Jokes about the president\u2019s power grab at the Kennedy Center in Washington soon pale. This is a nakedly authoritarian move<\/p>\n
Donald Trump\u2019s announcement that he was installing himself<\/a> as the chair of the John F Kennedy Center, Washington DC\u2019s temple to the performing arts, might have been mistaken for something petty or trivial \u2013 another random, Pollock-esque splatter of the policy paintbrush against the canvas of the world. On his favoured social media site he posted an image<\/a>, presumably AI-generated, of himself as a dinner-jacketed orchestral conductor \u2013 the macho maestro of the US. But this is more than personal: it is political, and points towards the president\u2019s wider project.<\/p>\n To understand what is going on, it is necessary to consider Trump\u2019s favourite European authoritarian, Viktor Orb\u00e1n<\/a>. Hungary\u2019s prime minister has chipped away at his country\u2019s constitution and judiciary. But a no less powerful tool has been his attention to parts of society often regarded as unimportant compared with a country\u2019s constitution. Alongside crushing independent media<\/a>, Orb\u00e1n\u2019s government has co-opted the arts, appointing right-leaning directors to theatres<\/a>, and instigating nationalist art exhibitions<\/a>. Orb\u00e1n understands that culture creates the climate for emotion and memory, imprints national myths, and \u2013 often intangibly \u2013 acts on politics.<\/p>\n Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian\u2019s chief culture writer<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jokes about the president\u2019s power grab at the Kennedy Center in Washington soon pale. This is a nakedly authoritarian move Donald Trump\u2019s announcement that he was installing himself as the chair of the John F Kennedy Center, Washington DC\u2019s temple to the performing arts, might have been mistaken for something petty or trivial \u2013 another … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}