The last time the US waged a propaganda war on the arts

President Donald Trump holds up a statue he received as a gift while meeting with county sheriffs in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 7, 2017. The modern Republican Party has fully embraced Andrew Breitbart’s maxim that “politics runs downstream of culture.” That seems to be part of why President Donald Trump has spent so much time in his second term trying to take control of American arts: because that’s the water that streams down into politics. If American politics is ever going to be purely Trumpian, American culture had better become so first. Tru