THE LUNACY THAT IS CULTURAL STUDIES.

Today's howler?  "Trump Is Using ‘Classical Architecture’ as ‘A Dog Whistle for White Nationalists.’"  The timing might be influenced by Our President commencing his tribute to the Corinthian Room as an extension of the east wing of the White House.

My stance has been that there can not be too much of that grand Roman quality in public buildings, and a president who might share that sentiment can't be all bad.

But if you're Layla Jones, covering the identity politics beat for Talking Points Memo, you're hearing those boots thwacking on the Alexanderplatz, or something.  And it's easy enough to find an academic to validate your delusions.

By seeking to assert control over civic architecture, Trump is creating a physical testament to his destruction of democracy, Reinhold Martin, an architecture historian and Columbia University Professor, told TPM. It’s an aesthetic offshoot of Project 2025’s goal to gut public welfare and government services, Martin said.

“It’s a project of demolition, and that’s why I’m saying the laughable but also obviously very tragic and historically disastrous outcome of this would be a series of empty basically stage sets,” Martin said, “empty political monuments, buildings with nothing in them because they fired everybody.”

Trump is also leaning on the idea that architecture can be used — as groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy realized in the post-Reconstruction era — to hearken back to a whiter past.

“The classical architecture stuff is a dog whistle for white nationalists,” said Martin, who co-edited a book titled “Architecture against Democracy.”

Architecture in America has been associated with “an American public, a democratic body, a democratic society,” Martin told TPM, “but also an imperial society, a slave-owning society, a commercial society. Classical architecture covers all of this.”

That's an interesting argument, in an academic book with the indirect cost return capitalized into the price of the hardback.  Plantation big houses have colonnades, as do Congregational churches watching over New England village greens.  "Greek Revival architecture was a favorite among southern plantation owners at the height of slavery, chosen explicitly for its links between civic power and human enslavement."  Fine, now do the meeting-house or the Boston and Maine station building.  Toward the end, guess who joins the conversation.  “Adolf Hitler had Albert Speer, right?”

And these people wonder why we keep getting more Trump.

The president’s architectural EO is in keeping with this reclamation of a bygone culture shaped by American expansionism, strict gender and racial hierarchies, xenophobia, and less advanced scientific development.

Periods of racial progress, like the civil rights movement and national movement for Black lives that came to a head in 2020, are usually met by fierce backlash. And Mabel Wilson, a professor of architectural history theory at Columbia University, told TPM it’s no surprise that this dynamic reaches into the arts and architecture.

“We make progress on one end,” Wilson said, “and then there’s immediate backlash because the system rewards people.”

“Architecture speaks silently,” Martin told TPM. “The attempt to revive classical architecture under current political conditions is an attempt that speaks silently about dismantling not just the ideas that were expressed in 2020, but the institutions of civil rights. And so it speaks silently the language of white nationalism. And that is well known, but it’s very difficult to literally demonstrate or prove. That’s why it’s so effective, because it’s easily deniable.”

For "easily deniable," substitute "visible only to Columbia professors," which is to say, "difficult to literally demonstrate" as it is in the class of ideas so loopy only a senior academician at a highly regarded university would hold them.