Everything Trump's White House proposes is a seemingly intentional effort to hurt his own base. But don't hold your breath waiting for any of them to notice.
Howells Community Catholic is just one of dozens of schools across Nebraska that receive complete funding for their arts field trips through the Nebraska Arts Council’s School Bus for the Arts program. And the council, in turn, receives about a third of its funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. With the announcement in March that President Donald Trump’s proposed budget would eliminate the NEA and its sister organization, the National Endowment for the Humanities, many arts and humanities educators are wondering whether the money that provides arts exposure for their students is about to disappear completely. “It’s pretty scary,” Ritzdorf tells me. If the School Bus for the Arts were to go away, her kids might never see a professional play, hear a live symphony, or visit an art museum. “It’s our sole source,” she says.
But this one isn't Trump's fault. It's not likely Trump so much as knows what the "National Endowment for the Arts" is, much less has any opinion on it that has not been spoon-fed to him by his surrounding team of steadfast Republicans. The party has long held that "arts" is one of those things that America, as a nation, is too poor to be able to afford, and if that means kids in Nebraska will grow up never once entering a museum or watching a play not put on by their own peers, that would be fine. The wealthy need their tax cuts, and conservative pundits want to be able to attend such productions without having their eyes rest upon—shudder—wee urchins from the outskirts of town enjoying the same quiet pleasures they do.
Honestly, that is the kicker: The amount of money saved by slashing the entire nation's art budget to zero would hardly budge the national tax bill at all. So, given the pettiness of the act, is it truly an issue of fiscal responsibility, or just another segregation so that the have-nots do not encroach so visibly on the terrain of the haves?
It isn't just the relative tax burden that's shifted between rich and poor, in the post-Reagan era; the wealthy increasingly seem to have walled themselves off into communities and vacation spots and absurdly lavish stadium luxury boxes that boast enforced, secure distance between themselves and the lesser classes. The pressure to curtail the notion of public schools themselves—in favor of privatized options that sort the poor, the less poor, and the slightly better off than that into individual campuses that provide an education of the precise quality each child's parents can afford—is unrelenting. There is true anger, among conservatives of all classes, at the notion that their children will intermingle with the less fortunate, or use the same textbooks, or play the same sports on the same fields, watered the same amount, and clipped to the same height.
So it's easy to wonder whether the nationwide bile directed toward allowing children to go on field trips is less about footing the gas bill and more about the idle classes being peeved about sharing their own pleasures with the sack lunch crowd, and about middle-class conservatives being peeved that rich and poor kids alike are being trundled off to museums and theaters—as in, together. It's not that it costs money. It's that art is not for those people. Good schools are not for those people. Water not tainted with lead is not for those people.
Notions of deficits and debts and fiscal responsibilities brighten and fade by the month and by the issue. But that seems more central to the notion of Republicanism than any of the rest of it, and seems to be the only flag held up by both the wealthy and the base that props them up. Where you are in the economic spectrum is unimportant, my dear Americans, so long as there is a those people you can point to who are slightly worse off than you. That is how you tell you are winning. That is how the game is scored.