By Peter Oliver
On Tuesday, April 29, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will host a celebration of the first person to be honored by the center since Donald Trump took office. The honoree: Donald Trump. This decision came at the direction of the new chair of the center's board -- Donald Trump.
Since it first started honoring American artists in the late 1970s, the Kennedy Center has effectively encapsulated the rich history of modern American performance creativity. The hundreds of honorees include such cultural icons as Fred Astaire, Aretha Franklin, Alvin Ailey, Katherine Hepburn, Bob Dylan, and on and on. Now welcome to the pantheon the great performance artist Donald Trump.
This fatuous exercise in self-aggrandizement might seem clueless, even comical. But it also sullies the integrity of one of America's great cultural institutions. Of greater concern, it slides in with a disturbing trend in conservative politics -- a Trump-led effort to constrict the genius, truth, and creativity of American culture and cultural history through ideological purification.
In an executive order ominously entitled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," Trump disparaged the overall national narrative presented by the great Smithsonian Institution. The executive order accused the Smithsonian of spreading "divisive ideology" and promoting "narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive." A chief target in purging "harmful and oppressive" narratives is the popular National Museum of African American History and Culture, one of many entities within the sprawling Smithsonian.
Trump has assigned the great culture assassin, Vice President JD Vance, to clean up the Smithsonian's act. The specifics of Vance's plan remain unformed, but the overall objective is clear -- an ideological cleansing. Museum directors and curators who resist revisionist orders will likely be fired, and funding could also be withheld. Perhaps uncooperative curators will end up in El Salvador.
Other museums and libraries are also under attack. Trump recently signed an executive order to eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which in 2024 distributed $267 million in grants to museums and libraries around the country. Trump initially explained the move as part of his administration's general cost-cutting campaign, but later came the truth, in a statement from the Labor Department: "This restructure is a necessary step to . . . ensure hard-earned tax dollars are not diverted to discriminatory DEI initiatives or divisive, anti-American programming in our cultural institutions."
This is all part of the great conservative campaign to rid American culture and institutions of "wokeness." Wokeness can be a head-scratching ambiguity, but clearly anything with even a sniff of a liberal slant or of diversity, equity and inclusion falls under the woke rubric. As a major offensive in the effort to banish wokeness, the Trump administration has decided to confront American universities, most notably Harvard. The goal: Prevent these liberal institutions from indoctrinating America's youth.
Even if many major universities like Harvard have a strong liberal bent, the idea that college students are so intellectually malleable that they are unable to find their own positions in the liberal/conservative spectrum is condescending. There are many conservative students and professors at Harvard and other universities.
Free and independent thinking, regardless of its political or cultural slant, is the dynamic that drives university life. Nevertheless, the Trump administration is essentially trying to blackmail schools like Harvard and Columbia, through the withholding of federal grant monies, to toe an anti-woke line. Harvard, an extraordinarily wealthy institution, can probably afford to muscle up against the Trump threats, but smaller, less well-endowed universities and colleges might not have the financial resiliency to stand a principled ground against the government bullying.
Of course, higher education isn't the only, or perhaps not even the primary, target of the war on woke culture. States like Florida have spearheaded a Fahrenheit 451-like ridding of elementary and secondary school books that might hint at a racial, equity, or "non-patriotic" theme. Now the federal government is joining the party. Teaching materials at Defense Department schools (for children of the military) are being scoured with such anti-woke zealotry that an American classic like "To Kill a Mockingbird" gets the heave-ho -- along with, interestingly, Vice President's Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy". For a while, a DOD webpage on Jackie Robinson was expunged -- too DEI -- only to be replaced after loud protests.
Trump has plenty of allies on the conservative scene to embolden him in his culture war. In March, for example, a Republican congressman (Keith Self of Texas) remarkably and unabashedly quoted chief Nazi propogandist Joseph Goebbels in a Congressional hearing: "It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion." Follow the Nazi template: No intellectual exchange, no energetic debate, no divergent opinions; what the government identifies as culturally appropriate is what matters. That worked out so well back in the 1940s; why not give it another go?
America's culture and its cultural history are of staggering complexity, arguably the most variegated of any country in the world. They are simultaneously inspiring, perplexing, visionary, contradictory, profound, instructive, and heart-wrenching. Trying to force that complexity through an ideological pinhole is crude, counterproductive, and senseless, a deep disservice to the country and its people.
Oliver lives in Warren.
