Isaac Butler

And that is a mistake that recurs throughout the story of my book, and it's a mistake that's recurred throughout this second Trump administration.

Because it turns out when you do that, what you actually do is empower them to ask for more.

So the National Endowment for the Arts is really a great society program.

It's launched in 1965.

It's not the first time the government tries funding the arts, but they try to do it differently for a bunch of different reasons.

And I will just say right now, I think the National Endowment for the Arts in its original form for those first 25 years is really the best of what the federal government can do.

It had a tiny budget, but it had an enormous, enormous impact.

So part of what's going on is after World War II, America is one of the two superpowers on Earth.

They have this idea as almost every, you know, if you even go back to the colonial period or the Renaissance or whatever, every country that's like steps up to the plate and is like, we run the show now, they start massively investing in the arts.

They do that to help create a national identity.

They do that to create something for posterity, for the history books.

They do that as kind of not propaganda, but a sort of advertisement for their way of life.

you know, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth.

And we were doing the same thing.

But importantly, we were doing the same thing in the shadow of the Cold War.

So the Soviets directly fund and directly control the expression of their artists.

And we wanted to get as far away from that.

And we pioneered this model that's really brilliant, that's often called the arm's length model or the hands-off model, which is that the NEA sets...

the categories of things that you can apply for, but it does not choose the winners.

The winners are chosen by civilian peer review panels that the endowment organizes.