Performative Authoritarianism and American Forgetfulness

They only win if we fail to act—if our memory fails. We’ve had victories before.

Sep 12, 2025

by Floyd Webb

This essay was written in response to the wave of disinformation and performance politics surrounding the proposed “elimination” of the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. Year after year, headlines repeat the spectacle while the truth—Congress continues to fund these vital institutions—gets buried. What I argue here is that this kind of performance is not harmless. It is part of a broader authoritarian drift that thrives when citizens forget both the tactics of power and the victories that once pushed back against it.

As readers, artists, and citizens, we need clarity, not theater. We need to remember the long history of democratic resistance in America and abroad, and the ways media and social media alike distort our understanding of that struggle. This essay is an attempt to sharpen our memory, expose the playbook, and remind us that the future is never foreordained. It will be written by those who refuse to forget—and who dare to act.

The present administration thrives on a paradox: the appearance of total power without the legal authority to fully exercise it. Executive orders to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts or the Humanities grab headlines, but Congress holds the purse. Threats to deploy the military against civilians chill the air, but the Posse Comitatus Act and federalism make that leap far more complicated than it sounds. Culture-war commissions publish their reports as if they were new scripture, but they lack statutory force.

This is what I mean by performative authoritarianism. It is spectacle. It is theater. And yet, it is not harmless. Because while the White House cannot unilaterally erase entire agencies or nullify appropriations, it can appoint loyalists, rewrite grant criteria, weaponize disinformation, and pressure civil servants. These maneuvers hobble institutions even when the grand gestures fail.

“Authoritarianism in America is not a sudden coup, but a steady pressure: to purge, to intimidate, to hollow out. It’s less a hammer blow than a slow erosion.”

What Is Real, What Is Performed

The elimination of NEA and NEH, for example, has been proposed in budgets again and again. But those budgets are political manifestos, not law. Congress has preserved funding at around $207 million each, and has consistently done so, demonstrating the legislative check in action. The law is clear: the President cannot simply impound funds without Congress, and courts from Train v. City of New York to the Impoundment Control Act have said so.

What is real, however, is the damage caused by the attempts. When criteria are rewritten to punish “ideological” projects, when staff are quietly cut, when litigation forces organizations into costly battles, the effect is a quiet strangulation. Culture is not eliminated, but it is chilled.

Consider specifics: a respected career official at the State Department’s Global Women’s Issues office was forced out in favor of a political appointee with no relevant expertise, reshaping gender policy overnight. Or the Department of Education’s narrowing of grant criteria for civics programs—explicitly favoring “patriotic education”—which turned funding into an ideological litmus test. These are the subtle levers of erosion, the backstage maneuvers that prepare the stage for something darker.

One might dismiss this as mere political theater, ultimately neutered by our institutions. But this view mistakes the final act for the entire play. The goal is not always an immediate, dictatorial decree, but the gradual normalization of extreme ideas and the exhaustion of opposition.

“The play is always the same: make the threat grand, let Congress appear as the savior, while in the shadows the screws still turn.”

Reality Check: The Future of NEA and NEH

The clearest example of this dynamic is the supposed “elimination” of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

FY 2025: Both agencies were funded at $207 million each—a level consistent with prior years. Congress, not the White House, made this decision.
FY 2026 (the current budget cycle): The Trump budget again calls for elimination. But the Senate Appropriations Committee has advanced a bill that maintains funding at $207 million each, while the House version suggests steep cuts (around $135 million each). Final negotiations will decide the outcome, but elimination is almost certainly off the table.

This contrast matters. The administration trumpets elimination; much of the media repeats the performance. But the institutions survive because Congress has consistently refused to comply—thanks in no small part to the relentless advocacy of citizens, artists, and organizations who understand the value of public funding for culture.

“The lie of elimination only works if the public believes it. Memory and vigilance turn performance into failure.”

Knowing this arms us. It shows where resistance has already succeeded and where it must continue. Every call to a Senator, every defense of cultural and intellectual work, is part of keeping these programs alive.

The American Forgetting

Why do Americans forget that we have beaten back extremism before? Why do we see authoritarian drift as unprecedented rather than cyclical?

Part of the answer is education—not only what is taught, but how it is taught. Textbooks sanitize slavery into “labor systems,” Jim Crow into “regional customs,” and resistance movements into the actions of a few great men. Civic education has been hollowed out, leaving students without the tools to recognize power or claim agency.

Another part is the deliberate strategy of forgetting. This is not just accident or neglect; it is a project. Those who benefit from authoritarian performance need a public that does not remember the playbook. Forgetfulness makes us governable; it keeps us from recognizing recycled tactics.

As philosopher Bernard Stiegler warned:

“Those who are deprived of the cultivation of their memory are condemned to repetition: repetition of violence, repetition of war, repetition of barbarism.”

This is the essence of our crisis: America suffers from a cultivated forgetting. Victories against extremism are stripped of their radical roots, leaving us vulnerable to despair. We forget that we once stopped McCarthyism, that we pushed back against Nixon’s abuses, that mass protest changed Vietnam policy. We forget that the largest protest movement in American history unfolded just four years ago in the streets demanding racial justice.

“Memory is a weapon. To remember our victories is to remind ourselves that we can win again.”

Media and Memory

No performance works without an audience. And in the United States, much of the press has become less a watchdog than a stagehand, amplifying the very theater it should be exposing. The problem is not formal state control but something subtler and in some ways more dangerous: corporate consolidation, ratings dependency, and intimidation.

When news is treated as spectacle, authoritarian gestures—executive orders, threats to deploy troops, commissions to rewrite history—become free advertising. When outlets lean on “both sides” framing, the erosion of democracy is described as a partisan disagreement, not an existential threat. When intimidation leads journalists to soften their language, lies become “misstatements” and propaganda becomes “controversy.” In this way, the Fifth Estate edges toward the role of state media—not by decree, but by habit.

The antidote is not despair but construction: the building of mass alternative media. Independent and nonprofit outlets, grassroots reporting, and cultural platforms can break the cycle of normalization. They can name authoritarianism plainly, amplify resistance, and preserve memory. Citizens with cameras, writers who refuse euphemism, artists who narrate what corporate media won’t—these form the counter-public sphere that democracy now requires.

If forgetting is the soil in which authoritarianism grows, then alternative media is the cultivation of memory. It is how we make sure the performance is not mistaken for reality.

“When the official channels normalize the erosion of rights, it falls to independent voices to archive, amplify, and resist.”

But if traditional media is the stagehand, the digital realm is the crowded, chaotic arena where the performance is amplified and distorted.

Social Media: The Den of Vipers

If mainstream media functions as the stagehand of authoritarian performance, then social media is the den of vipers—a swarm of outrage, disinformation, and conflict where lies travel faster than truth. Platforms engineered for engagement reward the most divisive content, and authoritarian movements exploit that architecture with precision. Bots amplify conspiracy theories, influencers launder propaganda, and algorithmic design ensures that fury, not fact, rises to the top.

The viral “Stop the Steal” narrative is the clearest example: a falsehood amplified into a movement that not only undermined faith in elections but fueled the January 6th assault. Or consider the coordinated online harassment of local election officials—ordinary public servants turned into targets of terror campaigns. These aren’t glitches; they are features of a system built to reward outrage.

Yet even here, resistance is possible—though it often feels small. Every share, every correction, every refusal to amplify a lie is a micro-act of counter-power. Building trusted micro-communities online—whether through newsletters, discussion groups, or cooperative platforms—can inoculate against the viral spread of disinformation. Independent creators who slow down the cycle, contextualize news, and refuse clickbait create cracks in the outrage economy.

Fighting back is not about “winning the internet.” It is about refusing to let the digital swarm dictate the boundaries of thought. When we insist on context over fury, on memory over amnesia, even at the smallest scale, we weaken the machinery of disinformation.

“Disinformation thrives on speed and outrage; truth survives through memory and care.”

Kennedy’s Warning

In 1962, John F. Kennedy declared: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

He was speaking about Latin America, but he could have been speaking to us. When voting rights are gutted, when protest is criminalized, when courts close off avenues of reform, the system is not made safer—it is made brittle. Pressure without release does not dissipate; it detonates.

Today, that warning hangs over us. If institutions keep narrowing the space for peaceful transformation, then anger will eventually seek outlets the Constitution cannot contain.

Warning and Hope

History offers both.

The warning is Chile under Pinochet or apartheid South Africa: when repression is total, upheaval eventually follows—often violent, often bloody.

The hope is South Korea’s candlelight revolution, Spain’s democratic transition, the American Civil Rights Movement: when millions act together and refuse passivity, governments yield without the gun.

As I write this, I believe the hinge is our collective memory. If we let cynicism convince us that nothing has ever worked, then despair becomes prophecy. But if we remember that ordinary Americans once won weekends, suffrage, civil rights, then hope is not naïve—it is historically grounded.

“History doesn’t decide this for us. We do.”

The Choice

So much of the present authoritarian style is performance. But performance prepares the stage. If the people do nothing, the curtain eventually rises on something darker.

The choice is stark but not unfamiliar: either we demand that our representatives defend the channels of peaceful reform, or we drift toward the inevitability of rupture.

We stand at a hinge moment. The lesson of history—our own and the world’s—is that forgetting makes us weak, but memory makes us dangerous to those who would rule by fear. If you are reading this, do not sit back as a spectator. Remember the victories your parents, grandparents, and neighbors carved from impossible odds. Join organizations, flood your representatives with demands, walk the streets when called, and tell the truth in your communities.

The future is not written by tyrants—it is written by people. By people who refuse to forget. By people who dare to act.

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