When it comes to cultural issues, the Trump administration’s exercise of executive power has been both energetic and reminiscent of a type of politics that was taken for granted among ancient schools of Western political thought. With more than 140 executive orders issued in its first 100 days—addressing a range of cultural issues from illegal immigration, declaring English the official language of the United States, and abolishing the practice of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in the federal bureaucracy and cultural institutions like the Smithsonian to overhauling the leadership at the Kennedy Center—the Trump presidency seems to be operating in accordance with the ancient belief that politics follows culture.

To say politics follows culture means that the cultural assumptions that form the identity of a people are given priority by political leaders and expressed through legislation and cultural institutions. Often these cultural assumptions revolve around the expectation that a people’s way of life, language, and heritage will be positively reflected in its museums, schools, and places of worship. This is not to say that under the Trump administration America’s cultural institutions will now become provincial, distorted, and less diverse. Quite the contrary: acknowledging that America has a core that consists of a civic national and cultural identity makes it all the easier for Americans to embrace other cultures and to evaluate America’s past in a fair and balanced fashion. Americans have finally had enough, however, of having to think of themselves as systemically racist. 

In ancient Greece, the belief that politics follows culture, especially in the context of citizenship, was expressed in a variety of powerful texts. Thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle understood that effective leaders reflect as well as shape the cultural assumptions of the people within the city-state. One text that demonstrates this is Plato’s Republic. A passage about the fictional city under construction in the Republic—Kallipolis—provides a telling illustration of citizens’ deep need for their political leaders to reflect their civic and cultural concerns.      

In Book VIII of the Republic, Socrates comments on how excessive freedom in a democracy distorts the proper attitude its citizens should have toward their history, their personal relations with their fellow citizens, and their political relations with non-citizens. He observes that in such an environment a “resident alien or a foreign visitor is made equal to a citizen, and he is their equal.” The quip sums up nicely the xenophilia (the love of strangers) and allophilia (love of the Other) embraced by political leaders who forget that citizens share a common culture. These leaders believe it is petty and unbecoming to make distinctions between citizens and non-citizens. According to this way of thinking, the native inhabitants of a country should not be entitled to prerogatives that the non-natives are not entitled to. Such distortions of citizenship, culture, and politics have been a hallmark of our political leaders and institutions in recent times.

Aristotle, too, took it for granted that politics follows culture. In his Politics, Aristotle goes to great lengths to argue that soul-craft (character formation) is the essence of statecraft (politics). Effective governance by political leaders is made possible by their harnessing of the people’s prevailing cultural norms and traditions. Those cultural norms are distilled within language, and so a nation’s language must be promoted and protected. Trump has done just this. His executive order to elevate the status of the English language on the federal level will play an important symbolic role by serving as a proxy for many of the unifying, core cultural features that we, as Americans, have rallied around historically and have employed to great effect during difficult times like the Civil War and the civil rights movement. The legacies of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King testify to the power of the English language and the democratic culture it embodies.   

Given the flurry of executive orders issued by President Trump thus far, it is inevitable that many of them will be contested on constitutional grounds. Nonetheless, it is high time that a president puts the full force of the executive branch behind a much needed “long march” back through America’s leading institutions to save and restore the best of American culture. By doing this, the president put himself on the right side of history.