Trump, Fascism, and What Artists Can Do
There is tension between wanting art to transcend and wanting it to reflect reality back to us. Plus: Are Dems finally ready to retire the purity tests?
1. Degenerates, Deplorables, and Teflon Don
WHEN DONALD TRUMP WAS PRESIDENT the first time, the artistic world mocked, castigated, and condemned him. There were examples in a variety of media: illustrated tabloids, open letters, billboards, posters, performance art, you name it.
Why has the second Trump administration not, at least so far, faced the same level of artistic resistance as the first? There are a lot of theories! Exhaustion and a sense of futility top the list. In 2016, the impotence of art to influence politics troubled artists and critics. “One illusion that will be particularly painful to part with is the idea that high culture and the arts have any effective power in American life,” Adam Kirsch wrote ahead of Trump’s first inauguration.
And even before the 2016 election, a Guardian headline asked, “Where is Trump’s artistic mauling?” It wasn’t so much a question as a charge. Jonathan Jones proposed ideas for leading working artists, “The sheer strangeness of Trump practically makes him a living work of art. . . . There’s so much material.” Jones concludes, though, that the issue isn’t unique to Trumpian politics: “There is just one problem with Warhol’s mockery of Nixon and Heartfield’s visceral images of Hitler. Neither made much impact.”
Nevertheless, artists continued to work in protest throughout the first term. Some did so with nuance, at a remove, subtly using visual media to engage critically with the constant stream of chaos generated by the administration. Others just went for it, subtext be damned, erecting naked statues of Trump and posing with masks made to look like his severed head. Yet neither the high road or the low road led to anything. “Resistance” art came across as little more than political protest and communal grieving, if we’re being generous.
The feeling of irrelevance continued to stymie art produced during Biden’s tenure. In an essay titled “Can we please have less political art now?” published just days after Trump’s re-election, Kat Rosenfield makes the argument that the anti-Trump art movement was a blight: “The most memorable thing about the art shaped by this paradigm is how forgettable it all is, how small and predictable and shrill and soulless.”
We may want art to be the vector of change, but what it does best is reflect the culture of its time.
“The works that followed Trump’s exit from the White House were . . . a relentless, ruthless, humorless box-checking exercise in ideological piety,” Rosenfield writes. “Satire and other more sophisticated forms of storytelling were subsumed by an intense literal-mindedness, in keeping with a growing conviction that audiences were both dangerously malleable and much too stupid to grasp anything but the most ham-handed moral messaging.”
As JVL says, read the whole thing.
Part of the problem may be that the creative class faces higher expectations, or even puts higher expectations on themselves, to provide accountability in the form of artistic catharsis where the rule of law, public morality, and democratic accountability have all failed.
During the first Trump administration, the stakes were lower than they are now. Trump didn’t know what he was doing, and Congress was still pretending to make an effort to hold him accountable. (Remember when, for one shining moment, we thought Will Hurd might vote for Trump’s first impeachment?)
Maybe the standards we have for art are too high. We have a myth of twentieth-century art helping to save the world from tyranny. But art did as much to aid totalitarianism as it did to fight it. For every Doctor Zhivago, there was a Red Star; for every Jackson Pollock, there was a Ludwig Dettman; for every Stephen Spender and Encounter, there was a Novy Mir loaded with Communist functionary editors. And for what it’s worth, Doctor Zhivago, Jackson Pollock, and Encounter were all supported by the CIA.
Art didn’t win World War II or the Cold War. America did. And now America—at least, its government—is on the side of the baddies. It’s not even clear that the money and time and effort the CIA spent on artistic endeavors helped to weaken the Soviet Union in the slightest—yet more evidence that art as propaganda doesn’t work.
We didn’t see an artistic “mauling” of Trump during the first term in part because such a mauling is impossible given the total saturation of Trump’s image and his unparalleled memetic abilities to transfigure any and all media in service of his propaganda. We won’t see a mauling now in the second term due to the atmosphere of fear and constricting of America’s self-identity.
Do America and the world really need more grotesque creative interpretations of Trump and his visage?
The best art can do now is to activate in us the emotional and social muscles we’ve let atrophy in our public life: sympathy, humility, earnestness, horror. Guernica and the AIDS Memorial Quilts didn’t change minds but hearts.
2. The F-word
Fascism! It’s Trump’s whole deal, and it comes out in his relationship with art and culture, especially. After Trump’s visit to the Kennedy Center last month, Ed Simon wrote about the overlap between Trump’s aesthetic sensibilities and—well, Hitler’s:
Hitler was famously a failed painter, a mediocre landscape artist tellingly incapable of ever representing a human figure. As Reich chancellor, he understood his role as a generative force, spending hours with his official architect Albert Speer poring over imagined schematics of a triumphalist New Berlin, or planning museums such as Munich’s Haus der Kunst. From 1937 until 1944, toward the end of the war, Great German Art Exhibitions were staged in Munich, promoting artists whom the Nazis felt exemplified Aryan ideals. “Hitler’s obsession with aesthetics was not merely a personal quirk,” writes Frederic Spotts in Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (2002), “but a central driving force behind his political vision, where he sought to ‘re-create’ Germany” — i.e., to make it great again. The dictator understood the charged energy of creative expression, of stunning imagery, grandiose architecture, theatrical spectacle. This was a field of battle as surely as a literal one, the site of “Cultural Struggle” or Kulturkampf. It’s what American alt-right journalist Andrew Breitbart once described when he said that “politics is downstream from culture.” What’s terrifying is that a culture war never remains cold, and it never remains just about culture. . . .
Trump shares with Hitler more than just an affection for the prosaic, maudlin, and nationalistic. He also understands the strategic importance of controlling the arts, of not letting apolitical bureaucrats dispense grants or specialists organize exhibitions and schedules, but rather consolidating his own control (as he’s doing over every other aspect of government). His recent actions may seem like micromanaging, but they reveal a darker intent.
3. Save Us, Mayor Pete
Last week on the Radio Atlantic podcast, Hanna Rosin interviewed Rep. Sarah McBride. Towards the end of their conversation about Trump’s culture-war antics and the ways it might be possible to slow down the harm the administration is causing, Rosin asked McBride how she chooses which battles to fight. The congresswoman gave a thoughtful answer:
We need to message in a smarter way. Sometimes the message that is viscerally comforting to someone like me is not helpful, and sometimes even counterproductive, in reaching and convincing a person who is just tuning into this conversation or who has a diversity of thought.
We have to create space for some imperfect allies. We have to recognize that if we are gonna have 50 percent plus one in support of basic nondiscrimination protections, if we’re going to have 50 percent plus one in support of protecting access to medically necessary care, that, by definition, will have to include some people in the 70 percent who oppose trans people participating in sports. That conversation needs to continue with people, but we can’t dismiss them as bigots or remove them from our coalition, because then we will have a ceiling of 30 percent on any coalition and defense of anyone’s rights.
Dems are finally realizing they need a bigger tent! Amazing—better late than never. Unfortunately, not everyone is on the same page about how best to go about reaching the middle and expanding the coalition.
Gavin Newsom hosting Steve Bannon on his show? 🤮
Pete Buttigieg going on the bro podcast circuit? 🤩
Cheap Shot
I know Cheap Shots is a Morning Shots thing, but here is a bonus postscript one for ya:
Being and old fart, I listen to 60s music...and every time I hear Eve of Destruction, Give Peace a Chance, Blowin' in the Wind, etc. on the radio, I wonder why this generation isn't speaking out. I'm no historian, but my personal recollection is that these songs and the stands that artists took in that era were very important elements of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Maybe there are such artists today, and I'm just not aware of them. I hope so.
Thanks Hannah. Always love seeing your writing. I have no illusion that resistance art or artists protesting will do anything. On the other hand, I am terrified by people caving like famous actors and singers falling in line did during the third reich. This time for financial reasons mostly.
Sarah McBride has this right and so does Mayor Pete. Newsom is not going to gain any right leaning fans by sharing common ground with pathological liars on his show.