If it’s Sunday, The Washington Post is imagining President Trump as an authoritarian dictator. A few weeks ago, the Sunday Outlook section compared Trump to fictional dictators. Yesterday, the Sunday Arts section gave Philip Kennicott a huge 2,000-word space for his own fictional-dictator scenario: imagining how Trump would ruin artistic free expression if he wins in November, or "an arts world in muted tones," as the headline put it.
Kennicott is one of those artistic socialists who believe the arts can only thrive if the government offers massive subsidies. Last month, he cheered how the new socialist prime minister of Canada would subsidize a “robust cultural infrastructure,” unlike that country’s conservatives. Trump, in his paranoid leftist imagination, is a dictator-in-waiting:
What would happen to the arts if this country turned to authoritarian leadership? If fundamental freedoms were challenged, if a strong leader gathered up the full weight of the regulatory state and started using it to systematically punish his enemies and reward his friends, if the country was precipitated into ever more severe constitutional crises, if the only political labels that mattered were whether you were with the Leader or the Resistance — where would the arts stand?
Arts leaders say they are nervous in general about the candidacy of Donald Trump, who has deployed authoritarian language more consistently than any [American?] major political figure in memory, but they are not particularly worried about this country’s robust tradition of free expression. Yet they also acknowledge that the arts have changed considerably since the last time the sector was tested by political crisis — the culture war debates of the late 1980s during the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidencies. And some of those changes could make the arts a flash point for the larger cultural forces unleashed by Trump’s rhetoric.
Kennicott blurs “free expression” with leftist politics. If the government funding of the arts pushes “social justice” and “Piss Christ”-style anti-religious ardor, well, that’s the best kind of creativity:
Much of the most exciting work in the arts today is by groups that connect creativity to such issues as immigration, homelessness, cultural diversity and other social justice causes, and that could make them a target. The arts have also enjoyed a long detente with political leaders in recent years, but it is a fragile one. The National Endowment for the Arts has seen its budget go up and down over the past eight years, but it hasn’t been formally reauthorized by Congress since 1993. A president who forced that issue could radically restructure the agency.
And then there is the pure unpredictability of Trump, who hasn’t evinced much interest in the arts during this campaign but could easily empower latent but powerful anti-arts energies at every level of American society.
“Anti-arts energies” then is translated into anyone who doesn’t want their involuntary donations to the government backing exhibits that mock Jesus Christ or his mother Mary (but never Mohammed).
Trump, for example, has expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and it’s easy to imagine him following Putin’s example, by winking at vigilantism and local acts of seemingly random oppression. With violent crowds (from both the left and the right) buffeting the U.S. electoral process, the country may be entering a new era of do-it-yourself cultural policing and censorship.
Using past experience with cultural repression, what Trump has already said, and plausible extrapolations based on the history and political science of authoritarianism, what follows is a sketch of how the arts might accommodate to a new political reality, how they would deal with something that has never happened before and yet has happened all too often.
What followed was a long, boring fable about that old “chilling effect” of art criticism (“censorship”) leading to lower government funding and intimidating corporate philanthropies out of funding the truly “transgressive” art that American supposedly requires.
Kennicott imagines a satire called “MacTrump” would suffer from a libel suit, and a school board who banned Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible citing “trigger warnings.” What would be truly shocking is Kennicott spending 2,000 words on how the ongoing oppressive political correctness on campus over “trigger warnings” and “microaggressions” and “safe spaces” is an example of “anti-arts energies.”
