The author and environmentalist Wallace Stegner called our national parks “America’s best idea”.
Certainly, these jewels – 85m acres of parkland throughout all the 50 states – are beloved by the public. So are America’s public libraries, arts organizations and museums.
But that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from threatening or harming them.
These institutions are under siege. They are hurt by deep funding cuts, the loss or bullying of public employees and, in some cases, by threats of extinction.
Why would any politician – especially one as hungry for adulation as Donald Trump – go after such cherished parts of America?
It seems counterintuitive, but this is all a part of a broad plan that the great 20th-century political thinker Hannah Arendt would have understood all too well.
Take away natural beauty, free access to books and support for the arts, and you end up with a less enlightened, more ignorant and less engaged public. That’s a public much more easily manipulated.
“A people that can no longer believe in anything cannot make up its mind,” said Arendt, a student of authoritarianism, in 1973. Eventually, such a public “is deprived … of its ability to think and judge”, and with people like that, “you can then do what you please”.
That’s what Trump and company are counting on.
It’s also part of the effort to divide Americans into two tribes – the elites and the regular folks, the blue and the red, the drivers of dorky hybrid sedans and the drivers of oversized pickup trucks.
The arts and nature, by contrast, serve to unite us. When you’re admiring a redwood or gazing at the Grand Canyon, you’re neither Republican nor Democrat. The same goes for listening to a beautiful piece of new music or choosing library books to read with your children.
But division and grievance serve Trump better. And so, we have the attacks on marginalized people, on university research, and the performing arts, often in the guise of eliminating waste or discriminatory hiring practices.
“The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history and science,” Adam Serwer wrote in the Atlantic recently in a much-discussed piece describing “the attack on knowledge”, putting in broad context Trump’s defunding of universities and attempts to discourage international scholarship.
What’s really going on is a long-term power grab.
In crippling learning, beauty and culture Trump and his helpers “seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination”.
When it comes to the parks, as the Guardian’s Annette McGivney reported recently, the harm is well under way.
Thousands of staffing cuts mean that many parks lack adequate supervision, that campgrounds are closed and that the care of precious natural resources is neglected.
Again, it’s by design, as the former national parks director Jonathan Jarvis told McGivney.
“There are ideologues who want to dismantle the federal government,” Jarvis said. “And the last thing they need is a highly popular federal agency that undermines their argument about how the government is dysfunctional.”
Mark Nebel, a longtime manager of a program at the Grand Canyon, and a true believer in the value of national parks, spoke about the personal toll.
“The Trump administration says this is all about efficiency, but it is nothing of the sort,” said Nebel, who became demoralized at the harm being done and abruptly resigned.
Reducing government waste may sound good but it looks more like willful destruction.
Among the many agencies that are under attack are the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. These organizations provide crucial support for public libraries and museums, grants to artists and writers, and much more.
They make us better as a people. They uplift us. Like the parks, they can bring beauty into our lives. And as the poet John Keats wrote, beauty and truth are inseparable.
But truth is only trouble for the would-be autocrat.
And truth itself is under attack, as Trump – a prolific liar – tries to control the message to the public by controlling the reality-based press. That’s how successful propaganda works.
Toward that end, his administration is trying to defund public media, including NPR and PBS, and – partly through lawsuits against media organizations including CBS News and ABC News – to intimidate journalists and their corporate bosses.
A more ignorant, less enlightened, more divided electorate is far easier to manipulate. And the power grab, after all, is the larger aim.
Once that power is fully secured, there is no one left to challenge the endless grift and self-dealing that is a hallmark of this administration – the sale of meme coins, the pay-to-play pardons of criminals and the cultivation of rich guys and their fat wallets.
The diminishment of truth and beauty is part of a long game, but one that doesn’t have to prevail.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
