Opinion | Trump’s Movement Needs High Art, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Can Help

Two weeks ago, a friend of mine at the National Endowment for the Humanities told me that a team from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency had arrived and was reviewing the books. Last week the hammer came down, as N.E.H. leaders told their staff members that cuts in personnel were coming, eliminating perhaps 80 percent of the agency.

This is a mistake — not, however, for the reasons given by leading humanities organizations such as the American Historical Association, which argued that DOGE’s actions “imperil both the education of the American public and the preservation of our history.” That peril has been present for a long time, much of it caused by scholars entrusted with that education and preservation — and funded by the N.E.H.

Many of the professors who teach the humanities in the United States, with their stifling ideological uniformity and their tiresome fixation on “critique” and social identity, could use some bureaucratic pummeling. The N.E.H. should not grant any more awards like the $133,165 it gave to San Diego State University to develop a social justice curriculum based on comic books or the $324,418 it gave to California State University, Fullerton, to create and study an interactive database of a popular L.G.B.T.Q. travel guide. Good riddance to all that.

But for the Trump administration to promote a culture of “American greatness,” it cannot just eliminate what it dislikes; it must also support what it favors. During his first term, in a speech denouncing the “left-wing cultural revolution,” President Trump called for a more celebratory attitude toward America’s cultural heritage — one that proudly recalled that “we gave the world the poetry of Walt Whitman, the stories of Mark Twain, the songs of Irving Berlin, the voice of Ella Fitzgerald.”

To that end, Mr. Trump needs an N.E.H. that funds projects that embrace this heritage. To cut the N.E.H. and the National Endowment for the Arts (which may be next on the chopping block) is to lay down potent weapons of ideological contest that the Trump administration should be wielding aggressively.

It is a conservative truism that politics are downstream from culture. What happens in the arts and humanities doesn’t stay there; it flows into the broader society over time. Without queer theory in the academy in the 1990s, the Supreme Court’s 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.

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 “manosphere.” But when it comes to high culture, the movement falters. After President Trump took over the Kennedy Center in February, he signaled that he would bring about a more congenial vision of the performing arts and the nation’s cultural heritage. But the people and creative works that he has mentioned in connection with this ambition — Elvis Presley, Babe Ruth, the musical “Cats” — are middlebrow at best.

This is where the N.E.H. and N.E.A. would serve Mr. Trump well: not only correcting “woke” excesses, but also providing an elite counterpart to MAGA’s populist thrust. Expert critics, scholars and artists could ensure that only traditionalist projects are funded.

There is precedent for this conception of the agencies, namely, when Dana Gioia led the N.E.A. and Bruce Cole led the N.E.H., both under President George W. Bush. (During Mr. Gioia’s leadership I served for several years at the N.E.A. as the director of the Office of Research and Analysis.)

Mr. Gioia and Mr. Cole managed to please Republicans and Democrats alike by developing programs that emphasized the legacy of Western civilization and the American tradition and were often aimed at young people. 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 playwright and poet. Under Mr. Cole, the N.E.H. introduced programs such as “We the People” and “Picturing America,” which provided teachers with resources to help them teach classic American documents such as the Constitution and artworks such as Grant Wood’s painting “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.”

That exercise in cultural conservatism is a lesson for the White House — or should be. The challenge may lie in the outlook of DOGE, which seems primarily financial and bureaucratic. The purging of fraud, waste and identity politics in the civil service is commendable, but we need to build things, too. A welcome example is the memorandum Mr. Trump issued in January concerning federal architecture, which instructed that federal public buildings must “respect regional, traditional and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States.”

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’ 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.

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 “A Confederacy of Dunces” (an N.E.A. product).

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.