We Need New Art—Imagining a Path Beyond Trumpism | Opinion

I no longer have a taste for dystopian novels. During Donald Trump's last term, friends referenced Handmaid's Tale, ad nauseam. As a reporter, I covered women escaping abuse in high-control religion; I didn't need to read the fictional version. I've picked up and stopped reading Parable of the Sower more times than I can count. Narratives of societal collapse ring too close.

Over recent weeks, Donald Trump has, through executive order, dismantled key government agencies and begun a project of erasing Black, female, queer, and other people from our public-facing history. Veterans' hospitals face staffing shortages. DOGE cuts threaten aviation safety and Social Security benefits. Pentagon officials inadvertently texted war plans to the editor of The Atlantic. We've lost normal relations with Canada.(Canada!) It's been a little over two months.

Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works, is moving to Toronto. He said he wants to raise his kids in a country that "is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship."

Don't we all?

There's no need to read dystopias. We're living it. Immigrant students and scholars are being sent to and detained in remote facilities in the South, some over participation in pro-Palestinian protests. U.S. citizens planning to join anti-Trump and anti-Elon Musk protests are encouraging one another to use burner phones to protect themselves from improper searches. (This, in America, a country with First and Fourth Amendment rights.) Elon Musk keeps giving away million-dollar checks in an effort to swing elections. Trump has ordered the Department of Education closed.

Yes, the chaos of the moment is by design. For as much as the creative class is often associated with liberal thinking, the American far-right (and its grassroots, the Christian Right) has, through callous striving and norm-shattering effort, been motivated by a spark of Machiavellian imagination.

The Heritage Foundation, now a household name due to Project 2025, has been organizing for conservative policies, deregulation, and a right-leaning U.S. Supreme Court for 50 years. Finally, it's efforts are coming to fruition, embodied in Trump's policies. The Supreme Court's Citizen's United ruling blew open the doors for corporate, billionaire-funded and dark money-fueled elections. Corporate consolidation of local news has created news deserts across Middle America, leaving a gap where Fox News or MSNBC offer a flavor of news curated to the viewers' worldview. Thanks to the 2010 Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP) program to redraw districts, formerly purple states like Ohio have become increasingly gerrymandered so that the most extreme-right figures benefit.

"Regular" America has been effectively squashed by greed and those who could better execute a power-grab. All of this has been met by a Democratic Party that often can't find its voice or articulate a method for accomplishing an alternative. Senator Cory Booker's marathon speech was a needed departure for a resistance that needs new inspiration.

Trump, a propagandist with reality TV pedigree, will keep telling us the U.S. is better for his orders whatever their impact.

It is likely no coincidence that Trump has made himself head of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, ousting all Biden appointees. Art can be weaponized. In Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, cultural initiatives drove artists to assist in a project of "racially pure" European society—soft power that tried to redefine Europe's history and character.

Those who do not serve the state's purposes get silenced by authoritarians.

Monday, all staff at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which funds museums and libraries, were placed on administrative leave. The goal is to stop funding what one Trump official called "discriminatory DEI initiatives" and "divisive, anti-American programming in our cultural institutions."

Yet when culture is forced underground, artists still find a way. In Chile, under Augusto Pinochet, women used traditional tapestries (arpilleras) to document "the disappeared," people they loved who were jailed or killed. The government called the arpilleras defamatory; women worked anonymously to avoid punishment but got their message across.

A needed ingredient in the resistance right now is the voice of (small-d) democratic imagination. A creative charge to overcome the numbing headlines. The writers helping us picture a U.S. freed from the oppression of unconstitutional political power. Guerilla artists, tagging walls at each place ICE has snatched apart families. Resistance music, bolstering a defiantly patriotic soundtrack for those assembling at hundreds of protests this weekend and beyond.

Art, music, and rich writing give us reason to fight, to strive for a freer tomorrow.

As we fling our arms wide, trying to protect so many other imperiled classes of Americans, artists, writers, and musicians need safe harbor too, because we need them to fortify the best legal and political minds of our generation, each sparking a path forward for the other.

Dystopia is a warning, a sort of premonition. We are past the horizon of dark predictions.

People in darkness require light—vision, and an inspired plan.

Sarah Stankorb is the author of the national best-seller Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors, and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Slate, The Atlantic, Marie Claire, and many other publications.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.