Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

There is perhaps no more reliable measure of the health of a political order than the degree of autonomy that culture enjoys within it. Culture, high and low, may be construed as the sum total of the feelings and the values of a society as they are expressed by means of beauty (or by their opposite, if that too is an aesthetic ambition) — the spiritual life of humanity as it submits to form. Breakthroughs in culture, including strictly formal breakthroughs, have been breakthroughs in human freedom. That is not because anything and everything needs to be said and shown, though a case can be made for such wanton laissez-créer, but because the decision by artists to exert their skills upon inner and outer materials that have not yet been the subject of such exertions multiplies the evidence of what human spirits can accomplish when they are unfettered and their powers of creation are left alone. Even people who cannot hear the structure of a Coltrane solo can hear the freedom in it (and learn from it that there is no contradiction between freedom and structure). 

Culture generally advances by means of shock, which is its method of expansion and enlightenment. The shock eventually becomes platitudinous as the innovation is accepted and acknowledged to have been a gift, an enlargement of a horizon that was in need of enlarging. Our understanding of life has often been heightened by works that were once regarded as blasphemous. Consider the ravishing amorality about love in Così fan tutte, or the genitals of Christ that Michelangelo painted on the wall at the Vatican. If you could consider them, that is: not long after Michelangelo died a colleague of his, acting on the ferocious criticism that the master’s voluptuously neo-pagan figure aroused, painted them over with the image of a loincloth, for which he became known as “the breeches-maker”; and a direct line runs from this orthodox rectification to, say, the refusal of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., to host the Robert Mapplethorpe show in 1989, a capitulation to pressure from a breeches-maker from South Carolina named Jesse Helms. 

But danger is culture’s middle name. Freedom promises the giving and taking of offense. Umbrage should be welcomed as evidence of liberty. The only safety that a polity owes its members is physical safety. Too many people now mistake censure for prohibition; but when I criticize what you say, it has nothing to do with your right to say it. Go ahead, be wrong. You are free to err, as am I. And please say it all, so that I may know where we stand. And pardon my antagonism, but the unpleasantness of our exchange must be endured for the sake of mature self-governance. Civility is a fine practice, but not if it represents an early form of self-censorship, or an avowal that comity is our most cherished ideal. 

The rules by which culture operates are its own and nothing else’s; or so they should be. Even when cultural expressions are difficult or obscure, they add to what we know and do not subtract, and the same is true of the most rudimentary three-chord love song that enhances the oldest emotion in the world. Who ever made out to Verklärte Nacht? And the intrinsic independence of the imagination — except from its own internal distortions and blockages, which are owed to its confinement in the early circumstances of a particular psyche — is the exhilarating equivalent of the intrinsic independence of the mind. Many thinkers, most trenchantly Moses Mendelssohn, have shown that, strictly speaking, belief cannot be compelled. You cannot force someone who does not agree with your opinion to agree with it; you can only force him to pretend that he agrees with it, and thereby produce not a convert but a hypocrite. In some circumstances this hypocrisy is a clandestine heroism. (The annals of the Spanish Inquisition, and of the crypto-Jews that it created, abundantly document this doubleness, which is a characteristic feature of life under tyranny.) External conformity is not internal conformity unless there is internal agreement, which cannot be imported from outside, when force stupidly attempts to do the work of persuasion. This is true even now, when the technological instruments of manipulation and demagoguery are staggeringly strong. 

The problem, the crisis, the tragedy is that the impotence of power before the inner lives of other people is not generally welcomed by those with consolidated power. They do not grasp why culture cannot be directed or legislated or decreed. They are offended by whatever will not bow and bend. After all, the autocrat’s most precious verification that he has made it to the top is the constant sensation of the supremacy of his will. And so the history of authoritarianism is riddled with political campaigns against cultural liberty and cultural diversity. These campaigns, indeed, are one of the first signs that a dictatorial regime, or a would-be dictatorial regime, has arrived. 

The essential multiplicity of cultural expression, which can serve as an engine of tolerance, stands as a formidable obstacle to the uniformity that autocratic (and theocratic) regimes desire. They harbor a top-down fantasy of perfect consensus. Their intellectuals’ screeds against “relativism” are at bottom complaints against the limits of political power in matters of belief, against the failure of absolutists to impose absolutism. Shouldn’t it be enough that they are in exclusive possession of the truth? If there is only a single truth and only a single authority, what is all that other noise? Silence it! Or better yet, bring it into line — synchronize it with power. 

One of the most central, and most swiftly implemented, concepts of Nazi ideology was Gleichschaltung, which means synchronization, regimentation, integration, coordination — the unification of disparate elements in government and society under a single ideological description, so that all diversity and dissonance is banished and smoothed out into a seamless and coercive general will that reflects the ideals of the regime and nothing else. As soon as it had the power to do so, the Nazi regime applied the concept to the German civil service, which had to be synchronized racially, and to German culture, which had to be synchronized with the official standards — reactionary, anti-modern, Volkisch — for art. In Lingua Tertii Imperii, or The Language of the Third Reich, known as LTI, the dazzling analysis of the Nazi vocabulary that he composed in 1957, having lived the entirety of the war in Germany and documented it secretly in his diaries, the philologist Victor Klemperer noted that the word Gleichschaltung “is so horrendously representative of the basic attitude of Nazism that it is one of the few expressions accorded the honor of satirization” both by clergymen and cabaret performers. He recalled a tour guide in a forest telling his group “that they had now been gleichgeschaltet with nature, a remark which earned him a round of applause.” Klemperer was especially struck by the dehumanizing effect of the term, by “its tendency to mechanize and automate” individuals with its strident insistence upon the dissolution of distinctness. 

The coordination of culture with power did not begin or end with the Kulturkammern of the Reich. And with this allusion to the Third Reich I do not mean to wade into the swamp of analogies, the touchy terminological debate about what sort of authoritarianism has dawned in America. There are more urgent things to discuss. Trump is certainly not Hitler, but then Hitler was very distinguished in his field. It is odious enough that Trump is Trump. Yet it does not seem inaccurate to say that we are witnessing the emergence of what Karl Dietrich Bracher called “the total leadership state,” as we come to be ruled by the leader’s executive orders, his doctrinaire but also arbitrary edicts. And there is no denying that one of the earliest abuses of Trump’s power in his second term was his immediate and thoroughgoing program of cultural synchronization — at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, at the National Endowment for the Arts, at the National Endowment for the Humanities, at the Smithsonian Institution, at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (including the Kennan Institute), at the Library of Congress, at the libraries of the military academies (in Annapolis Mein Kampf is in and Maya Angelou is out), at libraries across America, at National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, at government websites that provide a “woke” account of American history (read: a recognition, and even a celebration, of the incontestable fact that America is not all white, as established, say, on the Pentagon website, with its putatively “woke” documentation of Jackie Robinson and the Tuskegee airmen), at Arlington National Cemetery (graveyards are important repositories of culture), at the Voice of America and other information agencies, and of course at the universities, where a war against higher education has been peddled as a war against anti-Semitism. (Imagine, defending Jews by denouncing intellectuality! Thanks.)

Trump — or more precisely Trump’s Sharpie, his little black scepter — has nullified debate in American governance. There are screaming matches in the halls of the West Wing, but there are no sophisticated discussion of policy options beyond a collective nodding of docile heads at every statement of the president’s preferences, and the only thing that stands a chance of reversing a policy is a change in the president’s poll numbers or in his mood. Otherwise it is all a heavy shower of diktats: the potentate scribbles his strange EKG-like (or better, lie-detector-like) signature and then displays the document as if it were written on ancient parchment, and then the sycophants around him scurry to execute, and that is the entirety of the executive branch of the American government. The legislative branch, which is half supine and half impotent, is a disgraceful sideshow. The entire plot of American government is now the president versus the judges, and all the other discourse does not matter.

Trump’s cultural encyclicals attempt to bring cultural institutions into line not only with his exclusionary opinions but also with his philistine tastes. Yet the violation does not lie in the president’s philistinism. It lies in his authoritarian assumption that his own tastes should have any pertinence whatsoever to the nation’s culture. Who gives a damn what he likes? But powerful people (and rich people) like to believe that their tastes should rule. Dictators and other creatures of power have always been literary and theater and film and music critics, sometimes with disastrous consequences. They care deeply about entertainments and their social effects, and are acutely mindful of the power of images and words to ridicule and to subvert. It is one of the most counterintuitive but reliable facts of political psychology that the people with the most power are the people with the thinnest skin. Authoritarians are often afraid, and unlike the rest of us they can banish their fear by banishing its causes. Iconic figures fuss about icons (and some of them have had religious or secular institutions to do this for them posthumously). Frightened kings are dangerous but they are also funny. There is something delicious for the rest of us, who enjoy no extraordinary protections against life’s perils, that the conceit of invulnerability heightens every intimation of vulnerability. One almost feels sorry for them, the big shots behind so many layers of safety, who cannot abide even the slightest disturbance. Still, the rule must be: the more power, the less pity.

Nothing ruins an autocrat’s day so much as the discovery of a limit to his power. He prefers, and even expects, to wake up omnipotent. And so, as the fantasy of presidential omnipotence (“the unitary executive” is the chin-stroking euphemism) invades the realm of American culture, it is important to proclaim throughout the land that political authority confers no cultural authority, just as it confers no religious authority. There is no president of culture. The domain of politics is a secular domain, a material domain, an immanent domain, a domain for the common defense and the general welfare and nothing more — a site for citizens and not for souls. Introduce the soul and you introduce trouble. Politics, and more specifically political office, is incapable of providing answers about the meaning of human life. When it seeks to do so, when it practices what was briefly known thirty years ago as “the politics of meaning,” when it intrudes upon the purposes of art and philosophy and religion, upon the purposes of culture, a great warping occurs. 

Our political leaders are not our pastors or our teachers, except in the unlikely event that they show signs of genuine wisdom, and even in those rare Lincolnian circumstances their influence beyond politics is owed to qualities of their person and not to qualities of their office. Their personal ideals of life deserve to command no fealty, though they may inspire assent. When an attempt is made to impose them upon us, officially, de haut en bas, we owe them, or their purveyor, a sustained effort at refusal. This disjunction is more established in the case of religion, where the president’s personal savior may be just a kindly ancient carpenter to me, but it holds also in matters of culture. A program of cultural synchronization reflects a deep contempt for culture, a denial of its irreducible significance (which is itself a highly contested proposition now, as the reactionaries reduce it to metaphysics and the progressives reduce it to economics), a false assertion of commensurability, and sometimes an early warning of oppression. 

A Washington tale. In 1985, Ronald Reagan gave a state dinner for Rajiv Gandhi. The entertainment was a recital by Mstislav Rostropovich, the renowned Russian dissident cellist who was beloved in the capital. Reagan was a consummate vulgarian, and it came as no surprise that he fell asleep during the master’s concert. There is a droll photograph of the president in the front row dreaming in black tie. The important point, however, is that he invited music that bored him — that he did not mistake his own taste for the best taste, or for an appropriate cultural response to an august occasion. He recognized a good above himself and wished to represent his country with it. (I recall my perplexity a decade or so later, when I learned that the entertainment at a state dinner at the Clinton White House would be Whitney Houston — was she really the best we could show the world? — but the dinner was for Nelson Mandela on his first visit to America as a free man and the president of his country, and so anything about that event could be joyously forgiven.) 

A love of the low does not warrant a demotion of the high. Must popular culture devour everything? Is it too absent from contemporary life? A decade ago I committed an act of generational treason — I knew only one or two people guilty of the same betrayal — when I was revolted by the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan. That, too? He has written imperishable songs, and even a few art songs, but literature is literature, and literature of the more exquisite and more exigent kind is inadequately honored. There must be a place in posterity reserved for the likes of J. M. G. Le Clezio, the 2008 laureate in literature, whoever he is. I rather like the fact that I never heard of him.

Popular culture, long may it flourish, has become an imperialist enterprise. Trump has his own cultural roots: he is the product not of business or politics, but of professional wrestling, beauty pageants, reality television, and metropolitan Roy Cohn-like mob worship. Yet the problem for American culture is not that he is a vulgarian. The president would have no right to impose Schoenberg on the nation, either. His aesthetic judgements must be completely irrelevant. (As are mine, which is one of the reasons that I rise to defend the inclusion of Maya Angelou in libraries. From the perspective of cultural freedom, she is no better or worse than Wallace Stevens.) One of the most essential characteristics of culture is its dispersal: it travels as far and as wide as the technologies of communication will allow. It is everywhere and it has many capitals. There are no central authorities, at least none that can be justified on cultural grounds or as boons for culture. 

“The democratization of culture” is an old slogan about the praiseworthiness of open societies, but it invites some intellectual pressure. It must not denote a process of levelling in the name of equality, so that “elite culture” comes to be scorned and we wind up in the Caesarist predicament in which we find ourselves now. Equality is a political notion, not a cultural one. The democratization of culture is achieved not by its popularity but by its ubiquity — by the ever-increasing availability of more levels of culture to more strata of people. This dream of universal accessibility, hindered perhaps by the market but never by the state, is in its way a system of merit, as it exposes as many expressions as possible to as many people as possible, so that all of the latter can judge all of the former for themselves. This is how the late Mario Vargas Llosa put it in 2002:

It is necessary to democratize culture, but that also has its risks, if that means that we make ideas banal in order to make them accessible to everyone. That is not democratizing culture but rather corrupting it and replacing it with a caricature. The democratization of culture can only be understood as the creation of conditions that facilitate and promote access to culture for those who are prepared to make the necessary intellectual effort to enjoy and enhance their lives through culture. And democratization should ensure that everyone should have this opportunity.

Opportunity, or oxygen. Culture is a challenge, not a compliment. Moreover, the mental effort of which Vargas Llosa speaks may not be rewarded with edification or affirmation; culture makes no promises, except for the promise of non-trivial expanses of time. So many of our confusions are owed to a spurning of intellectual work — to spiritual sloth. Is it “elitist” to prefer artists who set themselves more difficult goals and proceed to meet them — to prefer Shostakovich to Prokofiev, or Sinatra to Manilow, or Hopper to Wyeth? And is it “populist” to deny the significance of actual differences in talents, so that they matter less in the evaluation of art than provenances? In Trump’s Washington, the answer to the latter question is yes. We are presently governed by the untalented and the incurious and the ineducable, who tastes have been hallowed in their own eyes by their throbbing sense of their own marginality. (It is the oldest comedy in town: the marginalized of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.) 

I know, I know: the prevailing taste among the liberal mandarins of culture also do not reflect only the finest aesthetic ambitions, as the travesties of the art market regularly demonstrate. They have their pets, too. When I read the New York Times, I begin to wonder whether there is a mediocre black artist in all of America. But the liberal cultural institutions are not remotely as exclusionary as Trump asserts, or as he plans to make them become. Trump’s refusal to respect the limits of the realms, and so many of the glories within them, is of a piece with his inability, a sociopathic deformation, to recognize any boundary or standard outside himself to which he must answer. He liked Cats, so let them eat Cats. (His vice president is on record that in Ohio they do.) As if any political liberal or cultural highbrow ever set out to deprive the republic of Cats.

We are all a little tacky in our tastes; pity the person without guilty pleasures in the arts. There is something cold and hard about the Adorno-driven literature on “mass culture,” about the “culture industry” industry: mass culture is, in actuality, what delights many millions of people, who take away stimulating and enchanting ideas about life from works that are not by Debussy. Vulgarity is often a close cousin of vitality; and the homogenizing pressures of the entertainment executives notwithstanding, not all its emotions are counterfeit. For this reason, it has a strong claim on the sympathy of humanists. I melt at the sound of the Five Satins and Little Anthony and the Imperials and Dion, and gladly drop whatever I’m doing at the sight of The Girl Can’t Help It and (shame on me) Pootie Tang; I remain weak for Rihanna, though a little grumpy about her low musical productivity; I find respite in Jason Statham’s affectless campaigns for justice; nearly any page of Dumas and Haggard and Sabatini and Cain and Elmore Leonard is good enough for me. Art Garfunkel’s Central Park rendition of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is forever a tremendous experience, and there are moments in Andrea Bocelli’s Milan version of the theme from Gladiator that sound to me like the greatest song Puccini never wrote. And so on. 

But I hasten to stipulate that my own pleasure is not the only pleasure there is. An open society is a society that always includes and even encourages bad taste. I mean, other taste. For years I have had to live with venerations of Norman Mailer and Katharine Hepburn and Jerry Seinfeld and Keith Jarrett and Beyoncé and Anselm Kiefer and Stephen Sondheim and Wes Anderson; I have suffered, but so be it. For wherever one parks one’s brow, everything will be found. The plenitude is the point. And snobbery at whatever level (Hank Williams? Are you kidding? Lefty Frizell!) (Tennstedt’s Mahler? Are you serious? Horenstein’s!) is an attempt by people with no respect for their own uncertainty, and no patience for the formation of their own tastes, to hide a perfectly understandable state of confusion behind the anxious enactment of a specious clarity. Cultural snobbery is social intimidation disguised as artistic discrimination. 

If I can hear the symphony that I wish to hear, it does not bother me at all that in the theater next door people are swooning over Hamilton. Let a thousand tickets bloom. This is not to say, of course, that there are no distinctions of aesthetic quality between people’s pleasures. Tolerance should not have the last word on artistic standards: like equality, tolerance is a political concept, not a cultural one. Within and between all the levels of culture, there must be criteria of better and worse, and these criteria should be thoughtful and even philosophical, and of course may be contested. I admire the man who notices that the harmonies of the Righteous Brothers are lovelier than the harmonies of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and that the formlessness of Ornette Coleman is more rigorous and more soulful than the formlessness of Albert Ayler, and that Grace Hartigan is a bore but Lee Krasner is not, and that (with the exception of Mahalia Jackson’s “Trouble of the World”) John Stahl’s early film of Imitation of Life is deeper than Douglas Sirk’s later one, and that Spohr’s chamber music is an utter delight but Schubert’s chamber music is — well, obviously. A denial of aesthetic distinctions should not be allowed to take shelter behind an argument for pluralism. Anyway, the president’s plan is to abolish any pretense of pluralism, within and between the cultural forms, on grounds that have nothing to do with artistic considerations. The scandal is not that Trump’s favorite acts may play the Kennedy Center: book them, and let the box office render its verdict. The scandal is that the targets of his biases (please give a thought to the Trocks!) may no longer play the Kennedy Center, which is a soft form of censorship.

The titanic struggle between “populism” and “elitism” is disfiguring our culture as well as our politics. Trump’s lowest-common-denominator plan for the Kennedy Center, his proposed usurpation of the high by the low, is designed to strike a decisive blow against the takeover of the entirety of American culture by us over-educated pinheads and our coterie tastes. But the stereotype is ludicrous. A bit of empiricism is in order and I have done some research. I have made a brow-driven study of the Kennedy Center honors. Between 2010 and 2024, they were awarded to Merle Haggard, Jerry Herman, Paul McCartney, Oprah Winfrey, Barbara Cook, Neil Diamond, Sonny Rollins, Meryl Streep, Buddy Guy, Dustin Hoffman, David Letterman, Led Zeppelin, Herbie Hancock, Billy Joel, Shirley MacLaine, Carlos Santana, Al Green, Tom Hanks, Sting, Lily Tomlin, Carole King, George Lucas, Rita Moreno, Cicely Tyson, the Eagles, Al Pacino, Mavis Staples, James Taylor, Gloria Estefan, LL Cool J, Norman Lear, Lionel Richie, Cher, Reba McEntire, Wayne Shorter, Hamilton, Earth, Wind, and Fire, Sally Field, Linda Ronstadt, Sesame Street, Dick Van Dyke, Garth Brooks, Joan Baez, Debbie Allen, Joni Mitchell, Bette Midler, Lorne Michaels, Berry Gordy, George Clooney, Amy Grant, Gladys Knight, U2, Billy Crystal, Barry Gibb, Queen Latifah, Dionne Warwick, Francis Ford Coppola, the Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt, Arturo Sandoval, and the Apollo Theater. Alongside these artists, the award was presented to Bill T. Jones, Yo Yo Ma, Natalia Makarova, Martina Arroyo, Patricia McBride, Seiji Ozawa, Martha Argerich, Carmen de Lavallade, Phillip Glass, Michael Tilson Thomas, Midori, Justino Diaz, Tania Leon, and Renee Fleming. 

An arduous process of quantification — I mean counting — yields this: sixty-one “popular” artists, fourteen “classical” artists. Admittedly the rubrics are imprecise and the hierarchies are vexing. Where do Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter belong, aesthetically speaking? Surely not with Gloria Estefan and Lionel Richie. (Jazz is always the art that defies the categories.) Millions of people who admire Yo Yo Ma have never heard his versions of Bach’s solo suites for cello. Film is indubitably a popular art, but the man who made the Godfather movies is not exactly a pulp artist. And there are no artistic categories in which Oprah Winfrey may be said to have distinguished herself, though she has raised celebrity worship into an art. To be sure, there is no denying that the names of Lee Greenwood and Kid Rock are missing from this roster of immortals, but that is an elitist oversight that will soon be corrected. 

The conclusion is clear: by 61–14, the lowbrows have it. A wipeout. The president’s view of the Kennedy Center — and I have not discussed the institution’s regular programming — is preposterously incorrect. Demotic tastes — including country music, the alleged soundtrack of MAGA authenticity — have been plentifully satisfied at the Kennedy Center. The institution is not expiring from a surfeit of Ligeti. Yet there is another way to interpret the information that I have just presented. Look again at the list. I have a hunch that in Trump’s coarse head, when he surveys the talent that appears on those stages, there are two other genres that appear alongside the genres of classical and country and rock and rap and jazz and so on, two genres that are more encompassing and less improvisatory: the genres of white music and black music, of white art and black art. Of course those are not genres at all. They are illiberal notions that disfigure both the right and the left. But the salience of such a classification in the mind of the president — comrades, are you still opposed to color-blindness? — is a horror not only for the culture but also for the country. (Lawrence Welk, thou shouldst be living at this hour!)

Like everything Trump does, his cultural interventions are conceived as acts of restoration, as rescues in an emergency. He is going to make American culture, too, great again — and as in all the other realms, “again” means going backwards, like to coal and to oil. Now, nostalgia is always an important factor in the formation of taste. There is no cultural expression that makes one happy in quite the way that the cultural expressions of one’s youth make one happy. In my own case, I am swiftly brought to joy by the neolithic sound of the Easybeats and Tommy James and the Shondells (the long version of “Crimson and Clover” is a neglected masterpiece) and Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and the entire oeuvre (we used that term in Flatbush a lot) of the depraved Phil Spector, and by the Rise Stevens recording of Carmen and the Mario del Monaco recording of Otello. (My parents gave me those LPs in their big square boxes and I still recall the moments at Fortunoff’s on Livonia Avenue in Brownsville when they placed them in my quivering hands.) I feel a tingle every time I pass Monet’s Garden at Sainte-Adresse at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not because it is one of his greatest pictures but because the museum acquired it when I was a boy and the papers made a big deal of it. I raced off to the subway to see it, and I remember thinking: there it is, and if they say so. The rule, then, is that the earlier I heard or saw something, the lovelier it must be. I was completely dead to the charms of Frank Sinatra’s recordings with Tommy Dorsey until I saw the lit-up look on the face of a friend who had grown up with them in Chicago in the early 1940s: the individual bliss of the individual past. There is no aesthetic aura like the aura of memory, though the latter cannot confer the former. So backwards is an inevitable and dependably magical direction in the appreciation of art. (There is also the backward gaze required by the stewardship of tradition, about which Trump cares nothing.) If only Fred Trump had adored Wozzeck!

Like all reactionary attitudes toward culture, Trump’s Kulturkampf is premised on a static conception of it — or more accurately, on a desire to deny the conspicuously dynamic character of culture and return it to an infinite repetition of the entertainments that existed in the era before the changes of which Trump disapproves. Those egregious changes were social and political as well as cultural, which is why Trump’s priorities in culture may be plausibly interpreted also as an expression of his larger hostility to the civil rights revolution. This sanctified stasis — as if culture was not evolving also in the good old days! — is a source of blindness to the achievements of the present, which would be too obvious to state except that I know cultivated people who have not been to the New York City Ballet since Balanchine died because it will never be that good again, full stop. And strictly speaking, it likely won’t. I was once one of those people, until some years ago I beheld splendid performances by the company, even though Suzanne and Peter were not on stage, and I felt like a fool for my self-impoverishing decades of dogmatism; and even when the dancers danced poorly I could tell the dancer from the dance. (How else could I feel confident in criticizing them? Yeats was wrong about this.)

Evanescence is an inalienable attribute of the performing arts, even where there are scores and recordings and films. In culture there is no full stop. One must live in one’s time. The aesthetic life is supremely a life lived in the present, because it is comprised of experiences. And there never was a moment or an era in the history of culture, not in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence or in early twentieth-century Vienna, that consisted entirely, or even chiefly, of brilliance; the picture has always been mottled and mixed, and incandescence has always co-existed with junk. 

Trump’s politicization of culture will provoke a response in kind. The left certainly has a long and glittering history of political art. And the spirit of protest has certainly produced masterpieces in all the arts, except that masterpieces are not the point of protest art. Such works are made not to delight, but to persuade; to induce not wonder, but rage. Protest art is contrived to drive the spectator into the street, so as to join other like-minded spectators, whereas the objective of non-political art is not a joining but an individuating. It is contrived to make one shun the public for the private, the sphere of action for the sphere of contemplation. In political art, aesthetic quality matters less than rhetorical efficacy. It is almost pointless to lodge a formal complaint against a work of political art, since it is not primarily consecrated to form. Indeed, beauty in a work of political art is mainly a diversion, a cunning stratagem for glamorizing a doctrine or sneaking it into the spectator’s standpoint under other pretenses. (This was certainly true of the services that the arts performed for the church, and consider also the artistic reputations of Eisenstein and Riefenstahl and Oliver Stone.) And it is never the case that your posters are propaganda but my posters are art. All political art is propaganda, regardless of one’s political sympathies.

“They won the war, but we had the best songs,” was Phil Ochs’ verdict about the 1960s. He was a wickedly funny and wrenchingly lyrical and ideologically radical man whose work deserves to be liberated from the Dylan hegemony, and unlike many of the protest singers of his time he was also genuinely political. (For many years I welcomed interns to The New Republic by making them listen to “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” and never mind that it slandered the house creed.) There is no reason not to deploy art in the service of justice, however one defines justice. Happy is the man who has known the exhilaration of singing along in a cause. And of laughing along with others in the ridicule of the powerful, even when the details do not add up. (Who remembers MacBird!, with Stacy Keach as Lyndon Johnson?) Especially given the complete degradation of oratory in our times, principles may be more stirringly represented in melody and imagery — in culture. 

Beware, however, of mistaking a refrain for an analysis. A stirringly represented principle is not yet a policy. Political art, even when you concur with its politics, is the enemy of nuance, but governance is almost all nuance, at least when it is scrupulously practiced. And the satisfactions of protest, which are considerable, can easily issue in complacence, in an illusion of effectiveness, in intellectual laziness. (Macbird! was funny, and the war in Vietnam was a nightmare, but Lyndon Johnson was not an entirely despicable figure. His signature is on the civil rights legislation.) If ever there was an object of protest who deserved to be depicted grossly, it is Trump: measure for measure, no? But the temptation must be resisted — or indulged and then resisted — lest cultural mockeries be confused for political strategies. Our way out of this vale of meanness lies in votes, not in epithets; in politics, not in culture. What is required of us now is an almost unimaginable sobriety.

All art is political: is there anybody in America who does not think so? If so, as Ochs used to sing, I wanna see him, I wanna wish him luck, I wanna shake his hand. The irony about the idea that politicized art of one kind must be met with politicized art of another kind is that it misses an even more decisive artistic statement against political power: that art essentially escapes the grip of power, on its own, of itself, owing to its nature, by the force of its intrinsic independence, its ontological autonomy, which is not retracted by the banal facts of its social origins and which thwarts the designs — the synchronizations — of politics. Those who make the case for the political character of art believe that they are elevating it to a plane of necessity that it otherwise lacks, but this is just another sorry instance of the damage that the slavery to history, the politicization of life, does to life. On the day when peace comes and justice with it, art will be exactly as necessary as it always has been, because the material conditions of existence are only some of what we must confront as the souls-in-bodies that we are. Art of the non-political variety, non-politicized culture, is precisely what establishes the terrain on which we may gather the inner resources for sustaining a struggle against the crimes of power. 

Artists may sometimes need to be liberated, but art never: it begins and ends free. It is beyond the reach of the despots. In our time this was the supreme teaching of the Russian poets under Stalinism. They were unfree people writing as free people; their persecutors, if they did not murder them, or until they murdered them, were no match for them. (And even then . . .) If it is appropriate to reach for the metaphor of martyrdom with which to describe them, then they were martyred for the invincibility of art. Please forgive my fustian: for a characterization of these masters it is the sheerest socialist realism. The most definitive articulation of this unshakeable internal grandeur — a subtle analysis of it and a ringing example of it — may be Andrei Sinyavsky’s essay “The Literary Process in Russia,” which appeared in 1974 in the first issue of Kontinent, an émigré dissident journal that was later translated into English and other languages. Every writer ought to read it.

I first met Joseph Brodsky in the late summer of 1979 at a symposium at New York University, and by the end of the symposium I loved him. The theme of the discussion was politics and art. I did not yet know that he had an impish streak and enjoyed a passing intellectual perversity, and on that afternoon he, the hero who did hard labor in a Soviet prison camp and was immiserated in a Soviet psychiatric hospital and issued that immortal retort in that courtroom in Leningrad and was forced by policemen onto an airplane into exile — he chose to make a somewhat unexpected argument against the art of protest. I will never forget it. The problem with protest art, he said, was that it was still in thrall to the state. In the thralldom was the servitude. A negative relationship had replaced a positive relationship, but a relationship persisted; and as long as it persisted, in one way or another, the state won. 

A protester, notwithstanding the morality of his cause, remains trapped within a fate that the state has dictated. For this reason, Joseph declared, the only true protest poem is a love poem. He could imagine nothing more powerful than its sovereign indifference to power. And he recited a short love poem in Russian, which I did not understand. Joseph was not opposed to protests, of course, or to cultural protests, and years later he wrote a bitter protest poem for my pages against American indifference to the atrocities in Bosnia; instead he was insisting severely upon the boundary of politics, and upon the spiritual freedom that precedes political freedom and therefore readies us to confront the abuse of political power. There was nothing unworldly or precious about Joseph’s happy fanaticism about the sanctity of art: we once raised a glass to one of Reagan’s large defense budgets. 

But now we must also defend the right to protest and the political role of the streets, whatever the cause. There can be no inconsistency here: either we all can march or none of us can. And the delegitimation of protest — particularly student protest, which is as American as avocado toast — is one of the central aims of Trump’s war on higher education. Every admonition against the politicization of culture must therefore be accompanied by a reminder of the nobility of politics, of the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government, or any other oppressive and unresponsive body, for a redress of grievances. The climate of freedom that can be established only by politics affects even the most solitary and apolitical artist. The only politics that protects the apolitical is democratic politics.

O, for the days when all that impeded the unconstrained experimentations of culture were corporations!