Leadership Quote by Louise Slaughter

There is a politician's sleight of hand in Louise Slaughter's framing: she praises art, but she sells it as infrastructure. The nonprofit arts world, in her telling, is not a delicate luxury that needs patronage; it's a stubbornly productive engine that keeps running even when "other industries have suffered". That contrast does two things at once. It flatters arts organizations as resilient civic institutions, and it quietly rebukes the familiar budget-season instinct to treat culture as discretionary.

The sentence is built like an argument designed for appropriations hearings. "Nonprofit" signals public-mindedness and accountability; "build in strength" borrows the language of markets without admitting the crassness. Most strategic is the pivot to "innumerable small businesses on its periphery". Slaughter widens the frame from galleries and theaters to the economic ecosystem around them: restaurants that fill before curtain, printers who run programs, stagehands, hotel workers, parking lots, neighborhood retail. "Periphery" is the keyword. It suggests spillover benefits without needing to quantify them, letting a lawmaker imply scale ("innumerable") while staying safely vague.

The subtext is coalition-building. Slaughter isn't only defending the arts; she's trying to recruit chambers of commerce, labor interests, and skeptical taxpayers into the same tent by translating aesthetic value into jobs. It's advocacy through pragmatic rhetoric: if you won't fund culture for culture's sake, fund it because it behaves like a local development policy with better branding. In a period marked by recessions and recurring culture-war fights over public funding, the quote doubles as a shield: cut the arts, and you're not just defunding performances - you're shrinking the small-business economy that politicians swear they champion.