On May 23, the Trump administration requested that Congress close the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, the premier government organizations for funding arts, scholarship, and culture in the United States. The NEH and the NEA, despite commanding a tiny fraction of the federal government’s budget, have long been on the GOP’s kill list, since conservatives consider them to be a complete waste of taxpayer money. The organizations responded with a level head. Instead of evangelizing for the arts and humanities as essential components of a nation of grandeur, an official for the NEH stated that “from Greenville, South Carolina, to Red Cloud, Nebraska, and beyond,” the organization has “inspired and preserved what is best in American culture.”

Where does this antipathy to state-funded art come from? I grew up in England under New Labour, Tony Blair’s smile shining over me. We learned that the Arts Council was an integral part of the state to which our parents paid taxes. I had always presumed that public funding for the arts and humanities was part of the general project of reconstruction after World War II, in the vein of the National Health Service. (I have this lazy habit of thinking everything is down to the war.) But in an email, Stefan Toepler of George Mason University told me that the responsibility of maintaining institutions of high culture in Europe had “largely been transferred to the state, often at the municipal level, by the early 20th century.” Still, he said, the postwar period in Europe cemented the idea that the government should provide access to arts and culture, “so much so that one could speak of culture as the fourth pillar of the modern welfare state in addition to the three traditional ones (health, social welfare, and education).”

In the 1980s, the French government appointed a minister for Rock and Roll, to try to fix the country’s flagging presence in that field.

Clearly, one could not say the same of American attitudes. In 1978, Dick Netzer published a book called The Subsidized Muse, examining how support for culture and the arts had become policy in the big-dog states of the Western world. First came the Ministry of Culture in France, in 1959. Then, in 1965, three creative acts: a Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work in the Netherlands; the first junior minister for cultural policy appointed in the United Kingdom; and the establishment of the National Endowment of the Arts in the United States. Since then, such policies have become particularly embattled in the U.S., as part of a general assault on the welfare state. In a 1999 article for Journal of Cultural Economics, Toepler and Annette Zimmer, in what now seems to be incredible understatement, explain that, “Today, public policy and in particular the concept of the welfare state with its focus on ‘big government’ is in a severe crisis.”

In Western Europe, support for the arts is in great part the result of centuries of patronage culture. Cultural policy there is as much the product of longe durée tradition as it is about the post-war concept of welfare. And for countries like France, the arts inform its self-conception as a great nation. In the 1980s, the French government appointed a minister for Rock and Roll, to try to fix the country’s flagging presence in that field.

By contrast, private interest has always had a large stake in the cultural policy of the United States. Before the establishment of the NEA, arts and culture support remained the project of urban elites, business communities, and institutional philanthropy. Not the glorious nation, not the government. When the government did eventually intervene, it supported artists through passive systems like tax exemption for cultural organizations, and of course for the donations of their wealthy patrons.