As the right wing wins one political victory after another, artists rush to present themselves as the vanguard of the resistance. It was one of the defining trends of the first Donald Trump administration. Musician Amanda Palmer said at a 2016 press conference in Queensland, Australia that “If the political climate keeps getting uglier, the art will have to answer. We will have to fight.” In 2017, Slate suggested we “resist Islamophobia” by reading a “gay Muslim furry romance” novel. That same year, Pompeu Fabra University philosophy professor Santiago Zabala claimed that aesthetic forces could “disrupt not only capitalism’s indefinite reproduction but also realism’s metaphysical impositions” in his book Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency. During the temporary lull of the Joe Biden administration, the Washington Post figured out how to heal our divided nation: watching WandaVision and other superhero media, which could apparently “teach us how to come together again.” 

Politicians got in on the action. After Stacey Abrams lost the Georgia gubernatorial election to Republican Brian Kemp in 2018, she pivoted to a new, imaginary political career as the president of United Earth on Star Trek: Discovery, a show which also name-dropped Elon Musk as one of humankind’s greatest inventors. In the real world, Abrams ran against Kemp a second time in 2022. She lost again, by a much larger margin. Art, it turned out, was no substitute for actual politics.

Now that Trump has returned, our nation’s content creators are scrambling to resist him even harder, with even more powerful stories—because stories are weapons, as io9 blog editor Annalee Newitz argues in her 2024 book Stories Are Weapons. Early this year, children’s author Phil Bildner heroically took to Bluesky to tell us to buy books, because “buying books is resistance.” On January 6, 2025, the fourth anniversary of the Capitol riot, sci-fi/fantasy publishing powerhouse Tor invited us to bask in some “fight the empire energy” by purchasing between one and five recommended young adult adventure novels. One week later, New York Times bestselling editor John Joseph Adams leaped into action, launching an Indiegogo campaign for a fiction anthology titled Protest 2025: Stories Against Tyranny, designed to “protest, resist, and survive Donald Trump’s 2nd term.” The project closed after raising $1,306 of its $50,000 goal.

This is nothing new. The art world has fought against the forces of oppression for ages. Weimar-era Germany was a hotbed for bold, fresh art, between Berlin’s thriving cabaret scene and subversive Expressionist films like Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Pacifist art blossomed during and after the first World War. Kurt Vonnegut said of the 1960s, “Every respectable artist in this country was against the [Vietnam] war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

Art did not save them. It will not save us. So why do we keep thinking it will?

Artists and Power

Authoritarians always attack artists. The Nazis denounced so-called “degenerate art” for its innovative style as well as its daring content. Pinochet’s goons tortured and executed folk singer Víctor Jara; the musician wrote his last song lyrics with broken wrists. Ronald Reagan bolstered his career by ratting on leftist filmmakers to the House Un-American Activities Committee. A major project of today’s technocratic right is to build AI content generators to render artists obsolete.

If every terrible regime treats artists like a threat, artists naturally start to believe it. If the government is afraid of you, it stands to reason that you must be powerfully dangerous. But that’s assuming authoritarians are driven by reason. They often aren’t. Since the fall of the Roman Empire, most authoritarians have tended to ban gay sex. But having gay sex will not defeat fascism. Reactionaries in the English-speaking world fear certain kinds of food: spice will overexcite the nervous system, soybeans will turn you into a woman, or seed oils will make you gay. But consuming tofu burritos will not defeat fascism.

In truth, artists, like exotic foods, have a more complicated relationship with power. Yes, art often flourishes among society’s undesirables: queers, failsons, the mentally ill, cultural and ethnic minorities. And, yes, artists often do belong to subversive political movements.

Illustration by Ben Clarkson

But those same artists often belong to the privileged classes that have much to lose in a revolution, too. It takes resources to make art. Paint isn’t cheap. Musical instruments and recording equipment don’t grow on trees. Movies cost a lot of money. Even writing—arguably the cheapest art form—requires free time, education, and a room of one’s own to work in. It’s easier to access these resources if you have some proximity to power or wealth. And if you have these things, you might not want society to change all that much, since it’s working pretty well for you.

And then you’ve got to get your art in front of people. Publishers, record companies, gallery owners, and so on can reject your work because it doesn’t meet their taste, or they think it will be hard to sell. You must appeal to them before you can reach your intended audience. And these gatekeepers might not like anything too radical. Director Ali Abbasi struggled to find a distributor for The Apprentice, a well-reviewed biopic that depicts the life of Donald Trump in a negative light. Francis Lawrence’s 2007 adaptation of I Am Legend had to change its original subversive ending, in which a lone militaristic American he-man fighting a war against a dehumanized enemy realizes he’s the real monster, to something a little friendlier to George W. Bush’s War on Terror: the hero blows everything up and sends a helpless woman and child to the safety of a military fortress. Julie Taymor’s 2002 Frida Kahlo biopic Frida made it to screens containing very little about its subject’s staunch communism; instead, producer Harvey Weinstein thought the film should focus more on tits. 

Self-publishing online does not guarantee widespread dissemination, either. There’s a lot of content out there, and algorithms designed by technocratic neofascists probably will not favor yours.

In the old days, artists found patrons among the aristocracy. Now, if we want to quit our day jobs to make art full time, we either seek corporate sponsorship or we suffer at the merciless hand of the free market. A progressive artist must choose between starving or making a deal with the Devil. Will you tone down the politics in your work to make it more marketable? Will you promote yourself on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or some other social media platform owned by reactionary billionaires? Will you submit your sculpture to a gallery funded by the Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical company produced the OxyContin that led to the opioid epidemic? Will you send your poetry to a magazine bankrolled by an heir to the Eli Lilly fortune? Will you attend a writing convention sponsored by Amazon or Raytheon, as science fiction’s Hugo Awards were in 2021? Will you shill for BetterHelp on your YouTube channel? Meanwhile, right-wing ideologues like failed screenwriter Ben Shapiro and failed comedian Steven Crowder frolic in a golden shower of cash supplied by shadowy billionaires, happy to swap their doomed art careers for more lucrative jobs as propaganda mouthpieces. (Until their benefactors pull the plug, anyway.) They don’t need to compromise their values; they never had any. 

Even if, somehow, you overcome the material barriers of the entertainment industry and get your uncompromisingly subversive work of art in front of a wide audience, there’s no guarantee that it will have the impact you intended. 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan loved Rage Against the Machine. The Wachowski sisters’ The Matrix struck a chord with internet-addicted misogynists, who refer to their descent into woman-hating loneliness as “taking the red pill.” Jim Crow-era white Americans loved watching Black entertainers perform in racially segregated concert halls. Trump and his supporters cheerfully sing and dance to the Village People’s gay cruising anthem “YMCA” at rallies. Squid Game did not spark an anti-capitalist uprising, but it did lead to some McDonald’s tie-ins and a series of degrading MrBeast game shows.

“Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead,” says a Thatcher-esque character in indie studio ZA/UM’s 2019 unapologetically leftist role-playing game Disco Elysium. In other words, if you create a stunning anti-capitalist  work of art that resonates with people, capitalism will find a way to package and sell it until it becomes kitsch, like Che Guevara’s face on a T-shirt. Disco Elysium fell victim to that same curse; the game’s runaway success attracted a couple of shady Estonian businessmen who took over ZA/UM and laid off the lead developers, dooming any chances of a sequel. (The studio is currently working on a mobile version of the game designed to “captivate TikTok users with quick hits of compelling story, art, and audio.”)

Magical Thinking

When an ancient Mesopotamian king was threatened by ill omens, his advisors would pick a substitute to serve as a human shield. This surrogate king, usually a man of low social standing, had no real political power, but during his brief reign he got to wear fine clothes and feast on good food and enjoy the company of a pretty girl chosen to serve as his surrogate queen. The surrogate king absorbed all the curses and demonic spirits while the real king quietly ruled the country behind the scenes. This was a temporary arrangement. At the end of no more than one hundred days, the surrogate king and his queen were sacrificed, taking the bad magic with them to the afterlife.

This is the role of the artist in our current political era: the surrogate king. Serve as a focal point for the public’s hope for social and political change: for women’s liberation, for non-toxic masculinity, for queer rights, for BIPOC excellence. And when you err, whether it’s a rediscovered problematic tweet from ten years ago or a long-running pattern of heinous sexual violence, suffer the public’s fury. You are king for a day, and when the sun sets you must enter the wicker man to be set alight.

The idea that art will save us is the kind of magical thinking that flourishes when people feel helpless. As Lauren Fadiman discussed in last November’s Current Affairs, books like The Secret that claim we can “manifest” our desires (without working for them) gained popularity in the wake of the 2008 economic crash. When dragging your way up the social ladder looks increasingly impossible, then vibes become as good as personal initiative—or actual political action..

Even the most ardent liberal knows, in their heart of hearts, not to expect much from their politicians. Youthful cries for positive change—a working healthcare system, or the protection of LGBTQ rights, or meaningful reform of the justice system, or withdrawing support for the genocide in Gaza—are met with ridicule. And, while the Democratic and Labour Parties fought valiantly to smother progressive leaders like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, respectively, they put up anemic responses to the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Those of us who want a better world have nowhere to direct our energy.

So we throw it at art and artists. Watch a TV show and argue whether it’s feminist enough while Roe v. Wade gets overturned. Watch Emilia Pérez, a movie about a Mexican trans woman; give it a bunch of awards while politicians work to ban gender-affirming healthcare. Don’t ask what our elected officials are doing to fix any of it. They’re busy fundraising—and redirecting blame.

Consider the 2024 presidential election. As the Democratic Party floundered, liberals looked away from the campaign’s many faults to condemn pop musician Chappell Roan for criticizing Kamala Harris’s position on Gaza. 

Consider the DNC turning to Taylor Swift to defeat Trump. Whatever your opinion of Swift and her fanbase, the fact remains that she is not a politician and should not be expected to save the country from itself.

Consider Democratic Party loyalists blaming Susan Sarandon for Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016.

Consider Woodstock ’99. The makers of HBO Max’s abysmal documentary about the disaster interviewed dozens of musicians,  journalists,  and concert goers, all in an efforttrying to piece together how a music festival turned into a riot with fires, rapes, and multiple fatalities. The talking heads did not blame the festival’s organizers, who planned the event without adequate security or sanitation facilities or drinking water. Instead, they unanimously pointed the finger at one man: Limp Bizkit singer Fred Durst, who somehow caused everything to go wrong by rapping “Nookie” and doing a bit of crowd surfing on a piece of plywood. 

At a critical moment in the proceedings that presaged our current era, Rome, NY, Mayor Joseph Griffo asked the Red Hot Chili Peppers to quell the chaos and was genuinely shocked when they did not. It occurred to no one that perhaps a democratically elected political leader bears more responsibility for public safety within his jurisdiction than does Flea, whose professional obligations are limited to 1) playing slap bass and 2) wearing a tube sock on his penis.

Artists are not blameless in this. Many entertainers happily don the mantle of surrogate king. Convince your fans that buying your novel or concert ticket or movie or merchandise is political activism, and you might sell a few more units, as well as gain an ideological shield against any style critique of your work. Who wouldn’t want to be king for a day?

What good is art?

This is not to say that art is worthless. Art has value for its own sake. It will not topple fascism, but that’s not art’s job. Nor should it be. It’s our job.

If art has any role to play in the struggle, it is to channel people toward collective action, not to act as a substitute for it. The protest art of the 1960s existed alongside fierce, organized political action: demonstrations and boycotts and campus revolts and the occasional riot. The labor movement of the early 20th century had folk songs, yes, but it also had Wobblies throwing bricks at strikebreakers. When you start to see art as the soundtrack to your revolt, not as the revolt itself, you might notice that the real king fits in a wicker man just as well as the surrogate.