Milikh’s sweeping proposal isn’t likely to be adopted, but higher education funding cuts championed by Republican governors and the G.O.P. tax reform’s bite out of high-dollar endowments represent a more modest version of this impulse. And a similar impulse lies behind the Trump architecture order: It’s a repudiation of the idea that there exists some neutral community of cultural expertise to which Republican presidents as well as Democrats should defer, and it’s a deliberate attempt to use the power of the public purse to shift the balance of power within a specific culture industry.

As such, it’s an act that provisionally deepens polarization, by elevating a new culture-war issue. But it also points to one plausible way that polarization might ultimately diminish: not through mutual disarmament, but through the fruitful use of power against power, so that different ideologies balance one another in different spheres and it becomes easier for Americans of all political persuasion to invest in their institutions once again.

In “A Time to Build,” one of the few mildly optimistic political books to come out in this winter of depressing ones, the conservative scholar (and editor of National Affairs) Yuval Levin argues for just such a comprehensive recommitment to American institutions — families and churches, academia and government — as an alternative to the current tendency to use them instrumentally, as a platform for partisan ambitions and personal desires.

Only a renewed institutionalism, in Levin’s telling, can correct both individualism and partisan tribalism, the two self-reinforcing spirits of our age. When we see our lives, personal or political, “as mediated by institutions that structure appropriate ways to do what we do,” he writes, “we are more likely to act responsibly and to demand responsibility of others.”

But reading Levin’s admirable exhortation while contemplating our “conservatives rule politics”/“liberals rule culture” division made me wonder if, to reach the point where people are willing to submit themselves to institutionalism once again, we may first need our factions to more aggressively check one another, in politics and culture both.

In politics, it’s easier for liberals to see how this might work. A movement to add Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., to the roster of Senate-represented states, for instance, or to divide California into six states, two conservative-leaning and four liberal, would be a form of partisan aggression in the short run. But if successful, in the long run it might help depolarize the Senate somewhat, forcing conservatives to compete outside their current rural-state majority and restoring liberal confidence in the fairness of the upper chamber.

But the same pattern might hold in cultural conflicts. Liberals have a harder time imagining this because they like to think of public architecture proposals or public-university hiring as “independent” and “nonideological.” But this is silly: Cultural production is obviously dominated by guilds with strong ideological dispositions, which alienate differently disposed citizens when those dispositions seem too all-controlling or oppressive.