Politics & Power Quote by Gary Bauer

There’s a neat bit of political alchemy in Bauer’s phrasing: he turns the National Endowment for the Arts from a modest grant-making agency into a moral emergency, then offers himself as the solvent. “End once and for all” is absolutist stagecraft, a promise of finality in a system designed to resist it. It’s less policy than purification ritual, aimed at voters who want cultural conflict translated into executive muscle.

The operative move is the conflation of “taxpayer funds” with personal violation. By invoking the taxpayer, Bauer borrows the intimacy of a household budget to make arts funding feel like coerced complicity. You’re not merely disagreeing with a controversial artwork; you’re being billed for it. That framing doesn’t require the audience to know what the NEA does. It requires them to feel cheated.

“Amoral and degrading” is strategic vagueness. It invites listeners to fill in the blank with whatever cultural anxieties are already preloaded: sexuality, profanity, blasphemy, nontraditional identities, artists who sneer at “family values.” The lack of specifics is the point; it keeps the target moving and broadens the coalition. He’s not arguing about aesthetics, merit, or the First Amendment’s messy ecology. He’s prosecuting a category.

Contextually, this sits in the long-running culture-war playbook of the late 1980s and 1990s, when battles over NEA grants became shorthand for a larger struggle over whose values get public legitimacy. Bauer’s intent is to reposition arts funding as moral subsidy, then promise defunding as a kind of national reassertion.