The Perfect Moment: Isaac Butler on God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Few days ago, we did a show with two very distinguished cultural American historians, Katy Siegel and Elise Armani, who have a new book out asking, what was America? Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial Era focuses on America in 1976, particularly on its art world and implicitly or otherwise, obviously, compares, the America of 1976 with the America of 2026, fifty years later. It focuses on a number of artists, including the African American artist, Benny Andrews, who I think, the two authors, Armani and Siegel present as the spirit of the bicentennial. Of course, in these last fifty years, great deal has changed in America, and that's, the subject of our conversation today with another leading American cultural historian, Isaac Butler, whose book, The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars, focuses on what happened really after 1976 in the nineteen eighties and nineties, focusing on America's cultural wars. Isaac is joining us from Brooklyn where everybody seems to live, at least those people involved, Isaac, in the culture wars, certainly on the left side of the culture wars. Congratulations on the book. It came out in June. It's already getting great acclaim. Let's go back to 1976. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Armani and Siegel book. I think you'd find it interesting. What was America?

00:02:17 Isaac Butler: From the I just added it to my, list of books to read. It sounds great.

00:02:21 Andrew Keen: Good. And I think you'll be culturally, politically on the same, wavelength

00:02:26 Isaac Butler: Wavelength.

00:02:27 Andrew Keen: As the two women. What was the— And I know this is a rather inane question, but I'm still gonna throw it out to begin with. What was the cultural state of play in America in the late seventies? Was it a liberal moment, so to speak, in American cultural history?

00:02:44 Isaac Butler: I mean, what you— What you're finding towards the end of the seventies is the— As we transition into the Reagan era is kind of the last vestiges of, what was regularly called the bipartisan consensus or the post war consensus, which was, for those born in the twenty first century, might seem like a totally bizarre thing. But there was actually, like, a fairly monolithic dominant culture. There was a dominant series of assumptions about how politics was supposed to work, how the economy was supposed to work, what education was for. You know? We had a culture and a counterculture. It was, now we have a very much more fragmented landscape. And so there were certain cultural agreements in place, many of which were quite liberal. One of them being, of course, that state funding for the arts was a positive thing is a perfectly good example. You know, Nixon greatly increased state funding for the arts. Nixon, of course, also helped shepherd in the creation of the, Environmental Protection Agency, you know, things like that. Integration is good. The government should at times intervene in the economy. You know? We were in the midst of the Cold War still, and that necessitated certain, agreements about how foreign policy was gonna be— Was going to proceed. And a lot of that changes under Reagan who does not like the postwar consensus and begins the process of— Or rather, it had been weakened over a series of debates, both cultural and political over the decade before Reagan, and then Reagan really, you know, blows it apart, during his presidency. And then it really kind of finally collapses when the Cold War collapses and there's no longer a foreign enemy to unify the country. There were things about that consensus that were very good. For example, I'm a I'm a great fan of state arts funding. Right? And there's things about that consensus that were very bad. There were specific minority groups, particularly LGBTQ Americans, who were completely left out of the public sphere by that consensus. So one of the things that is happening in the seventies is as the religious right gets better organized, it is starting to fight back in all sorts of ways, one of which is cultural.

00:05:05 Andrew Keen: So let me, I wanna get to— It's the heart of your book, the religious right characters like Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan, and, of course, another Pat, Pat Robertson. Yeah. We'll come to those in a few minutes. But is there a danger, Isaac, of looking at this period with rose tinted glasses in the sense— You mentioned Nixon, and I take your point, and he often comes up now. Some people would suggest if he was around these days, we might kick him around, but he'd probably be a member of the Democratic Party. Certainly wouldn't be a MAGA person. But is there a danger perhaps of being a little nostalgic, of over sentimentalizing? After all, this was still the period of Nixon's Southern strategy Mhmm. Of enormous racial tensions and unrest. How did it manifest itself in cultural terms? You noted that there was a kind of consensus perhaps unspoken or unwritten. How did it work? I mean, did Eisenhower or in Eisenhower's America, was there state funding, for example, for offensive art, for art that challenged, bourgeois sensibilities?

00:06:19 Isaac Butler: No. That starts under, you know, the NEA is born under LBJ, but it's conceived under JFK. And the National Endowment for the Arts, or the NEA, is the major federal arts funding. Or again [unclear], there were other ways of the state funding the arts, actually. One of the big ones that predates the NEA is the CIA doing it secretly, you know, to—

00:06:43 Andrew Keen: As they did every— Everything secretly, and I'm guessing that, our friend Jesse Helms—not Jesse Helms, J. Edgar Hoover would have, been very much involved in this on the FBI front too.

00:06:57 Isaac Butler: Well, no. The weird thing— Actually, the hilarious thing about that period, which is often called the cultural cold war, was really in the nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, is you have the FBI investigating artists that the CIA is secretly funding. Right? So you have artists that are being— [connection drops] Are you still there? Are you back?

00:07:43 Andrew Keen: You—

00:07:44 Isaac Butler: I'm just here for a second. Yeah.

00:07:45 Andrew Keen: That was, J. Edgar from the grave. So you were talking about the CIA funding artists.

00:07:52 Isaac Butler: I'll I'll just start the question again. I'll start the answer again from the beginning so that it's easier to edit. The, the hilarious thing— The— One of the hilarious ironies about what's called the cultural cold war, which is, the CIA's covert efforts to fight the cold war using art is that the CIA is often funding and smoothing the wheels for and helping out artists that the FBI is actually investigating. The reason being that these are artists who stand for the individual, and so they're very useful. The CIA thinks, anyway, they're very useful in a kind of propaganda level, making propaganda that they didn't even know was propaganda because they didn't know where their money was coming from, while the FBI is investigating them. So one of the most famous examples is the CIA helps send Louis Armstrong to Africa, not only while the FBI is looking into him, but while the CIA is also planning to, you know, kill Patrice Lumumba, you know, and knock over several governments in Africa, including the ones that he's touring to. So it's a really, really bizarre

00:09:02 Andrew Keen: What a wonderful world to

00:09:04 Isaac Butler: What a wonderful world indeed. And, of course, Armstrong had no idea any of that stuff was happening. Abstract expressionism, the CIA was a big fan of abstract expressionism even though there's one congressman who says that he thinks, like, drip paintings are secretly maps of US military assets Mhmm. And that the painters are Soviet spies. Right? So it's a very, very strange period. I don't— Let me put it this way. As a historian, you know, a moment of cultural consensus in which there's sort of two clear sides and then some people in the middle is very helpful for narrative terms. I think there are a lot of good and bad things about that period, and about the ideas that were often bandied about and agreed upon. I am definitely not nostalgic for Richard Nixon who— You know, when— I grew up in DC. And when Richard Nixon died, my friend's parents literally were singing ding dong, the witch is dead, and skipping around their living room. So, you know, it's it's not a period that I have a lot of nostalgia for, but it was a period of enormous growth, in both in terms of size and complexity and sophistication of American art in all media, whether it's theater, film, orchestral music, painting, sculpture, etcetera. It was a really great period of American art for sure.

00:10:34 Andrew Keen: And cinema, you've written extensively on that. Yeah. So I don't know. I'm just, throwing something out of thin air. I mean, a movie like Dr. Strangelove, which today seems so radical, back then, whenever it came out in the early sixties, would have been relatively mainstream. Is that fair?

00:10:56 Isaac Butler: I— I'd have to look into Dr. Strangelove, a movie I love, but the, the history of its reception is one that I'm, like, not 100%, versed in. But— Yeah. I mean, you know, it was sort of a— An instant classic. Right? It helps that it's very funny. I think that it's it's it's useful. It's easier to win over people with humor, you know, with the—

00:11:20 Andrew Keen: I'm guessing the guys in the CIA and the FBI wouldn't have found it quite as amusing.

00:11:24 Isaac Butler: May— Maybe not as funny, but I did love, what I— Gentlemen, no fighting in here. This is the war room. [ed.: the line is "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room."] You know? It's, it's a really truly delightful movie, and it has, you know, the great Peter Sellers and Sterling Hayden and stuff like that. What is very interesting, though, in terms of the culture of transgression, which I think is a little bit what you're talking about, is, you know, the late sixties through to the late seventies is that period that we call the New Hollywood. And there's a lot of groundbreaking stuff and a lot of envelope pushing in terms of content work that is going on during that period, with— You know, within Hollywood in part because the rating system has totally changed. There was a thing called the production code that used to regulate content of movies that is done away with by that period. And there's a youth culture that wants to go see those envelope pushing movies. So you can make quite a bit of money doing them. And so that's— It's a really, really interesting period, that ends less because of the religious right and more because of, you know, the era of the blockbuster comes in, and the model of how movies make money radically changes.

00:12:40 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Jaws, of course, being so important. I know that, The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese's great movie from 1988, figures in your narrative. We actually— In the next few days, we have an interview with Mark Binelli, who has a really wonderful new book out on, Scorsese's life in film called Just a Shot Away. So—

00:13:06 Isaac Butler: Great.

00:13:07 Andrew Keen: I take your point very much on the movies. So let's go back to some of the characters in your book. Jesse Helms, you know, the bad guys, Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson. The question I've always wondered, and maybe you can answer this, is what were these guys thinking and doing in the fifties and sixties? Were they as outraged as they seem by the nineteen seventies? Were they busy fiddling in their own lives? Maybe— Well, sometimes rather shamefully. Or what exists is— Because the right seems— And the sort of the cultural right in America seems so ubiquitous now

00:13:50 Isaac Butler: Mhmm.

00:13:50 Andrew Keen: Over the last fifty years, one wonders where it came from and what these people were doing before they became cultural warriors.

00:13:59 Isaac Butler: That's a great— That is a great, great question that I don't have time to probably answer quite fully, but you're you're— There's a lot of really— The religious right was organizing for a really long time before the, you know, kind of liberal mainstream noticed them, and particularly in the nineteen seventies right before the bicentennial, which is actually the what the prologue of my book is about, which is this event in, Kanawha, West Virginia called the Kanawha Textbook War is what people refer to it as, which was in 1974 and 1975, which was a fight over school curriculum that spiraled unbelievably out of control. And the religious right, which was then sort of not even called that, was really heavily involved. And, you know, the liberal establishment was really shocked when all of this happened. And it was sort of like, you know, when you read those, primary sources about the Vikings landing at Lindisfarne. Right? And the English are like, what the heck is going on? Who are these people? Where do they come from? Why are they burning everything? What— You know, it was like that when the— When, 1974, 1975. But then the weird thing is the mainstream sort of kept— It was almost like they kept falling on their head and getting amnesia because a few years later, they would be like, wait. Who are these people? Where did they come from? You know, over and over and over again.

00:15:28 Andrew Keen: Wasn't new. I mean, we've done shows. Many books have been written about the Scopes trial and many other Yeah. Cultural episodes, so to speak, in American history. So I mean, it didn't come from nowhere.

00:15:41 Isaac Butler: It didn't come from nowhere. And, actually, what's really fascinating about the history of the religious right is the modern religious right is really born, you know, as— In— Because of media advocacy, because of the need to get airtime on radio, because more mainstream churches had purposely blocked off essentially, the airwaves from more radical right wing evangelical, whatever you wanna call it, churches. And so they began banding together and forming trade organizations and things like that in order to capture the airwaves. You know, we're talking about before the birth of the FCC. And then slowly from there, they begin building these larger and larger, networks. Jesse Helms got his start in the media. He was a radio host and editor and all sorts of other things like that in North Carolina before he ran for office. And Jesse Helms, I find Jesse Helms fascinating. I mean, I mean, I don't find him likable, to be very clear, but he's a really fascinating figure because he is almost a prophetic genius when it comes to conservative politics. Pat Buchanan said that the two most important conservatives of his life are Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms. And Jesse Helms is the one who very early on— You know, he comes into office in the early seventies. And within his first term, he's saying the future of the Republican Party is evangelical voters. You know, he's running for office talking about how he was personally saved by Jesus Christ and born again. He's speaking that language. He's running on cultural conservative issues. He's running on anti, integration. Of course, he calls it free choice or whatever, but, really, he's running on anti integration, and cultural conservatism. And he breaks with the party in '76 by endorsing Reagan, over Gerald Ford and putting his incredibly powerful North Carolina political operation, which is more powerful than the Republican Party in North Carolina, to work for Reagan. And so he is really brokering this marriage between the Republican Party and the religious right. He helps, you know, what— He— One of his staffers helps found the Moral Majority. You know? So he's really, really deeply involved. And Reagan, wisely, I think, understands that constituency can help blunt Jimmy Carter's advantage in the South, and so he really, really courts them. What's fascinating, though, is that once he gets into the White House, Reagan really doesn't give the religious right very much. He really doesn't. They have the— A list of expectations they have from him as president, and he really does almost none of it. And that is actually one of the sources of the culture wars of the eighties and nineties is an intra Republican fight for power. The religious right begins picking these cultural fights because it helps them build a power base within the Republican party.

00:18:49 Andrew Keen: Interesting. So very different from you know who, these days.

00:18:54 Isaac Butler: Yes. Absolutely. And sure enough, you know, the religious right is not taken particularly seriously and doesn't have a huge constituency when Reagan comes into office. By 2000, their guy, who is an evangelical, is the president. Right? Like, they have completely taken over the Republican party within two years [as spoken: likely "twenty"].

00:19:12 Andrew Keen: I mean, it's just what kind of— We did a show on Phyllis Schlafly who's really working on almost Leninist principles. Maybe that's why Bannon sometimes appears somewhat of a Leninist to this

00:19:24 Isaac Butler: Yeah. Yeah.

00:19:24 Andrew Keen: —total takeover of power. And I guess the origins politically of all this is Barry Goldwater, isn't it?

00:19:31 Isaac Butler: Yeah. I mean, you know, Rick Perlstein has that great book about Barry Goldwater. And, yes, a lot of these people came out of Goldwater. There is this sort of broad term called the new right, which really has its birth in Goldwater. But what's also interesting is the— That a lot of those new right figures were Catholics. And so the other marriage that has to happen is between Catholics and evangelical— You know, right wing Catholics and evangelical protestants. And that is actually one of the main reasons why abortion becomes such a weird huge issue because evangelical Protestants did not actually care about abortion. They adopted it as one of their issues as part of this marriage that got brokered between these two forces.

00:20:20 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And that marriage, I guess, is literally represented now by JD Vance who Yes. Of course. Being an evangelical to a Roman Catholic. So let's look at

00:20:30 Isaac Butler: And let us say, you know, there's probably no group of people who I— I'm more immediately suspicious of than adult converts to cath— Catholicism. I love— There's lots of things about Catholicism I love. It's a beautiful religion. There's lots of incredible art that comes out of it, etcetera, etcetera, and so forth. But the recent track record in American politics of adult Catholics to Catholicism is very scary. Adult converts to Catholicism is very scary.

00:20:56 Andrew Keen: Okay. So we've talked about the right. The subtitle of your book is God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Cultural Wars [as spoken: Culture Wars]. I tend to think sometimes that the progressives see the right as making all the changes and the left, the creative left as being always the same. But I wonder, you mentioned, the birth of, new Hollywood guys like Scorsese who were very, very different from the old Hollywood in their lifestyle and their approach to making films. What also changed, in the seventies and early eighties when it came to the creative community, who for the most part, and correct me if I'm wrong, I'm guessing, were mostly progressive at least politically.

00:21:43 Isaac Butler: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. I mean, art in general in all of its forms is getting more transgressive and more permissive. That's true in literature. That's true in film. That's true in tell— I mean, Norman Lear, you know, is a radical new voice in television and things like All in the Family [unclear]. You know? So there is that going on. But the really big thing that changes and transforms American art into a far more transgressive force

00:22:09 Andrew Keen: And you might define— I mean, that's a long word, Isaac. What does the word transgressive mean to you? Do you

00:22:16 Isaac Butler: Well, that's interesting because I have a whole passage in the book where I discuss this. You know, transgression can mean a lot of different things. It— Here, what I'm talking about is the pushing or crossing of boundaries, whether those are boundaries of propriety and taste or boundaries of form. And in many ways, the history of art over the last couple of centuries is the history of various kinds of transgressions. Right? Someone breaks the rules, and they create a new way of doing art that is incredibly powerful and popular and interesting and incendiary. And then, generally, they become the old guard, and someone else has to break the rules. You know, that's that's you can look at how Manet chose his subjects and how he framed them in his paintings. That was hugely transgressive at the time. We look at those paintings and we don't think that, but it was. Or you look at the abstract expressionist doing away with figuration entirely. Right? So there's all sorts of different kinds of transgression. But in terms of transgressing the proprieties or taste of the audience, that really becomes an important force in art as we get towards the end of the twentieth century. And one of the major reasons why is the AIDS crisis. So what— You know, the AIDS crisis, when it starts really taking off in the eighties, hits the American arts very hard. And it hits them very hard in part because there are lots of LGBTQ Americans in the American arts, and there's lots of sort of, I guess, you might call them outcast type people in the American arts and stuff like that. And so what the— And at the same time, and this is an example of the bad thing in the post war consensus, America kind of agreed to not talk about AIDS, and to blame the victims.

00:24:17 Andrew Keen: And you're very familiar with this. You're the coauthor of a book, The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America. So you, you've you've [unclear] a great deal of thought. You know as much about it as anyone.

00:24:29 Isaac Butler: Yeah. And so, you know, there— You— AIDS Act— You know, the two places where the voices of people with AIDS and the LGBTQ community are heard are the streets in protests and in art. And so they flock to those two places, and their supporters flock to those two places. So there's a lot of art coming out of that period. Um, I don't know if I'm allowed to swear on this podcast.

00:24:51 Andrew Keen: Oh, you are encouraged to.

00:24:52 Isaac Butler: Okay. Great. Great. Fuckety doo. So there's a lot of art during that period that's basically saying, like, no. Fuck you. This society that you've built is killing me and all of my friends, and you need to listen to me. And that's happening in music. That's happening in painting, in theater, in experimental film, and it's happening all over the place.

00:25:10 Andrew Keen: Let me push back a little bit, Isaac, on this. I mean, I take your point on, the transgressive quality of the art you're describing. Yeah. But wasn't the sixties one long decade of— Or short decade of transgression of one kind or other? Politics, culture. I just saw, The Doors, the movie again. I mean, whatever one thinks of Jim Morrison, he personifies transgression. I mean, it's probably both his definition and his limitation. I mean, the riots of the late sixties, the politics, the racial issues. So wasn't the sixties the moment? You— Your book is called The Perfect Moment, but wasn't it the perfectly transgressive moment in American history? Certainly, conservatives would argue that.

00:26:02 Isaac Butler: I mean, the sixties is definitely a moment of huge cultural change caused in part by, a lot of people pushing back at the hyper conservatism of the nineteen fifties. Right? Yeah. You see that all over the place. Again, in music. You see it in painting. I mean, we don't think of Warhol as transgressive, but pop art was transgressive. You know? Etcetera, etcetera, and so forth. My book is called The Perfect Moment for a few different reasons. One of them is that is the name of the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective that is a major part of the book. Roughly half the book is about that retrospective. So it takes its title from that Mapplethorpe retrospective, but it is also that all of these various forces converge in this very particular way in this exact time. It's not the only culture war America has had. America's had culture wars since its founding. This is the first period of time where someone coins the term the culture wars to describe what is going on.

00:27:06 Andrew Keen: Who coined it? Was it the left or the right?

00:27:08 Isaac Butler: It was, I'll get you his name right now. It was a, social scientist named, James Davison Hunter who wrote a book called Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. But, fascinatingly, the person who popularized the term is Pat Buchanan, because Pat Buchanan accurately saw that the fight over the destiny of America's culture was the big fight of the early nineteen nineties once the cold war had ended. And he gives this speech in 1992 at the Republican National Convention calling for a new culture war that is

00:27:45 Andrew Keen: Yeah. His culture war speech. Even Wikipedia has that. So,

00:27:49 Isaac Butler: Exactly. Exactly. So, so the reason why I call it the birth of the culture wars is it's— It is the time that we call the culture wars. It's the first one of them. It's sort of— I call it in the book World War I of culture to today's World War II. So maybe that makes, the sixties, the Franco-Prussian War, the Russo-Japanese War. I don't know. But, but it's not that there aren't those wars and times of conflict before. It's that there's a specific thing going on in the eighties and nineties that ropes the government in as well, then where it becomes, like, really this issue that is redefining how the government approaches American culture.

00:28:32 Andrew Keen: Yeah. So as you put it, the culture wars always existed. They just— People didn't use that term because after all, Buchanan was best known, at least originally, for writing a lot of Nixon speeches were about— Which were about culture wars. But they just didn't use the term.

00:28:50 Isaac Butler: They didn't use that term, and it wasn't thought of in exactly the same way where the cultural— Where cultural stuff like, Sister Souljah or, you know, to Ellen coming out of the closet on the sitcom Ellen or whatever it is, where those are, like, hot button political issues. They are proxy wars for what is going on politically.

00:29:15 Andrew Keen: So you said you've you've— You have a whole chapter in the book, The Perfect Moment, on Mapplethorpe.

00:29:22 Isaac Butler: Yeah. I have a few.

00:29:23 Andrew Keen: Yeah. The American photographer and artist. Tell me more about him and why he's so symbolic of what happened. More than symbolic. I mean,

00:29:32 Isaac Butler: You know, Robert Mapplethorpe is a really fascinating, figure because he did more than just about anyone to make the photographic print a thing that is taken seriously as a work of visual art. There's a few other people too, but he is really instrumental in making photography, its own art taken seriously as its own art form. Off— Like, so for in the set— For example, in the seventies, there's a lot of photography that's used in conceptual art, but it's rarely just the photograph or the photograph is the record of a thing that has happened somewhere else. You know, like, you've done a sort of live spontaneous performance art piece, and the way you recorded it was in photographs. So in the museum, they'll show those photographs. But those photographs aren't art. They're the record of a work of art. And so Mapplethorpe really pushes, photography into the high art discourse, into the high art, realm. But what's also interesting is he has this period— Various periods in his career where he's doing really sexually explicit work, where he's doing, in the seventies, it's a series of photographs of gay men, engaged in S&M practices. And I should say these are not sexy photographs even if you're into those fetishes. They're very carefully posed. They're very carefully lit. They're like sculptures. They're very carefully retouched. But they're they're about, S&M practices, some of which I think still today would read as pretty extreme. And then there's other periods in his career where he's taking photos. He gets obsessed with black men and their erect penises. And so there's a lot of those kinds of photos as well. And there's a lot of nudes in his photographs just like there's nudes in, you know, any portraiture. And so, shortly before he died, there was a retrospective of his work called The Perfect Moment. He died, you know, shortly after it began, of AIDS. And, it was touring the country to various places and was directly funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. And, eventually, it touches down in Washington DC, or it's supposed to touch down in Washington DC at the now defunct Corcoran Gallery of Art. And right before it was set to open, the Corcoran Gallery of Art canceled the show out of fear of political, reprisals, basically, because the right had been grumbling about this Mapplethorpe exhibit because of these sexually explicit photos that were in it. And, that really became like a major national front page news issue that went on and on for a very long time. Eventually, the, exhibit was picked up by another gallery in DC called the Washington Project for the Arts. But then— And this is why it surfaces later in the book. When the show went to Cincinnati, the, it led to the first ever indictment of a museum and its director for obscenity for the art that was on the walls. The— They actually went to trial over pandering obscenity for showing these photographs.

00:32:58 Andrew Keen: Do you think it would be fair to suggest that there was somewhat of a symbolic, a symbiotic relationship between characters like Mapplethorpe and Helms that they got pleasure out of outraging each other.

00:33:19 Isaac Butler: Well, we know that Jesse Helms actually really kind of enjoyed playing this game because there's lots of different interviews where people will talk about that. You know, if you went into Jesse Helms' office, he would pull out the Mapplethorpe catalog, and he would flip to

00:33:33 Andrew Keen: His penises, were they?

00:33:35 Isaac Butler: Yeah. And he'd flip to his favorite outrageous photos of, you know, a guy peeing in another guy's mouth or whatever. He'd be like, ho ho ho. Look at this photo. This is a real bad one. And he'd show it to people, and he'd giggle about it. So yeah, but, you know, people ask me if I think Helms was really offended by this stuff, and I think Helms was having the time of his fucking life, honestly. In terms of

00:33:53 Andrew Keen: And the [unclear], I mean, again, coming back to J. Edgar, of course Yeah. Is the epitome of the closeted conservative Washington establishment. I don't know what Jesse Helms' private life was like, but are there question marks about him, what he really got up to at night in Washington, DC?

00:34:14 Isaac Butler: No. Not about him. I mean, there are other figures on the right and the religious right, you know, throughout this period who— There are those question marks. But— No. I mean, he was— As far as we know, he was, you know, happily married just for life. But, you know, that symbiotic relationship thing is a really interesting question. I interviewed a lot of the artists who were involved in these controversies, and all of them would say— You know, almost all of them would say, like, look. It was not my intent to have the government come after me, and there were ways in which it helped my career and ways in which it hurt my career. And it was very, very difficult for me personally. So they would have people say to them like, oh, isn't it great your show's in the New York Times because Jesse Helms went after it? And they'd be like, actually, it kinda sucks. I'm not gonna lie. So for example, you might get to play a bigger venue as a performance artist, but now you have to hire security all the time. You know? The one artist I spoke to who would say it absolutely changed my career for the better was Andres Serrano, who actually— His controversy comes up right before

00:35:21 Andrew Keen: This is a [unclear] photographer and artist.

00:35:24 Isaac Butler: And the photographer, he has this amazing, brilliant photograph called Piss Christ that, gets, that gets in some hot water, gets the NEA in hot water shortly before the Mapplethorpe retrospective. And, you know, when Andres Serrano took that photograph, he— His income was, like, $5,000 a year working off the books construction. Then he gets denounced in congress. And by the end of the year, he has a, like, a real career as an artist that's lasted to this day. And so he absolutely is like that controversy made my career. And in fact, in 2000, he sent Jesse Helms a thank you letter.

00:36:02 Andrew Keen: And what did Jesse say?

00:36:04 Isaac Butler: Jesse Helms never responded to it. He wanted to do a portrait. He was doing a portrait series called The Americans, and he wanted to take a portrait of Jesse Helms. And in the letter asking if he could do that, he's— He sent him a thank you letter. But Helms at that point was, like, not particularly well and did not respond to it.

00:36:20 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Didn't Helms live till he was about 100? [ed.: Helms died in 2008, aged 86.]

00:36:23 Isaac Butler: I mean, I don't know. It's like— I don't— Yeah. They run on, they run on evil. Anyway, so, yeah, they seem to live forever, those guys.

00:36:31 Andrew Keen: So, Isaac, you wrote an interesting, piece on your Substack recently arguing that the government should fund offensive art, which, of course, will certainly have Jesse Helms turning in his grave, was a lot of the debate about the fact that artists like Mapplethorpe and Serrano were getting government funding. So it wasn't so much of a moral debate. It was more a debate about where the money for art should come from.

00:37:02 Isaac Butler: Well, that's what people said, but that's not actually true. They did not want this art being made if they could help it, and this was the best way to try to impact that art and keep it from being made. There were some people for whom this was more of a libertarian, issue who were part of the right, who just felt like the government shouldn't be funding art at all or were about sort of propriety. But what the religious right was really trying to do was keep work they disapproved of out of the public square at all costs, just like they had tried and failed to do with The Last Temptation of Christ. The my— The argument that I make in that Substack piece is that if you're gonna have the government funding culture, you don't want the government dictating what that culture is. That's actually very dangerous. You want what the NEA classically was, which is what's called the kind of arms length or hands off model, which is we use nonpartisan experts in the field, not government bureaucrats, to decide who gets the money and where the money goes, and then we do not dictate the content of that work to them. And once they have the grants, they can make the work. And, I really believe in that. I believe that's actually very important from a free speech perspective. And I also think you can just sort of look at the results and look at the flourishing under— Of American art, for the thirty five or so years or forty years between when the NEA was founded and when the first culture wars ended. And that system worked. That system worked very well.

00:38:38 Andrew Keen: So is there a connection between these culture wars you write about, what you call the first culture wars, and today with Trump shutting or trying to shut the Kennedy Center, Musk trying to decimate the American state with his DOGE initiative? Have we seen the, the destruction, if you like, of the consensus that you talked about at the beginning of these conversations over the last fifty years?

00:39:11 Isaac Butler: Well, the postwar consensus is dead by the end of the nineteen nineties. And in fact, by the early nineteen nineties, it's really gone. It gets replaced sort of by this, it's actually called a different kind of consensus. It's called the Washington Consensus, which is basically neoliberalism. That is basically the Washington consensus, that comes to take its place over the course of the Clinton presidency. And, again, has its positive and negative aspects. I'm definite— And that consensus is actually falling apart under both Biden and Trump who are both, you know, very skeptical on a policy level of neoliberalism. The deep connection between the culture wars of the eighties and nineties and the culture wars of today are twofold. One is the legacy of the religious right having so much power over the Republican Party, and the other is actually more about tactics. It's about the tactics the right uses during that period of time and how they refine those tactics and learn how they work, and then those get kind of supersized or injected with metabolic [as spoken] steroids or whatever metaphor you wanna use under, under Trump. So, you know, a perfect example of that is the thing that Trump and Musk kept doing over pulling funding. They really learn in the eighties and nineties that, you can use money really coercively. You don't have to make a law that says you can't say x, y, or z. You just get rid of people's funding if they do say x, y, and z, and then suddenly everyone will censor themselves. You know? It's an incredibly effective tool of coercion, and we see that really, in the second Trump term. We see that thing all the time. We also see the particular way that the Republican party and the religious right and conservatives and stuff pick these fights, which is, like, you know, this overly performative offense, that then tries to move the moral high ground on their side. So it's not about free expression, but it's about hurt feelings and all this stuff. You know, they've really figured out how to play that game.

00:41:23 Andrew Keen: And they've turned it into a form of art.

00:41:25 Isaac Butler: They've turned it into a form of art. And also, they—

00:41:28 Andrew Keen: And a very offensive form, I think.

00:41:30 Isaac Butler: Yeah. And also, you know, the stacking of what were supposed to be nonpartisan organizations and boards and committees with, party hacks. You know, those are all the kinds of tactics that they're using over and over and over again during this period, and they're getting better and better and better at it. And we see now the payoff of them learning those lessons in the eighties and nineties.

00:41:56 Andrew Keen: Was there a split within the transgressive— Or the artistic community, the— What you call this transgressive movement of one kind or another, between those who had some faith in what you call neoliberal economics and those who still relied on the state. In other words, you know, there's the argument that if an artist's any good, they'll sell their stuff in galleries or online, and they'll survive. There's no real role for the state, whereas the other argument is, as you say, the state should fund offensive art. All too often, offensive art is very hard to support, in market terms. So in other words, did this these culture wars, did they split the creative community?

00:42:47 Isaac Butler: Not that much. I would say there were some artists who were like— You know, especially once the government actually does institute some vaguely worded decency regulations, there are some artists who are basically like, well, there's no way I'm applying to the government for money anymore. You know? I would rather get a day job, and some artists do go get day jobs and stuff. So that's that's part of it. There are some artists who just sort of feel like this isn't the government's place. It will inevitably lead to censorship. You know, you've gotta keep your freedom. The cream rises to the top, you know, etcetera, etcetera, and so forth. For the most part, though, actually, you know, there's a deep feeling of mourning by the end of the nineties when the Supreme Court case, Finley v. United States [ed.: the case is National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley (1998)] is resolved in the government's favor. There's a real deep mourning about what's happening— What happens to the NEA, just like— And we're feeling that again now with what Trump has done to the NEA, in his second term. I think the history of art demonstrates pretty conclusively that the marketplace is not actually a great arbiter of, artistic work. Sometimes it's great. Sometimes it's not. You know what I mean? And the NEA was never founded to replace the marketplace. The NEA was founded to be another— Like, a counterbalance to the market. Right? So you have the market, you have donors and foundations, and then you have the government. And they all kind of balance each other out so you have a more diverse funding ecosystem, which leads to a much richer artistic landscape. And, again, I think the proof is in the pudding. And if you look at post war American art, you know, you're looking at an example of how that system really, really worked.

00:44:26 Andrew Keen: Looking back, we have almost fifty years now, of hindsight, Isaac. You talked about Mapplethorpe and Serrano coming to fame because of Jesse Helms. There is the conservative critique, maybe not the evangelical critique. The law of this art is just sensationalist. Right. How does it look now? When we look back, I mean, there are a lot of artists. It's not just Mapplethorpe and Serrano. I know in the book, you talk about a lot of others, David Wojnarowicz. I'm gonna pronounce— How do you pronounce his name? David? Wojnarowicz. Sometimes people Wojnarowicz. Wojnarowicz. And so it—

00:45:09 Isaac Butler: Yeah. Well, I have heard it a bunch of different play— Ways. I say David Wojnarowicz. Some people pronounce that first w as a soft v, but I say David Wojnarowicz.

00:45:18 Andrew Keen: Wait. Wait. David Wojnarowicz, artists like Karen Finley. How does it look? Was this a golden age of American creativity in your view?

00:45:27 Isaac Butler: Well, it's it's interesting. I mean, there's a lot of work that comes out of roughly the AIDS crisis era that is truly brilliant. David Wojnarowicz is probably— Is more popular and famous today than he ever was during his lifetime. I actually just bought a print of one of his, works from the foundation, recently. But, you know, he had this— There was, a Whitney retrospective of his work in 2018 and a documentary about a year or two later. The original title of which— They've changed the title. When I tell you the title, you'll see why. The original title of which was Fuck You Faggot Fucker because that was the name of one of his paintings. Mhmm. But, now it's just called Wojnarowicz, I think. He's more popular and famous and important as an artist now than he ever was during his lifetime. Andres Serrano has had a long career of brilliant, brilliant work. I actually don't like Robert Mapplethorpe's work very much, but he was a superstar during his life, and he remains a superstar today. There's a lot of great plays and works of theater that come out of the AIDS crisis. The most important one being, of course, Angels in America, which I wrote my first book about. Performance art is a really tricky beast when you wanna talk about standing the test of time because performance art is deliberately made to be immediate and live and ephemeral and for the audience that is right there. So I find it hard to judge the work of a lot of performance artists because, like, we're— We just live in a different time. Like, this work is made to be immediate and instant. But I do think that particularly the work of, Holly Hughes and Tim Miller, I haven't seen that much of John Fleck, but I think Holly Hughes and Tim Miller's work is— Are both really incredible. If you get a chance to read, their work has been published pretty, in a few books, and it's really beautiful. But not every performance artist's work has aged well because that wasn't really the point. Do you know what I mean?

00:47:33 Andrew Keen: I guess that's the nature of art in any period. You've been very— Sorry. Go on.

00:47:38 Isaac Butler: No. No. So I'm just saying there is a lot of great art that comes out of that period. There's also a lot of great— You know, I think Die Hard is great. You know what I mean? Like, Die Hard's not trying to address the AIDS crisis. Die Hard's a pretty conservative, action movie, but I love Die Hard. So, you know, I— It's not only the stuff on the fringes that's that's interesting during the nineteen eighties.

00:48:00 Andrew Keen: You've been very generous with your time, and I don't wanna eat into, so to speak, your dinner with your daughter. So final question. You mentioned, your book, The World Only Spins Forward, about Angels in America. One of the characters— One of the real characters in Angels in America is Roy Cohn, who, of course, taught Donald Trump all his dirty tricks, another Yes. Unusual character. I looked him up in the index for The Perfect Moment. He doesn't appear in that, although he might do in a weird kind of way. Yeah.

00:48:31 Isaac Butler: I mean, Roy Cohn's a really— I mean, how much time you got to talk about Roy Cohn is totally fascinating.

00:48:37 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I didn't wanna have a Roy Cohn conversation, but my Yeah. Maybe another time, maybe we can even talk about the new Roy Cohn book. But my question is, what is the perfect final question, a big question, Isaac? What is The Perfect Moment, this history of America's first cultural wars? What should it teach progressives about the current moment, not the perfect moment in American culture and politics given the opportunities and perhaps some people might argue the dangers of reacting against MAGA as the Democrats begin to figure out their strategy for 2028 Mhmm. And to challenge what has happened certainly over the last four years. Should this book in a way be read as a kind of warning about going too far on the cultural front, or is it really just a book about culture rather than politics?

00:49:41 Isaac Butler: No. No. It's very much a book about politics, and I learned a lot. And I think some of my views about politics and how it works changed or were refined or— I don't know, but I definitely emerge from it a kind of, different person in a lot of ways, when it comes to politics. I mean, I'm a very political person. I grew up in Washington, DC. My dad worked for NASA. You know, when you let— You know, when you live in DC, it's like everyone subscribes to three newspapers and, you know, like, you know, it was one of those MacNeil/Lehrer was on the news. The news was on every day when I came home. We listened to NPR as we commuted in and out to school. So I've always— And the AIDS crisis was going on. So politics has always been deeply important to me. I think— And we see the Democrats making this mistake a little bit today, and we saw this mistake made a lot during this latest Trump administration the last two years. There is this tendency when you're dealing with people like Trump, and they're making these crazy demands to give them a little bit of what they want or to cave a little bit to compromise to make your— To let some steam out of the system and also to make yourself look reasonable. You see that again and again in my book. And when you're dealing with bad faith actors like Trump, for example, or just anyone actually in today's Republican party, that strategy actually doesn't work. What it does is embolden them because you're signaled weakness. It's sort of like, you know, when a bully tells you to get out of your— Out of his way in the hallway at school and you do it, the next day, he's gonna ask for your lunch money. Right? And it's only gonna escalate from there. They are gangsters at heart, and it's a gangster mentality. So over the course of the culture wars in my book, almost every time the right goes after someone and the artist or the administrator or the government official, whatever, is like, actually, you're full of shit. Go fuck yourself. We win. Most of the losses happen as the result of preemptively compromising when threatened. And so— And this is a big mistake Obama made a lot over the course of his presidency too. So I think that when it comes to culture and picking fights about culture or whatever, this is a very difficult time because the right will pick a fight over anything. You know, there was a day when everyone on the Internet was talking about whether Miller Lite was the true beverage of the working class or whatever the fuck. Right? And so you can't get roped into every stupid fight. You do have to choose your battles. But if you're gonna choose your battles, you have to really fight them. And what's really scary right now, watching the Democrats run for congress, is what's happening with trans rights and how the Democratic Party is preemptively caving and selling out trans Americans and their rights, in the hopes of winning office, over and over and over again. I don't think there's any evidence thus far that it is actually working. I think it is largely unnecessary. There are some places in the country where I think it's more understandable than others, but I think it's largely unnecessary. And what you're really signaling is that you don't stand for anything. If you hate trans people, you're not gonna vote for James Talarico no matter—or no matter what he says. Do you know what I mean? And so, there's a real thing in the Democratic Party of trying to cave on stuff that you think is low hanging fruit. And, it doesn't really work. And if anything, it emboldens the other side to go after you more. In terms of activists in the progressive field, I think that what the, my story really shows, pretty clearly is the necessity of long term organizing. By the time the arts world and liberals were trying to fight back or about the religious right, they were trying to, like, do this in a— On an ad hoc basis while the religious right has had decades to plan for it. And, the hope was in the twenty first century that the arts and the left would do a meaningful job of organizing to try to create a new constituency around the arts as part of the progressive program, and they didn't. And that's part of how we've gotten to where we are today. So there's a short term and a long term thing, really, that I think are at the heart of my book.

00:54:13 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I think— Yeah. I'm not sure if you've seen Jacob Weisberg's new book, Profiles in Cowardice. I think you're very much on the same page as him. Finally, finally, I gotta ask one more question. What about on the cultural front? You're you're a— You described, you have seventeen day jobs. You're a— You're an artist as much as a historian. Yeah. You were one of the authors of Real Enemies that, that brought conspiracy theories and paranoia to the stage. What about the challenge for artists in the age of MAGA and Trump where— And we've had so many shows on this, where reality is so absurd, so ludicrous. I mean, what would someone like Mapplethorpe be if he was around today? What kind of art? It's not it's not so much possible, but what are the artistic opportunities? Or what are the opportunities for creatives in our bizarre world?

00:55:14 Isaac Butler: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I will say that there's often a lot of really bad, political art out there. I mean, there's a lot of really bad art all the time. Most art is bad. That's been true throughout the history of the world. Right? But bad political art tends to happen when, artists feel— And it's usually in internal to themselves kind of compelled or a pressure to make work about politics even though they don't have anything particularly interesting. They don't have any particularly interesting questions that they're mulling over and thinking about while doing it. They just feel like duty bound to do it. You can kind of tell because there's a hollowness and a simplicity to the work and its thinking. But there are a lot of artists making really interesting work right now about, what's what's going on in our country. I just saw this play a couple weeks ago in New York. It's closing soon. It's called Degenerates, and it is a play about incels. It's about an online community of, of incels who have a kinda— You know, who, and a lot of the play is they're like Discord chats, but acted out as if they're scenes. That's an amazing play that is trying to look at what the Internet has done to men and what the Internet is doing to our politics, but it's still rooted in the characters and these really human questions of, like, how does someone go awry? I look at a movie, like, you know, I just saw You Can See Everything last night, which is setting the world on fire.

00:56:40 Andrew Keen: I don't think— Which is in a way— Maybe we'll do another show on that, which is astonishing on many different levels.

00:56:46 Isaac Butler: On many different levels. Right? And one of them is a political level about lies. I mean, the— It's questions about lies and the truth are political even though it's not a work of agitprop. It's not a work with a political message. There is a lot of interesting work happening out there. What I have seen a lot of that makes me excited is because the world is so fucking crazy right now. A lot of that work, You Can See Everything's a perfect example of this, is taking these big formal swings. You know? It's really trying to stretch the bounds of what you can do on the stage or in the frame in these way— Or on the page in these ways that I find really exciting. That's when it gets really exciting, when you care as much about the artistry as you do about the theme. Degenerates is another perfect example of that. So I do think there's exciting work out there to be found. There's lots of bad work too, but that but that's always the case. You know?

00:57:42 Andrew Keen: Right. If you want exciting historical work, Isaac Butler's new book, The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars is really important in both in documentary terms, but also because it's beautifully written. And as you can tell from this conversation, written by a man of great cultural sensitivity. Isaac, thank you so much. And we'll get you back to— We— I'd— Actually, maybe we could do a whole show on recent movies. Have you seen the Musk movie?

00:58:12 Isaac Butler: I have not seen it yet. I feel like I know so much about Elon Musk. I just— And it's so long. And as a pair— As a working parent, it's like, when am I gonna have the hours, to see it? But, I mean, if you— I'm happy to watch it as a homework assignment to come on and talk about it if you'd like.

00:58:31 Andrew Keen: Well, yeah. I'll take you up on that. So we'll see you again very soon, Isaac Butler. Thank you so much.

00:58:36 Isaac Butler: Absolutely. Thank you. Have a good one.