One of the kookiest battlegrounds of the latest American culture war has to be the National Garden of American Heroes, President Trump’s proposal for a park filled with monuments to 250 notable Americans who found fame in sports, art, music, entertainment, business, or politics.
There’s no real logic to the list—Herman Melville is on there but Nathaniel Hawthorne is not. Miles Davis is included, but there’s no Nina Simone. Trying to make sense of the list by identifying a specific ideology can be quickly disproven by an anomalous inclusion. Simone’s exclusion doesn’t seem explicitly racist or sexist after noticing there is plenty of representation for both notable Black Americans, women, and Black American women. It’s an arbitrary list in an arbitrary way, seemingly based on nothing more than momentary whim.
It’s worth trying to think through what’s going on at the Garden of American Heroes, though, because so much of the president’s popularity and so many of his actions have been based in cultural grievance. The Kennedy Center takeover, the taskforce for making Hollywood great again, the battle against Ivy League universities—all are fights against the “elites” and the multicultural spaces they have nurtured.
The rise of diversity in the arts coincided with the fall of the so-called “high” arts in public spaces and in universities. In the 1990s, arts and music education started disappearing from public schools, attendance at opera houses and symphonies began to decline, and university humanities departments went into budgetary crises. This had more to do with the end of Cold War-era funding, which had gone toward literary magazines, the visual arts, and arts education. But some saw conspiracy instead of coincidence, as if the reason why the “Great Books” curriculum lost favor was directly attributable to the rise of gender studies departments.
For example, New York’s Lincoln Center ended the longstanding Mostly Mozart Festival in 2023, which programmed classical compositions from around the world, and replaced it with “Summer for the City.” The new roster included a celebration of hip hop, “the world’s first LGBTQIA+ mariachi group,” and other musical acts whose primary selling points were related to identity. The reasons for programming decisions like this are complex, but some critics saw a direct correlation. Cicero is being replaced by Sandra Cisneros. Mozart is being replaced by SZA. Cultural collapse is imminent.
And for people trapped in cultural grievance, the hope is that through “elite replacement”—not to be confused with the “great replacement” conspiracy—we will make art great again. The problem with the culture, some believe, must be the wokeness of it all, the dominance of women and other previously marginalized voices—even in spaces that used to be safe for white men: The story of our Founding Fathers, for example, is now being told by Hamilton. Thus, Project 2025’s plan to put conservatives in charge of the institutions that maintain our cultural production. The problems of American culture, however, go much deeper than that, and “elite replacement” doesn’t really work if there’s no Leonard Bernstein waiting in the wings with a big vaudeville hook to drag Lin-Manuel Miranda from the stage.