Arts & International Affairs: 2.3: Autumn/Winter 2017 | Página 54

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
• eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts,
• eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities, and
• defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Finding a document that so nakedly lays out this policy serves as a reminder that many
of the seemingly abrupt plans of the current administration (and its allies in Congress)
execute a project that has been developed over decades of accusing the progressive wing
of American politics—particularly in the realm of arts and culture—of elitism and the
exclusion of “everyday” people. A great deal of energy has gone into building up popular
support for this message, until such time as policies could be rolled out by the most con-
servative elements of the Republican party. 2 The result is cultural policy—or elimination
thereof—based in political ideology.
The mechanism for this process requires a powerful sleight of hand between material
and symbolic claims about government spending. As CultureGRRL points out regard-
ing “symbolic value,” cutting the NEA or NEH is a performance of fiscal responsibili-
ty, as opposed to the actual thing. Yet, the symbolic and the material are not entirely
discernable, especially when the budgets are in the hundreds of millions of dollars (a
large-sounding sum to regular Americans), and have real effects—a fact of which both
sides are acutely aware.
Important to note is that the CATO document is not unique in its approach, but is a
good example of the rationale for dismantling state cultural agencies. In order to do so,
the authors take a few different tacks in the space of a relatively short document. These
fall broadly into the categories of (1) government overreach, (2) protecting the purity of
arts and culture, and (3) class-based arguments.
In the first category, the authors invoke the legal powers afforded to government through
their interpretation of the Constitution:
In a society that constitutionally limits the powers of government and
maximizes individual liberty, there is no justification for the forcible
transfer of money from taxpayers to artists, scholars, and broadcasters.
(535)
Of course, the government transfers wealth from taxpayers to many kinds of actors all
the time through appropriations, tax cuts, subsidies, etc., but this is a way for the authors
to link up this particular policy prescription with a whole host of other market-based
notions about how to distribute resources (for health care, education, etc.), which they
do throughout the rest of the handbook.
In the nine-page document that follows, the terms for cutting these institutions are laid out, and
connected to the political philosophy of the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank that has operated
since 1977, providing federal and other lawmakers with their policy prescriptions in areas ranging from
health care to foreign policy.
2
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