In the ongoing appropriations battles on Capitol Hill, there was good news last week. House Republicans found the nerve to take substantial steps toward eliminating two government programs.
One of them is the National Endowment for the Arts. The case for dismantling the NEA is familiar to anyone who has heard the word ” Mapplethorpe.” It’s badly managed, it funds occasionally raunchy and often third-rate projects, and in crucial ways its continuing influence is unhealthy for the arts as a whole.
It’s hard to make such a case against the other program Republicans targeted, however — the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Having somehow resisted the p.c. trendiness that has contaminated the academy, the Wilson Center, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, remains one of the few havens for disinterested scholarship in the country. Its flagship publication, the Wilson Quarterly, likewise is one of the few scholarly magazines not given over to cant — see, for example, its recent celebration of the Victorian virtues or its cluster of articles, last winter, on “What’s Wrong with the American University.”
Let’s be clear: In the ideal limited government that conservatives envision, there may well be no room for a government-funded Wilson Center. But if it has to go, there are dozens — scores! — of obnoxious programs that should go with it. In their lack of discrimination, House Republicans call to mind Evelyn Waugh’s famous comment on the surgeon who removed a benign tumor from Randolph Churchill. “It was a typical triumph of modern science,” said Waugh, “to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.”
