Over the past several tumultuous months America has seen the Democratic Party’s ambitious attempt to restructure health care slam head-on into the obstacle of public opinion.

The American people are learning first hand the answer to the age old question of what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.  President Obama has spent months pronouncing that action must take place on health care and stating “failure is not an option.”

Speaker Pelosi has chimed in with one of her definitive statements (the kind that keep getting her in trouble) that the Democrats will absolutely pass a health care package within weeks.  These proclamations come after weeks of unprecedented turmoil resulting in the public’s support for “reform” plummeting and taking confidence in the president with it.

What is truly amazing in this situation is that neither the White House, nor Democrat leaders in Congress have adjusted their positions or tactics one bit since widespread concern, uncertainty, confusion, anger, opposition and even rage over “reforms” swept much of the nation. 

At the White House the campaign team remains steadfast in their apparent belief that there is no problem that the President can’t talk himself out of.  They drove their seventy percent approval rating square into the brick wall of an always skeptical populace.  David Axelrod and friends promptly threw it in reverse, backed up, and then drove into the wall even faster. 

The town hall meetings and protests should have indicated that there was an organic wave of skepticism building against health care reform, and, just as importantly, against the way Washington was trying to impose it.  Somehow, the White House brain trust completely misread this situation and decided that this called for the eloquent President to simply make the same case more forcefully and more frequently.  The result is the further diminution of the Obama’s popularity and, after a momentary halt, further erosion of support for the particular reforms Democrats are pushing.

We know that the White House and other leading Democrats firmly believe that all this opposition is the result of a nefarious campaign of lies and “scare tactics,” engineered by the GOP, the insurance industry, talk radio, the Trilateral Commission and the Freemasons in order to preserve the lucrative status quo.  This position is so discredited by both facts and logic that it does not merit an additional debunking here.  It is the reaction to this belief by Democrats that now must be considered.

Whether opponents have manipulated public opinion in a dishonest way or not, it is clear that public opinion has changed dramatically.  So what do you do about it?  Do you express any appreciation for the public’s concerns?  Do you validate any criticism?  Do you engage in good faith negotiations starting with any real concessions?  Absolutely not.  The Democrats’ reaction is that of the quintessential ugly American abroad.  When those stupid foreigners don’t understand what you are saying, just say it louder and they’ll get the message.  This boorish and condescending behavior is having the same effect on the American public that it has on people across the globe.

The White House on January 20 switched into full-time transmit mode.  Only outgoing messages could clog up the information pipeline.  So cocksure is this administration that their cause is righteous and their policies perfect, that listening is not necessary and actually hearing anything is simply impossible.  Even when the President caved on the public option, he never admitted that it may not be the best policy choice and he never reached out to the GOP to leverage it as part of real negotiations.  He jettisoned the public option in response to opposition from BlueDog Democrats. Yet, Obama still raves about how great it is in his speeches–before mentioning that he can live without it.

Since the health care debate began in earnest, the messages of the administration and Congressional Democrats have not changed in any meaningful way.  Strategically, the White House would be better served to acknowledge and validate the opposition and look for opportunities for engagement.  Right now, Obama needs to look like a leader and a statesman rather than a petulant child.  Countless pundits have called for a “plan B” or “hitting the reset button.”  But the messages remain simple—our proposal is best and opposition to it is morally wrong.  More of Barack Obama saying the same thing with a healthy new dollop of condescension and scolding thrown in would not be the first choice of most communications strategists in such a situation.

Coming forward with a true centrist proposal that would enrage leftists and fail to satisfy the far right could win significant support and serve as a foundation for a more modest but still significant reform package.  But this White House seems only wired for conflict.  And the “my way or the highway” approach is threatening to destroy this presidency.

Early this year, Republicans up against the new president feared that they would lose scores of House members and several Senators on many major issues in Congress.  But in spite of Obama’s silver tongue, it is his tin ear that prevents the administration from hearing the public and adjusting its policies and messages accordingly.  This formula has formed the basis for a resurgent Republican Party leveraging public resentment at liberal overreach.

There are two things fundamentally wrong with the Obama administration’s efforts to turn the arts into a vehicle for political advocacy.  First, it is an egregious abuse of power both in terms of misappropriation of public resources and a chilling of the free expression of ideas at the core of artistic vitality.  The second problem is that the resulting art as propaganda usually stinks.

 

You don’t have to be an ancient history professor to know that government controlled (or heavily influenced) art is, on the whole, lousy.  There are still artists alive today who either toiled in or toiled against the socialized artistic regimens of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.  Some laudable efforts undertaken by the WPA aside, there is no shortage of examples of art and architecture that glorifies the state and crushes the human spirit.  The funny thing is that the critics who most abhor the impact on art of the Nazis and Soviets and the works they produced are proud liberals who saw how it helped quash the concepts of non-conformity and innovation that are the life blood of artistic progress.

 When Obama’s leftist appointees at the National Endowment for the Humanities came up with the idea that they would recruit fellow-travelers in the arts community to harness their “talent” to promote the One’s political agenda they were hardly charting new territory.  Most every regime in history has done the same thing.  Allegorical painting is the most common example used by popes and princes to glorify their side of the political story.  Chairman Mao’s Red Brigades used drama and opera as tools of the state propaganda machine, and made ruthlessly sure that you didn’t experience any alternative theater on the side.

Shortly after coming to power the National Socialists in Germany established the Reichkulturekammer that recruited artists supportive of the Nazis to commit to producing art that comported to the aesthetic vision of Hitler and his propaganda minister Josef Goebbels who headed up the effort.  The resulting art was highly conformist and strictly representational.  Sculpture, in particular, managed to capture highly accurate anatomical forms devoid of any sense of human movement or sensuality. 

According to Peter Adam in his 1992 book Art of the Third Reich Goebbels made it clear that any artist that did not participate in this program would not be “allowed to be productive in our cultural life.”  In a subtler fashion, the NEA controls millions in grant money that is provided to artists on highly subjective terms and is influenced by the political appointees heading the agency.  Obama’s appointees can easily reward those who participate in their own kulturekammer and ignore those who choose to produce art that does not promote the administration’s health care proposal or cap and trade legislation.

In the Soviet Union, shortly after the revolution there was short-lived appreciation for the avant-garde seen as anti-bourgeois.  But art was still seen as an instrument of the revolution and Proletarian Cultural and Enlightenment Organizations were established to focus the arts toward political ends.  Soon, however, Soviet Realism, the staid, strictly representational art favored by Stalin and a more effective propaganda tool was the only style officially allowed.  All professional artists were members of unions that set strict rules for style.  Any experimentation was done underground and could not be exhibited or sold publicly.

The Soviet regime believed that art was only useful as far as it depicted and furthered the struggle of the proletariat against oppression.  As such, Soviet Realism was simplistic in form and greatly limited in scope.  While grandiose in scale, (like much of the Nazi art), official art all traced back to the state in that it either glorified the socialist struggle or denigrated that which was considered counter-revolutionary.  

For years conservatives and libertarians have been united in their suspicion of the NEA for slightly different reasons.  Conservatives did not appreciate the government promoting what they saw as degenerate or incomprehensible art that undermined moral values—motives that were not entirely unlike those of the Germans and Soviets in the 1930’s.  The difference being that today’s conservatives didn’t want to see their tax dollars paying for art by which they were offended.  Libertarians, on the other hand, simply didn’t see a role for government in art at any level, believing that freedom of expression would allow the public to judge the relative value of artistic expression.

The Obama administration has raised this debate to an entirely new level that unites conservatives and libertarians in their shared revulsion of any attempt to harness the arts to glorify a political agenda.  Liberals truly passionate about art should be rallying along with their political opposites, knowing that art controlled by a liberal government will one day inevitably be art controlled by a conservative government and that this is a story that cannot have a happy ending for artistic freedom. 

On a more universal, and is some ways more intrinsically important, level, anyone who has suffered through a Michael Moore film or a Harold Pinter play (or studied the art and architecture of the Nazis and Soviets), knows that art for propaganda’s sake is often boring, dehumanizing, and un-entertaining.  It is very likely that increased government involvement in the arts will lead us in a direction away from dynamic arts with myriad successes and failures and towards conformity and constriction of expression.