about 80% of its workforce being from Portland as some lame commitment to local artists. (I think your local McDonald’s can do better than that.) To out-of-touch nonprofit arts organizations, I ask, “Is the sky blue in your world?”
There is one and only one solution right now. The only thing you can do is to act hyper-local, become the charity that makes the best decisions for the community (and with the community), and collaborate with other local nonprofits to do the same. If you can find it within your big-ass nonprofit arts organization’s duties to quantifiably make lives better, more whole, or show data that your work has created more opportunity, higher test scores, or any kind of charitable impact, you win. Otherwise…
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