In the opening scene of the black comedy The Death of Stalin, a violinist in Moscow is told her orchestra is giving a command performance for Joseph Stalin, and refuses to play on political grounds. A frantic radio director, fearing he will be arrested or shot if he fails to produce the concert in time, begs her to reconsider, finally prevailing with an offer of 20,000 rubles.
Recently, the Trump administration faced a similar situation. After Donald Trump purported to rename the Kennedy Center after himself, the jazz musician Chuck Redd withdrew from a planned Christmas Eve concert. The administration’s response was somehow both more authoritarian and comic than the one in the movie.
The Kennedy Center’s president, Richard Grenell, announced that the Center intends to sue Redd for his impudence. Grennell’s letter threatening legal action depicts Redd as a sad loser suffering “dismal ticket sales and lack of donor support” and “lagging” attendance whose withdrawal, paradoxically, is “very costly to a non-profit Arts institution.”
One might presume the withdrawal of an obscure performer detested by the audience and donors alike would be easily brushed off, or even welcomed. Yet Grenell demands $1 million in damages.
Grenell’s letter argues not only that Redd has harmed the Center’s finances, but that his withdrawal constitutes an “act of intolerance” driven by “the sad bullying tactics employed by certain elements on the left.” Grenell vows, “We will not let them cancel shows without consequences.”
This is a strange interpretation of “cancel culture.” The concept, in its original form, described a tendency on the political left to react to minor ideological or linguistic offenses by demanding firings or social shunning, demands often reinforced by outraged social-media mobs. The problem with cancel culture—from the liberal standpoint, anyway—is that it is coercive.
But for an individual to decide not to participate in a politicized ritual at an artistic institution now renamed, Soviet-style, after the still-living head of its reigning personality cult is not coercive. Permitting individuals to choose which ideas they wish to endorse is the essence of liberalism.
The MAGA movement, of course, has no use for liberalism, which is why it naturally sees such an act of conscience as an attack. “The outrageous behavior is scarcely out of the ordinary for a political side less reliant on policy platforms and more reliant on bullets of deranged assassins,” fumes a column in Steve Bannon’s National Pulse, tweeted out by the official Kennedy Center social-media account.
In the minds of President Trump’s loyalists, refusing to genuflect to the great leader reflects the same general impulse as attempting to assassinate him. This was Stalin’s premise, too. Imposing the personality cult upon the state is designed not only to burnish the leader’s image, but to create opportunities to smoke out dissidents. Trump’s mania for renaming things after himself and turning his birthday into a national holiday celebrated with military parades forces individual members of the bureaucracy to choose between complying with his ego-gratifying demands or exposing themselves as the kind of officials who might decline illegal orders.
The comic aspect of the Kennedy Center threat is that Trump has little leverage over artists. He can fire a general who refuses to organize a parade for him, but he can’t make Lin-Manuel Miranda put Hamilton in the Kennedy Center.
The administration’s apparent plan to resolve this difficulty is to shame or browbeat members of the artistic community into performing there. “Any artist cancelling their show at the Trump Kennedy Center over political differences isn’t courageous or principled—they are selfish, intolerant, and have failed to meet the basic duty of a public artist: to perform for all people,” the Center’s vice president of public relations told the New York Post.
Trump has treated last year’s election as eternal proof that he is the incarnation of the public will and that any opposition to him is a kind of alienation from the people. From this belief, it follows that performing in Trump’s cultural center is a public duty. But since the administration currently lacks the power to lock up artists who don’t comply, this demand is as silly as it is presumptuous.
