{"id":3773,"date":"2025-04-14T05:48:52","date_gmt":"2025-04-14T12:48:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/?p=3773"},"modified":"2025-04-14T05:48:58","modified_gmt":"2025-04-14T12:48:58","slug":"what-to-do-with-the-nea-make-it-conservative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2025\/04\/what-to-do-with-the-nea-make-it-conservative\/","title":{"rendered":"What to do with the NEA? Make it Conservative?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my last post<\/a> I wrote about the Cato Institute\u2019s Ryan Bourne\u2019s call to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts. Here I will consider a different approach from the right, Mark Bauerlein\u2019s \u201cMAGA needs High Art, Not just Kid Rock<\/a>\u201d, from the New York Times<\/em>. He writes about the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as the NEA, but I will focus on his thoughts about the latter (to this point, the NEH has taken some heavy cuts, but not so the NEA).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are some selections from the op-ed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

But for the Trump administration to promote a culture of \u201cAmerican greatness,\u201d it cannot just eliminate what it dislikes; it must also support what it favors. During his first term, in a speech<\/a> denouncing the \u201cleft-wing cultural revolution,\u201d President Trump called for a more celebratory attitude toward America\u2019s cultural heritage \u2014 one that proudly recalled that \u201cwe gave the world the poetry of Walt Whitman, the stories of Mark Twain, the songs of Irving Berlin, the voice of Ella Fitzgerald.\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a conservative truism that politics are downstream from culture. What happens in the arts and humanities doesn\u2019t stay there; it flows into the broader society over time. Without queer theory in the academy in the 1990s, the Supreme Court\u2019s Obergefell and Bostock decisions, which extended rights and protections to gay and transgender people, might not have happened. The Trump administration needs to make sure that the right kind of culture is at the headwaters of the river today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it comes to popular culture, the MAGA movement readily attracts kindred spirits. Hulk Hogan speaks at the Republican National Convention. Kid Rock visits the White House. Joe Rogan presides over a sympathetic \u201cmanosphere.\u201d But when it comes to high culture, the movement falters. After President Trump took over<\/a> the Kennedy Center in February, he signaled that he would bring about a more congenial vision of the performing arts and the nation\u2019s cultural heritage. But the people and creative works that he has mentioned in connection with this ambition \u2014 Elvis Presley, Babe Ruth, the musical \u201cCats\u201d \u2014 are middlebrow at best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where the N.E.H. and N.E.A. would serve Mr. Trump well: not only correcting \u201cwoke\u201d excesses, but also providing an elite counterpart to MAGA\u2019s populist thrust. Expert critics, scholars and artists could ensure that only traditionalist projects are funded. \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under Mr. Gioia, the N.E.A. created Shakespeare in American Communities, which sent theater troupes into schools across the country to introduce students to the Bard. \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ideally, the Trump administration would do more than just revive the Bush-era conception of the arts and humanities agencies. It would also draw inspiration from even bolder, New Deal-era initiatives, such as the Federal Writers\u2019 Project, which gave jobs to out-of-work writers to document American culture, and the Federal Art Project, which funded murals, sculpture, paintings, posters and other public art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such ambitious proposals would be anathema to small-government Republicans, of course. And it is true that state-sponsored art programs have often resulted in clumsy propaganda. But they have also given us the Lincoln Memorial, the photographs of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange and the great comic novel \u201cA Confederacy of Dunces\u201d (an N.E.A. product).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If conservatives wish to halt the progressive advance in American society, they must rectify a mistake they made decades ago: focusing on law and economics and leaving the arts and humanities to the other side.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

There are more than a few things to take issue with here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, I think Americans in general, progressive and conservative, celebrate that this country has produced Whitman and Twain, Berlin and Fitzgerald. This is not a problem that needs fixing. At least in my town, the place you are by far most likely to hear the latter two is on our local NPR station, and it is not the Democrats who are trying to eliminate its federal subsidies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, we have to keep in mind that the President of the United States is Donald Trump. His having middlebrow cultural tastes is not really the problem at the Kennedy Center; most presidents have had middlebrow taste in the arts and it\u2019s not all that important. But look at the lackeys and sycophants he has appointed to its board and management. As in every appointment he makes, loyalty to his personal whims is paramount, with the achievement of any actual policy goal coming a distant second. In some ways Bauerlein\u2019s piece reminds me of those tiresome articles that say \u201ctariffs are good, actually, we just need Trump to implement them with a meticulously crafted strategy in pursuit of American industrial goals\u201d, which as I posted in a note sometime back, is like asking my dog to perform the Hammerklavier Sonata.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third, Bauerlein cites the familiar line \u201cpolitics are downstream from culture\u201d (I can\u2019t quite<\/em> tell if he is trying to say that rights for gay and trans people are an outcome we could have happily avoided if not for culture). But this is too simple. Politics and a broad conception of culture – in terms of how we live and what beliefs are for the most part commonly held – and a narrow conception of capital-A Art are in a very complex dynamic relationship, each affecting the other through time. Our art reflects the culture and politics of the time and place it was created much more than it changes those things. I don\u2019t think queer theory in corners of university humanities faculty in the 1990s was much of a driver of the rights of gay people – this was a long cultural change where gay people not having rights was increasingly seen as an unjust anomaly (if I bring the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott<\/a> into this, he would say the extension of legal protections to gays was not<\/em> an example of rationalism – this was the central argument that Andrew Sullivan<\/a> made in 1989). It is just not right to say \u201cif only the art that was presented and celebrated were different, we would begin to see shifts in politics and culture.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which gets me to my last point. Back when I taught management and public policy, I would introduce my students to Goodhart\u2019s Law: any variable that might have been correlated in the past with performance, that is then chosen as the<\/em> metric that will be used to evaluate<\/em> performance, immediately becomes useless as a metric. The individuals being evaluated will shift their priority from what they thought was important to chasing the highest possible value of the chosen metric, rendering the metric pointless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me assert a similar law for the arts: while Art might influence our cultural and political values to a slight degree, any sort of art that is chosen as a vehicle for attaining specific cultural and political goals becomes debased as art and useless in fostering those goals (I would take credit for this, except that Orwell through a few essays said much the same thing). Having the NEA fund \u201ctraditionalist\u201d projects for political purposes would quickly be recognized as such. I\u2019m all in favor of subsidies for students to be able to attend performances of Shakespeare. But theatre is a living art, and students need to see that, embodied in new works. This doesn\u2019t mean a focus on new works that are \u201crelevant\u201d to them, in the sense that \u201crelevant\u201d has come to mean \u201cvaluable lessons about current political issues\u201d, which is just another form of thinking the purpose of art is to shape social attitudes. Bauerlein\u2019s \u201canti-woke\u201d agenda for the arts is as bad as any \u201cwoke\u201d agenda, and even a fairly dull student will see right through it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, even if we had a normal, thoughtful conservative president, Bauerlein\u2019s proposed agenda would fail. That we have the president we actually have for another four years, I would really prefer, for art\u2019s sake, that he just turn a blind eye to it. If Trump took a real interest in the NEA, then I would join Ryan Bourne\u2019s call to just put an end to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cross-posted at https:\/\/michaelrushton.substack.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my last post I wrote about the Cato Institute\u2019s Ryan Bourne\u2019s call to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts. Here I will consider a different approach from the right, Mark Bauerlein\u2019s \u201cMAGA needs High Art, Not just Kid Rock\u201d, from the New York Times. He writes about the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3774,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3773","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-issues","8":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-1.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3dIW5-YR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1025,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/02\/nea-funding-and-the-ecological-fallacy\/","url_meta":{"origin":3773,"position":0},"title":"NEA funding and the ecological fallacy","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"February 4, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The SMU study has a serious problem","rel":"","context":"In "issues"","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"rich town poor town doesn't matter","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/openingnight.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":684,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2013\/04\/creative-communities\/","url_meta":{"origin":3773,"position":1},"title":"Creative Communities","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"April 19, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm happy to report that Creative Communities: Art Works in Economic Development has been released by Brookings Institution Press. Some background: In 2011, discussions with the Research and Analysis branch of the National Endowment for the Arts led to the idea for a symposium on \"The Arts, New Growth Theory,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "issues"","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"creativecommunities_2x3","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/creativecommunities_2x3.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1966,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2016\/02\/local-state-federal-public-funding-for-the-arts-in-the-u-s\/","url_meta":{"origin":3773,"position":2},"title":"Local, state, federal: public funding for the arts in the U.S.","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"February 1, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"At the Atlantic, Andy Horwitz asks 'Who should pay for the arts in America?' He is specifically asking about nonprofit arts, whose funding comes from paying customers, donors and other sponsors, and the public sector. He observes: The current state of the arts in this country is a microcosm of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "issues"","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"this land is your land","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/america_map.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/america_map.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/america_map.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":4599,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2025\/09\/public-funding-for-the-arts-and-viewpoint-discrimination-at-the-nea\/","url_meta":{"origin":3773,"position":3},"title":"Public Funding for the Arts and Viewpoint Discrimination at the NEA","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"September 22, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"The\u00a0ACLU is pleased to announce\u00a0that they succeeded in court against the new National Endowment for the Arts provision prohibiting funding for organizations or projects promoting \u201cgender ideology\u201d. The case is\u00a0Rhode Island Latino Arts v. National Endowment for the Arts. Here is an excerpt from the ACLU report: In an important\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "issues"","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/image-2.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/image-2.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/image-2.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":3677,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2024\/12\/even-richard-nixon-has-got-soul\/","url_meta":{"origin":3773,"position":4},"title":"Even Richard Nixon has got Soul","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"December 12, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"(January 24, 1970, Richard Nixon in Philadelphia to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Eugene Ormandy: AP photo). A few days ago I wrote about\u00a0a post by Thomas Wolf\u00a0on public arts support in the US -\u00a0I focused on\u00a0what he said about the income tax deduction for charitable donations as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "issues"","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/image-5.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/image-5.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/image-5.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/image-5.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/image-5.png?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/image-5.png?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1796,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2015\/01\/new-research-from-the-nea\/","url_meta":{"origin":3773,"position":5},"title":"New research from the NEA","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"January 13, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"New research on arts participation and economics has been released by the National Endowment for the Arts. I won't try to summarize everything there, just a few comments: Two of the reports are on participation: one asks about who participates in what, the other asks people about why they participated.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "issues"","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"what are the data telling us?","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/whirlwind-computer.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3773"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3775,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3773\/revisions\/3775"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}