The Urgent Lessons of the ’90s Culture Wars

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It is not a happy time to be an arts advocate in the United States. The last year has seen the real threat of eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, and the spectacle of the head of Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History hauled in front of Congress to be publicly grilled about her programming by Republicans. For many observers, all this is very alarming, but also gives the sinking feeling of having seen this story play out before. You often hear that we are living through a return of the “culture wars,” the turbulent period of very public, very bruising battles over decency and public funding for the arts from the late 1980s and early 1990s. In many ways, what happened…