Talkin’ ‘bout My Degeneration
Where Every Accusation is a Confession
Many readers will be familiar with the Nazi regime’s Entartete Kunzt (Degenerate Art) exhibitions in 1937. These shows were designed to mock and discredit modern art by displaying confiscated works in a way that was chaotic and deliberately unflattering. They were also meant as a tool to marginalize any individuals, artistic products, or groups in society that they hated. It featured over 650 pieces that had been seized from German museums and galleries, including paintings, sculptures, and prints. The Nazis couldn’t tolerate dissent or difference. People who saw the world through a different lens were regarded as the enemy. This should sound familiar.
In the most glaring of terms, the Trump regime is headed in the same direction. As I discuss below, free speech is an essential tool of democratic society. Visual arts, literature, and music are critical vehicles for the free transmission of ideas. We have a sacred duty to stop those who would quiet free speech.
The National Gallery Invaded by DOGE
According to several media accounts, on April 17, individuals associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) met with leadership from the National Gallery of Art (NGA). During the meeting, NGA Director Kaywin Feldman and Secretary and General Counsel Luis Baquedano discussed the museum’s legal status with DOGE representatives.
For many reasons, the DOGE attempt to insert itself into the operations of the NGA is troubling. While one hopes any loss of funding will be made up by the billionaire philanthropy club, the more dangerous issues regard censorship, political oppression, and cultural hegemony. While some MAGA philanthropists support a somewhat broader cross-section of artistic expression (Alice Walton and Crystal Bridges comes to mind), the Trump Cult leans strongly toward classical, representational, often romantic, non-challenging, and naively patriotic artistic products.
The NGA meeting is significant for a number of reasons. It is worrisome because the Trump administration has already eviscerated numerous government agencies, fired thousands, and sought to install a vague but predictable political ideology that’s intolerant of dissent. That the DOGE hooligans have darkened the door of the NGA should be especially troubling to anyone remotely schooled in history. Moreover, the NGA has already been forced by the Trump regime to close its Office of Belonging and Inclusion. According to a January 24, 2025, report by The Washington Post, “[This order] effectively [halts] as years-long effort to rebrand and diversify its leadership.” Whatever Trump and company want from this venerated archive of national art treasures, it is not good for the NGA or the nation.
A Singular Institution
While most probably assume (as I did) that the NGA is a part of the Smithsonian Institution, it isn’t. The NGA is a public-private partnership that receives funding from Congress for daily operations but most of its resources for acquisitions and growth come from a private trust (like most Presidential Libraries). As such, the NGA isn’t a traditionally configured unit of the federal government — even though most of its staff are federal employees. It’s overseen by a board of trustees, that typically includes government officials, among them current trustee, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
As Kriston Capps, writing for Bloomberg notes, “Its status is the result of an agreement struck by steel magnate Andrew Mellon in 1936 to give the nation a collection of Old Masters paintings and build the original West Building to house them, plus an endowment for future growth. In return, Congress provides funds for maintenance, upkeep and administrative costs.”
The NGA’s origins in the largess of Andrew Mellon invite an interesting comparison to Musk. In a move that was likely illegal, Mellon was appointed by President Warren Harding to head the Treasury Department. From the outset he used his office to bully competitors, benefit from insider deals, and function as a law unto himself. His appointment came as the result of a $1.5M donation to Harding’s campaign.
He served in that position for eleven years, under three administrations: Harding, Coolidge, and Wilson. He is said to have hated Wilson, or at least Wilson’s income tax on the wealthy. As Matt Stoller writes, “Mellon sought to reduce that tax any way he could. He pestered Congress to lower the top individual rates, to lower rates for corporations, and to end that most odious of taxes, the one on inheritances. That tax would have blocked Mellon’s father from bequeathing Andrew the beginnings of an empire. Mellon won substantial reductions in the Republican Congress, but a combination of progressive Republicans and southern Democrats blocked him from a full victory.”
Even so, Mellon used the IRS as a cudgel to smite anyone who displeased him. This predatory and vengeful ethos was an extension of his approach to corporate practices. As Stoller later states, Andrew Mellon, like his father, Judge Thomas Mellon, saw the working classes as an enemy to be controlled, “Public schools drew his ire; he believed children would study harder if they had to pay. Labor unrest among lower classes, he believed, needed to be met with violence, and may even “require blood to purify.”
If one is even fleetingly attentive to the blighted hellscape of dystopian policy emanating from the Trump administration, Stoller’s description of Mellon should provoke some comparisons.
In other parallels, the 1920s saw the rise of figures like evangelist Billy Sunday, an ardent prohibitionist, William Jennings Bryan, noted for his anti-science prosecution of John Scopes, and the national ascendance of the Ku Klux Klan. Conservatives of the era cheered as the US Post Office in 1922, destroyed 500 copies of Ulysses by James Joyce (as a work of obscenity); and the 1927 ban of Eugene O’Neill’s play Strange Interlude by the mayor of Boston. Of course, it hardly needs recounting that conservatives decried suffrage afforded women in 1920.
Psychopathy and Censorship
Even in his nightmarish flouting of all convention, propriety, and law, Trump is unoriginal. His difference from other chief executive psychopaths is one of degree, rather than kind. His creation of DOGE and enabling of Musk retraces steps in well-trod ground.
Of course Trump has a lot of help. Where Harding was acceptable to the religious right, Trump, the serial adulterer, con-man, golf cheat, racist is the darling of “Christian” fundamentalists. He allows them to hold sway on issues about which he has no conviction because he knows it binds them blindly to him (i.e., abortion, birth control, racism, women’s rights, and Christian Nationalist cultural hegemony). For their part, the fundamentalists are so caught up in an errant drive to make the United States a “Christian” nation, they set aside all the things that would have Trump — the deeply flawed man — excommunicated from their congregations. In doing so, the fundamentalists choose to ignore the rank hypocrisy of their devil’s bargain.
Then there is the Trump regime’s dubious gambit to privatize the US Postal Service. As reported by Newsweek, American Postal Workers Union President Mark Dimondstein said in a statement, “[This] would be an outrageous, unlawful attack on a storied national treasure, enshrined in the Constitution and created by Congress to serve every American home and business equally. [Privatization is] part of the billionaire oligarch coup, directed not just at the postal workers our union represents, but the millions of Americans who rely on the critical public service our members provide every single day.”
The urge to privatize USPS is more than a bone thrown to his billionaire buddies. It is an institutionalized way to squash free speech. Again the machinations of another chief executive psychopath ring familiar.
According to Dennis Wagner writing for State of the Union History, in 1835, President Andrew Jackson ordered the US Postal Department to censor materials sent out by the Anti-Slavery Society of New York. The materials were part of a campaign to expose the “madness and cruelty of slave holders as an argument to rouse the Christian world against the SIN OF SLAVERY.”
Five years later in 1840, a Congressional Postal Commission concluded that the Postal Service was key to a democratic state, that it improved literacy, and strengthened free speech. That sentiment is as true today as it was almost two centuries ago.
Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence. — Frederick Douglass, 1860.
A Brief History of Degeneracy
Used for over 600 years, the term, “degenerate,” whether as a noun or verb implies a regression from a superior state to a former less acceptable state. The 19th century Italian social philosopher, Cesare Lombroso, used the term, “atavist,” in much the same way. Lombroso connected the physical and mental characteristics of criminals to both atavistic traits and degenerative processes. He argued that “born criminals” exhibited physical and mental abnormalities that marked them as primitive or degenerate humans. From Lombroso’s now widely rebuked conclusions, one might then argue that degenerate people create degenerate art.
At the start of this essay I used the German term, Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) with specific reference to Nazi Germany, but the idea has a much longer provenance. Anita Kühnel from Grove Art Online defines Entartete Kunst and how the concept has been applied throughout history, “The first known example [was] … made by the Italian bourgeoisie of the 14th century [characterizing] medieval art as a barbaric relapse when compared with antiquity… Niccolò [Machiavelli] employed the term ‘degeneration’ (corruzione) in his Discorso of 1581.”
Degenerate (adj.) late 15 century. “Having lost or suffered impairment to the qualities proper to the race or kind,” from Latin degeneratus, past participle of degenerare “to be inferior to one’s ancestors, to become unlike one’s race or kind, fall from ancestral quality,” used of physical as well as moral qualities…
She goes on to explain, “It was used by Giovanni Pietro Bellori in his polemic against Giorgio Vasari and Michelangelo. It is also used generally to mean irregular or against the rules, in contrast with the dominant aesthetic trend, which is set up as the rule. In this sense the term ‘Baroque’ was also initially intended to be disparaging.”
The “Purification” of German Art
In 1918, after his military service, Adolf Hitler returned to Munich, where he developed many of his views on politics and art. A key influence during this period was Dietrich Eckart, a writer, nationalist, and anti-Semite highly esteemed by Hitler. Eckart’s ideas, particularly his belief in Germany’s “cultural decline” due to “cultural Bolshevism” and foreign influences, deeply shaped Hitler’s thinking. He argued that Germany’s defeat in World War I and its societal fragmentation were caused by racial and cultural contamination, especially by Jews. To restore German cultural purity, Eckart advocated eliminating foreign influences and returning to traditional German ideals.
Eckart viewed art as central to national identity, believing it should truthfully represent German history and ideals, separating Germany from the rest of the world. He rejected modernism and promoted a return to classical art rooted in German values, holding that only Germans could produce “pure” art. His nationalism, emphasis on cultural purity, and anti-Semitism profoundly influenced Hitler’s later cultural and ideological policies.
The Nazis tightly controlled cultural expression through the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer — RKK), established in September 1933 under Joseph Goebbels. Its purpose was to ensure all artistic creation aligned with Nazi ideology. The RKK was divided into seven branches, including the Reich Chamber for Visual Arts (Reichskulturkammer — RKdbK), which oversaw visual art.
In 1936, Adolf Ziegler, a German painter and politician, became head of the RKdbK. On June 30, 1937, Goebbels authorized Ziegler and a six-man commission to confiscate art deemed “degenerate” — works the Nazis considered subversive or dangerous. These included works created in styles like Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Fauvism, and Surrealism, which the Nazis despised for their alleged moral and cultural decay, as well as their association with the Weimar Republic and Jewish or leftist artists.
At the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition on July 18, 1937, Hitler denounced modern art as “artifactitious stammering” by untalented individuals, vowing to purge German art of such “phrase mongering” and replace it with works reflecting the “life course” of the German people.
Nearly 16,000 artworks were confiscated by the Nazis, culminating in the “Degenerate Art Exhibition” (Entartete Kunst Ausstellung), which opened in Munich on July 19, 1937, and toured Germany for four years. The exhibition condemned modern art and featured works by artists like Otto Dix, Karl Hofer, and Max Pechstein. Even Nazi sympathizers like Emil Nolde were not spared. The show drew over three million visitors, far surpassing attendance at a concurrent exhibition of approved Germanic art, which featured conservative landscapes and portraits by artists like Ferdinand George Waldmüller and Carl Spitzweg. According to The Tate Museum this “[E]xposition of traditionally painted and sculpted work… extolled the Nazi party and Hitler’s view of the virtues of German life: ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’: roughly, family, home and church. Ironically, this official Nazi art was a mirror image of the socialist realism of the hated Communists.
“In the paintings and drawings of this chamber of horrors there is no telling what was in the sick brains of those who wielded the brush or the pencil.” — Program for the Entartete Kunst Ausstellung
A 1938 German law legalized the seizure of “degenerate” art without compensation from state collections. Hermann Göring exploited this, convincing Goebbels to transfer some confiscated works to him. Göring sold many of these internationally, using the proceeds to acquire art for his private estate. Thousands of confiscated pieces were sent to the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, where they were sold through private dealers and auctions, including the notorious 1939 Galerie Fischer auction in Lucerne, Switzerland. The purge of modern art caused a boom in the art market, with works used as currency for bartering goods, luxury items, or even exit visas for persecuted individuals. By 1939, approximately 5,000 confiscated artworks were destroyed, marking the final step in the Nazis’ campaign against “degenerate” art.
Bitter Old Wine, Bitter Old Leaders
As above, Trump is stunningly unoriginal in everything he does. He may be more indifferent, more cruel, and less empathetic, but all of his actions mirror those of other authoritarians and demagogues. As Adrian Horton, writing for The Guardian observes, “[The] US president’s attempt to control or dismantle cultural institutions plays into a long history of authoritarians using arts to push their agenda.”
To paraphrase some of Hortons key points: Oppressive regimes across history have sought to control the arts to reinforce their power and narratives. In ancient Rome, emperors commissioned works like Virgil’s Aeneid and Trajan’s Column to glorify their rule. The Stalinist Soviet Union abolished independent artistic institutions, demanded absolute loyalty to the party, and executed Ukrainian folk poets. During Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, “old culture” was eradicated, resulting in over a million deaths. In Pinochet’s Chile, muralists were arrested, tortured, and exiled, while in Brazil’s military dictatorship, museum directors like Niomar Moniz Sodré Bittencourt hid artworks to protect them from censorship.
These tactics persist today, often supported by Trump-aligned figures. In 2019, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro dissolved the ministry of culture, slashed arts funding, and appointed unqualified rightwing figures to cultural positions. Poland’s Law and Justice party rewrote history at a World War II museum and dismissed its director, while Italy’s rightwing government threatened to remove foreign museum directors. In recent years, China placed artist Ai Weiwei under house arrest, Cuba jailed performance artist Danilo Maldonado for criticizing the Castro regime, and similar patterns of censorship and repression continue globally.
Despectocracy: Government by Spite
The intrusion of DOGE into the NGA was hardly Trump’s first salvo into the destruction of public art. The regime has already eviscerated funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, purging the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts board — replacing half the members with sycophants, targeted NPR and PBS, as well as destroying hundreds of DEI initiatives related to arts and humanities.
As infectious diseases often do, the MAGA urge to destroy anything they don’t understand or like has spread to literature. According to Eric Berger writing for The Guardian, “There are at least 112 proposed state bills concerning school — and public — libraries that seek to expand the definition of what is deemed obscene or “harmful to minors” and to limit librarian staff’s ability to determine which books are in their collections.”
In some MAGA-controlled states, this urge is even more ridiculous. According to Li Cohen, writing for CBS News, in Florida the bans are more expansive, “Also on the list are Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary, The Bible Book, The World Book Encyclopedia of People and Places, Guinness Book of World Records, 2000, Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus for Students, and The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary.”
From this one may correctly infer that the Republican cowards are afraid of words. They are afraid of your children learning words they don’t like. They are terrified that schools will produce independent thinkers who dare to have questions. They fear knowledge that they didn’t produce.
Fans of the AppleTV series, Ted Lasso, may recall a scene where the titular character (played by Jason Sudeikis) quotes Walt Whitman, “Be curious, not judgmental.” We’ll set aside the fact that Whitman never wrote or said this and focus on the lesson. The MAGA movement is the antithesis of this sentiment. They are first and exclusively judgmental. They are seldom curious. If they are curious, it only extends to the best techniques for oppressing and marginalizing people, thoughts, and things they don’t like. The MAGA movement is singular and cultish. As Ted Lasso goes on to say, “You know, they thought they had everything figured out. So they judged everything. And they judged everyone.”
There’s only one little problem with this kind of moral certainty. If everyone thinks exactly the same, knows only the same “facts,” and sees the world in identical terms, they have imposed upon themselves a very dangerous limit. The travails of life and the forces of nature don’t care what you believe. They will throw problems at you that require solutions beyond the boundaries of your groupthink. Those problems will demand innovation and revolutionary ideas to solve them. They will demand your discomfort.
The people capable of solving difficult problems will need to know the words you hid from them. They will need the science you decried as “woke.” But you’ll be too busy labeling vaccines as oppression to notice that children are dying. The irony of a party that demands more children, but lets the ones already here die will be lost on you. You’ll give preference to gun idolatry over laws proven to reduce the murder of young people. You’ll create a revisionist history that relieves you of burdensome empathy and wonder where help was when you are in need. You’ll deny due process to the people you irrationally hate while demanding it when it’s your liberty at issue. In short, you will have embraced a social theology based in hypocrisy, fear, and intolerance.
If that isn’t degeneracy, I don’t know what is.
