OPINION:
On Feb. 12, the Kennedy Center board appointed President Trump as the chair after he fired several Biden-appointed board members in response to activist programming laden with queer and far-left ideologies, including drag queen performances aimed at children. America needs decisive, unorthodox action to salvage our national culture from the depravity of politically engineered art.
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is the nation’s premier cultural center and a beacon for American greatness, not a vehicle for ideological crusades. Mr. Trump’s anticipated revamp of the Kennedy Center in Washington is necessary to advance cultural renewal in the United States after years of divisive identity politics injected into American arts and culture.
This shake-up of the Kennedy Center board is the most significant shift in American cultural policy in the past 40 years. As an adjunct assistant professor of arts administration at the University of Kentucky, I am thrilled to see the government support beauty and truth in the arts.
America’s vast geographic and cultural diversity makes government support for the arts imperative. Just as agriculture cultivates the land into bountiful harvests, the arts cultivate within us the traits, intellect and refinement we need to grow as individuals engaged in our communities. Arts institutions such as the Kennedy Center produce cultural value for our communities, enriching our lives, fostering social connections, and providing economic benefits through tourism and development.
My course on cultural policy, which examines how the government supports and conditions the arts, includes the history of the Kennedy Center’s founding. This center resulted from a bipartisan effort in the 1950s to establish a national cultural center. President Kennedy helped fundraise for this center, which was named after him when it opened in 1971. It has been painful for me to watch this American institution distort artistry in favor of divisive identity politics.
The new American “Golden Age” requires a cultural renewal that invigorates Americans to enjoy and celebrate the best artworks the West offers, free from the dogma of leftism.
From the heart of our capital, the Kennedy Center expresses a national identity through the dramatic and musical performances it stages, epitomizing the plurality of American experiences that make us American. It has steered away from that responsibility in recent years. Instead, it has adopted restrictive Latinx, LGBTQIA2S+, anti-racism and Black Lives Matter rhetoric and values in its programming to deceitfully sanction leftist sensibilities and falsely present them as the exclusive markers of cultural sophistication and artistic success. That is not how culture organically works or benefits people.
Culture emanates from individuals’ encounters with the highest forms of creative expression against the backdrop of ordinary life, where the daily collective practice of customs, rituals and traditions unfolds in communities. It is the heritage of collective preferences and expressions that bonds people together and cultivates social cohesion at local, regional and national levels.
A healthy American cultural heritage requires pride in our national identity as the singular articulation of our many geographic, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and social differences and affiliations. However, that mission is hindered by cultural leaders who deploy political litmus tests to determine the worthiest artworks. The changes at the Kennedy Center have the potential to usher in a national shift in how Americans value the arts back to its founding ethos, which reflects the Kennedy administration’s cultural policy agenda to democratize access to the best of the arts for all people.
As painful as it is for journalists and professors to acknowledge, Mr. Trump echoes the Kennedy administration’s cultural policy when he calls for only the best art and a new “Golden Age.” As first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy declared on national television that only “the best” art would do for the White House. Then she cultivated the myth of American Camelot after her husband’s assassination.
America is a pluralistic country, but recognizing and representing that diversity does not necessitate compliance with far-left ideology. The leftist dogma that masquerades as aesthetic excellence must be rooted out from federally funded arts programming.
The Trump administration should not stop at the Kennedy Center. It can use the Department of Government Efficiency to investigate how taxpayer money is being spent at the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which distribute grants for arts and culture programming throughout the country. The Department of Education can investigate how taxpayer money is being used at colleges and universities to fund leftist anti-Western research that contributes to anti-American sentiment in arts and humanities curricula.
All these steps are necessary to condition a renewed age of artistic achievement and unapologetic pride in this country.
• Zachary Marschall is editor-in-chief of the Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform site and an adjunct assistant professor of arts administration at the University of Kentucky.
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