My friend Rob Koons is less cynical than I am. He thinks that a “reformed [National Endowment for the Humanities] could be the spear point for cultural renewal on a large scale.”
Having a lower estimation of the essentially unshiftable denizens of the NEH (and NEA) bureaucracy, I think Trump was right to zero the budgets for the Endowments and other such destructive, federally funded cultural initiatives (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for starters).
align=”left” But there is a pragmatic and a principled reason to favor the abolition of federal funding for the Endowments. The pragmatic reason is that they are captives of the cultural Left and no new Chairman, be he the reincarnation of Pericles, can do anything about that.
Rob believes that conservatives can “repurpose the NEH and transform it into a force for the disruption of the cultural Left and the rebuilding of our nation’s memory and sense of identity.” I believe that is a fond hope. We’ve already tried, with sound chairmen of the Endowments like Lynne Cheney, Bruce Cole, and Dana Gioia. Doubtless they all did some good.
But their tenures left the malevolent core to the institutions untouched. The Endowments are staffed by exactly the sort of bureaucratic swamp dwellers that Donald Trump came to Washington to drain.
Rob says that the “fundamental problem with the NEH as presently constituted is the peer-review system by which it disseminates research grants.” I think that the fundamental problem is that the endowments represent an illegitimate extension of federal power. The arts and the humanities ought to be supported by private initiative, not taxpayer dollars.
But what about the preservation of our cultural patrimony? What about the Washington monument and Lincoln Memorial? An edifice, I would point out, is not a grantmaking institution.
Rob thinks that by introducing National Honor Exams, we can recapture the cultural high ground.
I think there are manifold problems with that proposal. First of all, he envisions a system whereby top scoring high-school students would “be given the right to enter the college of their choice,” while top-scoring college students “will have the right to enter the professional or graduate school of their choice.” Who is going to bestow that right? What if Yale or Harvard or Princeton does not not recognize the “right” that Rob wishes to manufacture?
More fundamentally, what he proposes is yet another federal bureaucracy, one apparently with extraordinary coercive powers over the nation’s educational institutions.
Partisans of the Endowments, from the Right as well as the Left, oscillate between telling us what a derisory sum of money they command—hardly worth paying attention to, don’t you know—and insisting that the work of the arts and the humanities is absolutely essential to the future of civilization as we know it.
Important it may be. But there is a pragmatic and a principled reason to favor the abolition of federal funding for the Endowments. The pragmatic reason is that they are captives of the cultural Left and no new Chairman, be he the reincarnation of Pericles, can do anything about that. The oft-told litany of pathological, anti-American garbage supported by the Endowments can never be effectively countered until the character of elite culture changes.
The principled reason the Endowments should be abolished is that they represent initiatives into which the federal government should not venture. You might love the arts and the humanities, as do I, you might think they are things that make life worth living. But that does not mean that they should be supported by the administrative apparatus of the state.
Because the Endowments cannot be mended, they should be ended.
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Hear, hear Mr. Kimball. I agree that the “Endowments” are irredeemable. I agree they have no place under a scheme of limited government, as properly understood, ours is. I agree that much of the “art” and “humanities” the “Endowments” subsidize is tripe. But these subsidies are more insidious. They subsidize the spread of a leftist materialism to which most of the people being taxed to fund them do not subscribe. If the leftists want media platforms from which to proselytize, let them buy them and support them without taxpayer money.
Last Sunday, I listened to a “TedTalk” program on (taxpayer-funded) NPR. The subject was whether artificial intelligence (AI) was far enough along to put everybody that thinks for a living out of work. I truly don’t know how the guest transitioned to the following points, but his “talk” quickly became an airing of the “ambient phallus” theory of life: when there is a death, we humans grieve “because our genes don’t want that to happen to us until we’ve passed them along more;” when we fall in love, “It’s our genes commanding their spread,” etc, ad nauseum.
Aside from your very salient points, if these materialists want podiums to spread their views, I say buy them & pay for them yourselves.
Kimball’s point about the NEH is absolutely right–uproot it and salt the soil where it stood. But as for a “reincarnation of Pericles”, Kimball ought to know that this imaginary optimal NEH head would be worse than *ineffective* at changing the Endowment’s orientation, he would actually be a major statist, because that is what Pericles himself was, by the standards of the Athens of his time.
Cogent essay, Mr Kimball. I believe in Rob Koons vision, but I agree that it’s a near impossibility. Sadly.
Drain the Cesspool.
Exactly. All that is conserved by conservatives are the initiatives dominated by the left while the left is out of power. The list of government programs eliminated by conservatives is woefully short, as much as the laundry list of programs, illegitimate and outside the scope of a limited government with enumerated powers, is long.
Let the Big Money Left–Soros, Saban, et al.–fund the programs the left deems so important.
Stop funding NEH; starving artists should …starve!
If they are any good they will be able to create art they can market. If nobody is interested in their art then the taxpayers should not be either.
Either way let them starve or get a job
there is a word for government funded “art” — propaganda. anyone who thinks the NEH won’t always be a front for the left, is a complete fukking idiot. see if you can get this dunce to play poker with you, for high stakes.
The reason that the NEH and similar cultural entities and much of Academia has been captured by the left (not to mention the great endowment Foundations is precisely because they have large sums of money with no accountability for results. The Federal Govt is $20T in debt, should drop all but minimal activities (cleaning bird dung off monuments), and should let these cultural functions have to depend on the private sector. Similarly the large Foundations – all captive to the left – should lose their tax exempt status and be positioned to have to actually perform. Their governance should be forced to comply with their founders intentions and the Foundations should all be subsetted – e.g. should have to spend their endownments down to nothing over some reasonable period (10-20 years) to prevent being captive to unaccountable bureaucrats.