Restore America’s legacy

President Bush’s re-election and continued Republican control of Congress offer conservatives a unique opportunity to reshape certain government institutions and policies previously dominated by the cultural left. Beyond the obvious menu of low taxes, a strong defense, tort reform and free trade, conservatives can potentially reshape areas of government previously strangled by the political hegemony of liberal thinkers, bureaucrats and activists.

Despite these promising circumstances, conservatives must not allow past prejudices and timidity to quench their appetite for reform. Embracing and participating in these changes is a key step toward improving American culture.

One institution undergoing a remarkable transformation is the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The NEA was described a decade ago by the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby as a place that “pollutes American culture.” Congress was ready to pull the plug on the NEA in 1995, a process, according to Mr. Jacoby, that was tantamount to “the draining of Washington’s most fetid cultural swamps.” Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey once called it the “single most deplorable black mark on the arts in America.”

Beyond the valid philosophical questions about taxpayers subsidizing art, the 40-year-old agency ignited additional outrage by funding obscene and objectionable projects over the past decade. Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” (photographs of a crucifix submerged in urine) was just one of several now infamous examples of theNEA confusing liberal self-indulgence with art. Critics like Mr. Jacoby noted that the NEA neither regretted nor apologized for funding this garbage, but embraced it, saying art should “challenge our most sacred values.”

What a difference a decade makes. Last year President Bush requested an $18 million increase in the NEA’s budget for FY05, the largest proposed boost in more than 20 years (FY‘06 funding is requested at last year’s level). Why should a conservative Republican president continue to support funding for an agency that once encouraged people to walk across an American flag as part of an “art” exhibit?

Dana Gioia, the NEA’s chairman for the past two years, deserves great credit for jumping into the “cultural swamp” with both feet and arms and then flexing muscular conservative leadership. While the arts community traditionally celebrates edgy postmodernism, including the worship of cultural relativism, Mr. Gioia challenges this worldview. He is systematically confronting some of the most sacredly held icons of the post-modern world and providing the agency with new credibility in the process.

Rejecting the nihilism so common in today’s popular culture, Mr. Gioia believes art and literature can teach us about universal values like beauty, honor, courage and truth. In a cultural climate where “personal choice” is the only absolute, and the only end self-satisfaction, Mr. Gioia believes the great art and literature of Western civilization provide a lush foil to the arid chaos of relativism.

After the bruising the agency took during the culture wars in the 1990s, it fell into a period of benign silence, desperate to avoid new controversy. “Gioia has moved the NEA from a kind of ‘do no harm’ neutrality to positively supporting projects that say certain things are more virtuous than others, that reject the post-modern world view,” a supporter on Capitol Hill told me.

One of NEA’s latest initiatives, American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius, is a terrific example of the new breeze at the agency. Instead of funding “social pathology dressed up as art,” as Roger Kimball wrote in the National Review Online last January, Mr. Gioia’s project introduces “Americans to the best of their cultural and artistic legacy,” according to the NEA. And Robert Mapplethorpe need not apply.

Yet the changes at the NEA require fertilizing to expand and flourish. Mr. Gioia needs some help in this gardening endeavor. Conservatives have traditionally ceded this cultural battlefield to the left. And those involved have eschewed participating with the NEA. “After everything that happened over the past decade, it has not been a place conservatives have felt comfortable,” a former administration official told me.

World views matter in politics, society and art. Through Mr. Gioia’s leadership, NEA is beginning to shine as a beacon of reform. By sending a strong message that art projects and education celebrating our most sacred values help improve American cultural life, he is warming the pool for conservative participation. Gioia’s actions say that the NEA is no longer a “swamp.” In effect, he’s beckoning to conservatives: “Come on in; the water’s fine.”

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