Cultural critique is in a tricky spot. Living as we do under an extremist government, it is hard to know what to do with criticism, or how to consume art that does not carry a big rubber stamp declaring it “political.” It’s hard to defend doing anything except being in the streets.

There are many bad arguments circulating on this topic. The musician Amanda Palmer, for example, has asserted that President Donald Trump will make punk rock great again. Palmer, who says she has “studied Weimar Germany extensively,” told a conference in Australia, “We’re all going to crawl down staircases into basements and speakeasies and make amazing satirically political art.”

In a superficial sense, her theory is understandable. Art has a way of flourishing in the most hostile climates, and artists under repression have produced work of extremely high quality. Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while locked in a tower. Athol Fugard wrote plays about South African life at a time when black and white actors could not appear together on stage. What would Osip Mandelstam have written in a different Russia? Who would Cicero have been without Mark Antony? (After Cicero’s execution, Antony’s wife Fulvia took up Cicero’s head and, with the pins from her hair, stabbed his golden tongue.)

As Palmer would have it, our critics should await a gilded age of subversion. This subversion will be defined by satire, which is a form of art that directly takes on those in power. Our songs will be about those figures, the way that the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” was about the Queen. A new movement will arise, requiring interpretation and judgment, and so the critic will be redeemed.

But this is not a good basis for believing that the arts matter now. For one thing, it relies on a vision of cultural politics that is tied necessarily to the state.