The first couple attended a Kennedy Center Arts performance of Les Misérables this week. Judging from some of the coverage, you may have thought President Donald Trump was there for a dramatic reading of The Art of the Deal rather than an innocuous middlebrow musical. CNN even took us “Inside Trump’s charged visit to the Kennedy Center,” where the president was confronted with boos and heckling from protesters, including several preening drag queens.
“For those of us born and raised in the Washington area,” Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent for the New York Times, groused, “the Kennedy Center was always a place to escape politics and enjoy some music or theater. Now it’s been turned into just one more venue for the polarization of the current era.”
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This frustration is ostensibly over Trump replacing the Democrats on the Kennedy Center’s Board of Trustees with his cronies. Let’s face it, though, Democrats are irritated about temporarily losing control of a single cultural institution.
Obviously, the contention that the Kennedy Center was once an apolitical safe space is utterly absurd. The Left always dictates culture. “Polarizing” is just a euphemism for conservatives noticing.
Numerous productions that have pulled out of performing at the venue, including Eureka Day, “a play about the anti-vaxx movement,” sound polarizing to me. Because the “Trump takeover” allegedly conflicts with the values of “freedom and liberty for all people,” producers also pulled Fellow Travelers, an opera based on Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel about two gay federal workers who fall in love during the “Lavender Scare” of the 1950s. Considering the number of American books, movies, and plays that have been produced about McCarthyism, you’d think it was the most consequential tragedy to have befallen humanity.
Baker might not see The Kennedy Center performance of Fellow Travelers or Liberated Muse: The Soundtrack for Social Justice as polarizing shows since many on the left treat their ideological positions as incontestable moral truths. One suspects, however, that conservatives would have a nit to pick. I suppose I’d ask a liberal in D.C. to try and imagine the Kennedy Center hosting a play celebrating the superiority of the traditional nuclear family or a musical about gun rights and the inalienable right to self-defense. Now, of course, those would be truly transgressive productions in this era. At the very least, they’d be branded as polarizing.
Indeed, the first-ever performance at the Kennedy Center was the 1971 premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. A year earlier, Tom Wolfe had published his famous essay in New York magazine, “That Party at Lenny’s” — later included in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers — that ridiculed the frivolous radicalism of Bernstein and other social elites who assuaged white guilt, throwing soirees for the Black Panther Party. Bernstein is often described as liberal these days, although by the 1970s, he was on the far Left. Mass itself is long seen as an anti-war work about Vietnam. President Richard Nixon didn’t even attend, at the urging of his advisers.
Still, most people would concede Bernstein’s musical genius. Conservative fans of music, literature, film, and art are often compelled to overlook the leftist sensibilities of its creators. And yet the Democrats talk about boycotting milquetoast productions of Broadway musicals as if they were resisting the Vichy regime. When Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance attended a National Symphony Orchestra concert at the Kennedy Center in March, a “chorus of loud booing” fell upon them. It was somewhat ironic that this clueless crowd, who seem to believe they live in a burgeoning dictatorship, booed as musicians performed Shostakovich, a composer who worked under a totalitarian system and in the constant threat of exile and execution.
The Left’s complaints on this issue are hollow. For a while, it was virtually impossible to go to any venue without being bombarded with liberal societal and ideological lectures. It isn’t the American Right that injected politics into professional sports. Conservatives do not run the big movie studios or publishing houses or streaming networks.
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If you want to put on another play about McCarthyism, have at it. No one is stopping you. Thousands of venues would happily oblige. But it’s not as if the new Kennedy Center board is staging reactionary conservative productions. As far as I can tell, it’s bringing in popular bourgeois fare with widespread apolitical appeal. There is nothing polarizing, as far as I can tell, about Moulin Rouge! The Musical, Chicago, Monty Python’s Spamalot!, Back to the Future: The Musical, or Mrs. Doubtfire. Although, apparently, Broadway, like the film industry, can’t come up with an original idea.
We have so many outlets for culture these days that the Kennedy Center is largely irrelevant. But it’s never been apolitical. The notion that it’s only now been politicized speaks to the Left’s inability to see past its own partisan blinders.