None More Wonderful Than Man: Art, Artists, and MAGA’s Hollow View of Humanity

Donald Trump recently announced that The Kennedy Center, which he has attempted to illegally rebrand as the Trump Kennedy Center, will shutter for two years to undergo major renovations. The move comes as the center, which is a public-private partnership, has seen plummeting ticket sales and widespread boycotts from artists like Philip Glass and the touring company of Hamilton. But I don’t want to talk in too much detail here about the Kennedy Center in and of itself. Rather, I want to talk more generally about the MAGA attitude towards the arts and how we have seen this play out in recent days. 

Trump’s assault on The Kennedy Center, from slapping his name on the building to installing himself and his ideological allies in controlling positions at the institution, represents a view of art as something that mainly exists to arrogate power and impose a political worldview. Richard Grennell, whom Trump made interim president, made it his mission to root out excessively progressive and avant-grade influences at the center and turn it into an exhibition hall of MAGA follies. Grenell declared the need to “cut the DEI bullshit.”

Artists responded by canceling performances, and audiences reacted with record-low ticket sales. It’s hard to interpret the closure of The Kennedy Center as anything other than a petulant, Trumpian reaction to these setbacks. And there is real concern he might go so far as to disfigure or even demolish the famous building, designed by renowned Arkansas-born architect Edward Durrell Stone. 

But if Trump is taking out his anger on the nation’s premier center for the performing arts, this only mirrors the way the MAGA right sees the creative arts and its professionals—that is to say, as objects to be brought to heel and made to serve their ends. 

This weekend’s Grammy Awards ceremony saw a number of artists give speeches criticizing the administration’s immigration regime. As you might expect, a liberal-leaning hall full of musicians offered a lot of humanistic defenses of immigrant rights and passionate condemnations of MAGA racism. In accepting her award for song of the year, Billie Eilish asserted “no one is illegal on stolen land.” Let me say right here that I’m uninterested in debating the content of Eilish’s speech. What I think is more telling is how commentators on the MAGA right reacted, particularly the vitriol and ridicule they aimed at Eilish and the other artists. 

Megyn Kelly invited fellow right-wing media personality Jesse Kelly on her show to discuss the Grammys and the artists’ speeches. After playing the clip of Eilish, Megyn said:

Let me tell you my number one takeaway from last night. There’s a ton of mental illness in the music industry, that’s one. And number two, not to put too fine a point on it, but I sat there like, sing for me, bitch. That’s how I felt. Sing. I don’t support anything you’re doing. I’ll never buy your album. But I will sit and listen to your music if I like it. Sing. Do it. Dance. Do it. I’ll watch you, and I’ll listen. I won’t give you any money. I don’t give two shits about your politics. Now sing, right now.

Jesse agreed, suggesting America should degrade our creatives to the same outcast position they had in Ancient Rome:

People can criticize the Romans, the most wonderful society in the history of mankind, the longest lasting. They gave more improvements to the planet than any other empire in the history of the world. But the Romans had a lot of things figured out very very well. You say ‘just sing for me?’ Well that’s exactly how the Romans viewed artists. The Romans loved plays, they loved music, they absolutely adored these things. But they also understood that, generally, the practitioners of these things should never ever ever ever ever ever [sic] make decisions of any kind in a society…They regarded them as the same level as prostitutes. And you can say that’s mean and that’s insulting, but I would invite everybody to go watch the Grammys and tell me just how far the Romans were off. They nailed it exactly. I don’t need to argue politics with Billie Eilish…in the same way I don’t need to argue politics with a monkey.

These are astonishingly dehumanizing sentiments, although their sources are entirely unsurprising. What you see in both Megyn and Jesse’s screeds is a sense that the people who make art are not meant to think or feel for themselves. They’re not really meant to be people as such. No, they exist to make things for the edification of a boorish set of elites, among whom they clearly count themselves. 

Relatedly, there is also a rejection of the heightened empathy that tends to color artists in both their professional and personal expressions. 

The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles honed in on Eilish’s declaration in her speech that all people matter. “Yeah, yeah, they really matter,” Knowles droned sarcastically. “They matter. We gotta protest, you know, so we’ll get Trump to win an even larger share of the popular vote.”

This contempt for artists as nothing more than whores there to please the (preferably conservative) masses is a telling attitude toward the creative pursuits. While I also don’t look to many individual artists to be experts or guideposts in fields like politics and economics, I also do not have any reason to view Michael Knowles, Megyn Kelly, or Jesse Kelly as any more insightful on those matters. 

That’s because they are not. They are entertainers themselves. Their political commentary, such as it is, is neither rigorous nor analytical. It’s performance, meant to stir the emotions of their viewers—to get them to clap, to like, to hit share and subscribe. Yet it's a kind of sophistry, a mean propaganda. That’s not to suggest they don’t also mean the things they say. But it is not news. It is not analysis. And you can sense, particularly from characters like Knowles, a cloying desperation to be seen as important, shiny media figures in their own right. They want the glow of stardom, and they hate the people who have it. 

As for the performers that the Kelly duo wish would just shut up, I don’t expect them to put away their humanity when they exit a studio or film lot. What, after all, should I presume it is that animates their own artistic skills and achievements? Isn’t it their own connection to the human experience? Let them draw from it as they like. 

But it isn’t just what artists are doing when they aren’t working that angers the MAGA right. They have plenty of problems with the product as well. 

Michael Knowles recently took issue with the casting in Chritopher Nolan’s upcoming film adaptation of The Odyssey. The decision to cast Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy has elicited howls of rage from the right. Knowles and other right-wingers have labeled this an offensive departure from the Homeric source material, as well as the volume of Renaissance era art that depicts Helen as white. 

Knowles had this to say:

The purpose of casting is the same as the purpose of acting is the same as the purpose of directing is the same as the purpose of editing and producing. To cast Lupita Nyong’o in that role is to distract away from the story. It’s to undermine the story…They call it colorblind casting when they cast Lupita as Helen of Troy, but they don’t call it colorblind casting if they were to cast Philip Seymour Hoffman as Malcolm X. 

Chalres Murray, the infamous author of The Bell Curve and its noxious theories about race and IQ, declared that “Christopher Nolan casting a black woman as Helen of Troy in The Odyssey causes me to feel hostility. It is a deliberate assault on a treasure of Western Civilization.” Elon Musk posted, “Chris Nolan has lost his integrity.”

Nevermind that Helen is the daughter of Zeus, a wholly fictional being of ancient mythology. Nevermind that historical Troy was located in Asia Minor and the “whiteness” of many heroes of the classical age would have surely been contested until quite recently. As others have noted, is Nyong’o not a beauty? Could she not launch a thousand ships? Aren’t these Homeric tales fundamentally stories about beauty, war, victory, despair—essential experiences of mankind?

The objections of Knowles, Murray, and others to Nyong’o’s casting are clearly nothing more than gutter racism and cultural chauvinism. 

For Trump and the MAGA commentariat, all they can see is artists trying to deceive the public into adopting a licentious and dubiously progressive worldview. They can only see a con and an attempt to control the young minds they, as predatory right-wing influencers, want to control instead. 

So of course these accusations are merely projection. The purpose of art, in the MAGA worldview, is not to cultivate finer feelings but to propagandistically impose their politics on the public. Art does not serve anything like empathy, awe, catharsis, or transcendence. Rather, it’s a crude thing, a means of communicating cheap platitudes and reflexive ideology. None of this is to say there can’t be or isn’t good conservative art. But a certain kind of MAGA mind, rendered a dull lump by the fascism that pervades it, cannot comprehend the creative spirit as anything other than something to be dominated and subjugated to their political will. 

It’s unsurprising that the Nazis waged a relentless war on creativity, especially the modern and the avant-garde, in everything from architecture and design to painting. Hitler himself was a failed painter whose work was most notably deficient in his inability to realistically capture human subjects. As Charlie English writes in his account of the Nazi war on art, 

In this sense, Hitler´s painting supports Arendt´s theory of National Socialism—that it was defined by its banality and lack of empathy. The Nazis relied on the ability of people not to imagine themselves in someone else´s shoes. The lack of a connection was very much the point.

There is a right-wing war on empathy that observers like Bradley Onishi have been cataloguing for months and that was most recently documented by Hillary Clinton for The Atlantic. But I don’t believe you can decouple this from the war on art and artists. 

I share the belief that the arts are central to the cause of human freedom. This isn’t only because of the expansive potential of the imagination. It’s also because of the well of universal feeling and experience from which art draws in order to evoke something in its audience. And this experience pulls us—as listeners, viewers, observers, whether the medium—into a cycle of mutual edification. Art helps us to know one another better and to know ourselves more honestly. And it helps us to process our awe and terror at the world and our existence. It’s why those with authoritarian impulses always want to control it, to limit what it shows us, and to silence its practitioners. What they fear most is the plain truth of being human. 

Featured image is the Kennedy Center, by Wally Gobetz