‘People are picking the dumbest fights’: the tortured history of America’s culture wars
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- Isaac Butler published The Perfect Moment, a history of the 1980s culture wars that links today’s political battles over art and identity to the religious right’s targeting of the National Endowment for the Arts.
- The religious right, led by figures like Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms, and Donald Wildmon, pivoted from Cold War anti-communism to attacking government-funded art as a way to mobilize conservative voters and gain political power.
- The Corcoran Gallery of Art canceled Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1989 retrospective The Perfect Moment under political pressure, a self-censorship Butler sees as a major victory for the religious right.
- Donald Wildmon became a key strategist by misrepresenting artworks like Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ and David Wojnarowicz’s AIDS-themed pieces, sending images to Congress and fueling moral panic.
- The NEA Four—performance artists Tim Miller, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Karen Finley—had their grants revoked over LGBTQ+ and feminist content, leading to a Supreme Court free-speech case.
- Butler argues liberal underestimation of the religious right and a reflexive desire to compromise enabled conservative gains, a pattern repeated in later political eras including the Trump administration.
- Butler connects past and present by noting how modern politicians use funding threats—like Trump’s warnings to universities over transgender policies—to achieve censorship without violating the First Amendment.
Why it matters: Artists and cultural institutions lose when political actors use funding as leverage, because even the threat of defunding forces self-censorship. Butler shows this tactic succeeded in the 1980s and remains effective today, meaning free expression in publicly supported art is structurally vulnerable without organized resistance.
