The Mirror World of MAGA Cultural Policy

A few days ago I stumbled on a startling truth I want to share with you. Do you know the concept of “mirror worlds?” It has a few meanings. The one I’m using describes a parallel dimension that mirrors the world as we know it, but everything important has been flipped, monsters instead of mates, traps instead of hideaways, lies in the place of honesty. My eyes flew open and a mirror world emerged in plain sight.

It was while A Culture of Possibility podcast cohost François Matarasso and I were interviewing Jeff Chang last week for an episode that will drop on 18 July. You won’t want to miss it. Our focus was how Trump’s executive orders led to Jeff’s book and many others being banned by the egregious Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense.

Along the way, we touched on other aspects of MAGA cultural policy, and that conversation led me to some startling realizations. Here are three of them. Note that everything unfolding in relation to culture is also happening in healthcare, education, the environment, etc. ad nauseum. But in cultural policy world, the irony is particularly thick on the ground.

MAGA AND THE CENTRALITY OF CULTURE. I’m one of many who have long pleaded the case that arts and culture are crucial to understanding and healing society. Values are shaped and expressed, social fabric is strengthened, sense is made, heritage is explored, and innovation is cultivated via the evergreen human desire to create beauty and meaning.

We diehards argue that culture, which contains the secret of survival, ought to be taken far more seriously than it is by the powers-that-be who treat it as a frill rather than a social good of essential importance. In the realm of cultural policy—the values, guidelines, and initiatives that shape support for and engagement in cultural development—we tirelessly point out that far less attention goes to culture than it warrants. The US government, for instance, has never allocated more than a few cents per capita to each of the principal federal cultural agencies, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities (NEA and NEH). Not since the New Deal of the 1930s has there been major investment in the public interest in preserving, disseminating, and cocreating work that supports cultural democracy—pluralism, participation, and equity in cultural life—although there have been important smaller efforts from time to time, such as support for public service employment for artists and others in the 1970s through federal legislation known as CETA.

In the MAGA mirror world culture IS a primary focus of attention and intervention. Some of the earliest things Trump did centered on arts and culture. Less than a month after he was inaugurated, I wrote about how he was converting public art institutions to temples to his own glory, as by replacing the leadership of the Kennedy Center with his toadies and naming himself chair. I was reminded of Napoleon crowning himself emperor in 1804. A couple of months later, I wrote about him rescinding NEH and NEA grants, forbidding grant applicants from violating his executive orders that censored topics such as gender and race, and earmarking both agencies for elimination in his budget proposal.

Tariffs, immigration, and war occupy the headlines. But read between the lines and this will be evident: culture has more importance in the MAGA mirror world than we might ever have dreamed possible. There’s just one hitch. Instead of intervening to make it more democratic, engaging, creative, and diverse, MAGA’s distorting mirror shows us policymakers bent on turning the engine of our dynamism into a perpetual motion machine of authoritarian crap.

THE GREAT REPLACEMENT. Remember in 2017 when neo-Nazis marched through Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us?” They were expressing a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory that originated in France and took US-based white supremacists by storm. In essence, it says that non-white immigrants, Muslims, and Jews are being deployed by sinister elites to replace the white Christians who rightfully ought to dominate, guide—and indeed, own—the nation. In the intervening eight years, the idea has become downright respectable in MAGA circles, espoused by pundits like Tucker Carlson and opportunists like J.D. Vance to fuel MAGA opposition to immigration, promoting the belief that the United States is a white Christian country where others live on sufferance (if allowed to live at all).

Among Trump’s first actions were firing a large number of individuals of color with public responsibility, from military generals to the head of the National Portrait Gallery. The proffered explanation is that these people have supported “diversity, equity, and inclusion”—DEI—which is now verboten. The MAGA regime has embarked on a campaign to replace all those in public service committed to increasing the range of voices speaking for the public good with true MAGA believers (or at least convincing opportunists) who will sing in unison for white supremacy. The Great Replacement is underway, only in MAGA mirror world, it’s white nationalist Christians who do the replacing.

THE TRIUMPH OF STATE ART. In the mid-sixties when the National Endowments were first established, the cold war with the Soviet Union and its outposts occupied a great deal of space in political discourse. One of the chief arguments for the establishment of the NEA was that investment of public funds would amplify and attract private contributions, and to be certain of that, matching requirements were a big feature. This was positioned as a defensive move: communist countries funded state art (think socialist realism with its heroic portraits of Stalin and Chinese murals of cheerful workers marching in unison). The consensus was clear: America hates state art. That’s why our federal cultural agencies were explicitly designed to promote private sector funding, always putting private money and decision-makers in the lead. In fact, when the NEA started, Nelson Rockefeller and other movers and shakers described its purpose as filling “the culture gap” between what major institutions earned at the box office and what they needed to live in the style to which they hoped to become accustomed.

In MAGA mirror world, state art is our jam. Trump crowns himself head of the Kennedy Center. He diverts funding intended for projects that serve the public good to his “Garden of American Heroes,” commissioning statues of those he seems worthy of worship. No doubt there is much more to come.

Along with other cultural democrats, I used to think the antidote to the distortions of private philanthropy was more robust public action. At least all the decisions wouldn’t be made by zillionaires and their minions who got huge tax deductions (not to mention naming rights, etcetera) to grease the wheels of their charitable giving. Then Trump got elected, instantly twisting our commonwealth into a weapon for his personal agenda.

I’m having a hard time finding a moral for this story. Nothing is safe forever? What goes around comes around? Be careful what you wish for? Resist something too hard and you’ll take on its shape?

I can’t decide, so I’ll just conclude by saying that MAGA cultural policy has taken core principles—for better or worse, the hill former cultural policymakers were ready to die on—and twisted them to serve their own interests while everyone else pays the price. I keep wondering where the big, loud, coalition-building opposition to all this is hiding. Campaigns sprung up at the end of the 80s to fight NEA censorship and other such offenses. All I’m seeing now is the occasional strongly worded open letter from one or another arts network. Without organized popular opposition, I fear culture will be distorted by MAGA mirror world for some time to come.

Dan Auberbach, “Trouble Weighs a Ton.”