Why cut the NEA? Because art makes us Real.

What 4 Philosophers Who Witnessed Fascism Would Say About the NEA Attack

Yesterday I found out that my beloved local theater, FilmScene, had its NEA funding cut. I love this theatre. I’ve lived my life and changed my mind in it’s screening rooms. There is nowhere more like church to me, and, yes, I saw Conclave there.

The news of FilmScene’s NEA cut came after a day spent scrolling through an Instagram feed littered with announcements from the small literary presses I follow announcing their own funding cuts. Last week, of course, were the announcements from individual artists whose promised funding had been revoked.

FilmScene’s NEA grant helped sustain their community-driven programming — FilmScene in the Park, Community Collaborations, the Refocus Film Festival, and the Iowa Disability Film Festival. It was terminated seven months early because these efforts are no longer “prioritized by the President.”

The organization is hoping to recoup some of the $30,000 grant, but the bigger blow is what’s coming: a proposed full elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts in the FY26 federal budget.

Trump proposed zeroing out the NEA back in 2017. That didn’t fully happen, but the erosion has been steady. And what Monday’s cut reminded me is that arts funding doesn’t disappear all at once. It’s a slow disassembly of the imaginative commons. The defunding of the arts doesn’t come with fanfare; it arrives quietly, in increments, until the scaffolding of public imagination starts to rot.

I’m still trying to fully process that this is happening — but more than that, I’m trying to understand why. What’s the endgame in gutting NEA grants, slashing support for independent film, weakening PBS and NPR? You have probably seen the “FIRE ELON. SAVE ELMO.” memes and it is likely also not news to you that the actually costs saved by these cuts are miniscule in the grand scheme of governmental budgeting. The NEA’s annual budget is about $210 million. 1% of NPR’s funding is federal. PBS funding clocks in around $500 million annually, a drop in the $6.8 trillion federal budget — fractions of a penny per taxpayer. So, no, these aren’t cost-saving measures.

Likely, these cuts are part of the propaganda wing of the terror campaign being waged by the President. Symbolic acts of suppression whose target isn’t waste, but expression. Suppression of public access to culture that isn’t commercial. To stories that aren’t algorithmically optimized. To voices that might critique, dissent, or reimagine.

For much of my life, the platitude that “art is what makes us feel alone” was just that — platitudinous. Banal. The white noise of grant applications. But now that there is a robust and organized attempt to erase identity and dissenting opinion, arts are an act of social, political, and personal affirmation. The arts make us Real. They are not beneath the President’s support, but actively contradictory to his violent agenda.

We are, of course, far from the first country to live through this. In a disturbing way, what I take solace from the most is knowing this has happened before and that people smarter than I who have thought about these issues for longer made sense of them, offered playbooks of resistance, and (for the most part) survived.

Yesterday, I started thinking about how some of the thinkers I lean on most would explain the NEA cuts. It occurred to me maybe you’d also find this meditation useful, if not comforting. So — here’s a brief on my interpretation of how Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, and Susan Sontag would interpret this moment.

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Hannah Arendt (1906–1975): Culture is what survives us—and what makes politics possible

Arendt distinguished between labor (survival), work (creating the world), and action (political life). Art belongs to work: it builds the durable, visible world in which political action can appear. When we lose cultural infrastructure, we lose the stage where freedom gets performed.

In The Human Condition, she writes:

“Without the existence of a public realm, freedom becomes a private affair and loses its political character.”

The NEA’s slow defunding dismantles that public realm, eroding the spaces where we gather not as consumers, but as citizens. Indie theatres don’t just show movies. The build and sustain a shared world — precisely the kind of world Arendt saw as foundational to democratic life.

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Walter Benjamin (1892–1940): The aesthetics of fascism and the death of critical consciousness

Benjamin saw fascism not only as a political regime but as an aesthetic strategy. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he writes:

“Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to eliminate. It sees its salvation in giving these masses not their rights, but a chance to express themselves.”

For Benjamin, cutting support for disruptive, difficult, or noncommercial art is a way to neutralize critique. Public funding can allow for fragmentation, montage, and resistance — forms that challenge the smooth narratives of spectacle. Independent theatres program precisely that kind of jarring, unexpected work. The kind that reminds you that you’re watching.

When that disappears, we don’t get silence — we get seamlessness. Art becomes smooth. Passive. Harmless.

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Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno: Defunding art clears the way for the culture industry

Horkheimer and Adorno had no illusions about the state, but he feared what came next even more: the total domination of the market. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, he warns:

“The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises.”

Without public funding, only profitable art survives. And what is most profitable is most often the least critical. Horkheimer and Adorno believed true art should negate, disturb, resist. It should be strange and difficult — not Marvel, not algorithmically pleasing. It can’t flourish in a world where survival depends on engagement metrics.

By stripping away even the modest protections of NEA grants, we guarantee a cultural landscape dominated by sameness. By entertainment. By distraction.

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Susan Sontag (1933–2004): When we lose art, we lose the capacity to see clearly

Sontag was obsessed with how we look — and how we’re trained to look. In On Photography, she writes:

“Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.”

For Sontag, art is not a luxury but a necessity — a way of seeing that cuts through ideology. NEA-funded institutions theatres make it possible to encounter images that haunt, that don’t resolve neatly into meaning, that refuse to flatter the viewer.

In a media environment saturated with content, Sontag would argue that defunding the arts is part of a campaign to standardize vision itself until we forget how to see with our own lens at all.

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What they all agree on

These thinkers spanned different generations, disciplines, and political commitments. Their lives ended very differently — Arendt and Sontag died in New York, of a heart attack and leukemia, respectively. Adorno returned to Switzerland and died of a heart attack. Benjamin, however, died by suicide at the Spanish boarder while feeling Nazi-occupied France. Regardless of how they lived their lives, they all agreed on this: art is never apolitical. It’s where memory is kept, where dissonance is staged, where freedom rehearses itself.

Public support for art doesn’t just keep theaters and museums open. It ensures that imagination remains a shared resource, not just a private indulgence. When the state cuts that support — whether with a dramatic flourish or a quiet shrug — it narrows the field of what can be said, seen, and imagined.

Independent theatres are, at their heart, places where people gather in the dark and think together. That’s what the NEA helped make possible. And that’s precisely why it is being cut.