Neoconservative Republican Governor John Engler of Michigan inherited a $1.1 billion budget deficit from his predecessor, moderate Democrat James Blanchard, when he took office last January 1, 1991. Engler eked out a narrow 17,595-vote victory over Blanchard by promising relief from Michigan’s burdensome property tax structure, fourth highest in the United States, to Reagan Democrats in middle-class areas like Macomb County and Downriver Detroit. To balance the state budget and reduce property taxes, Engler proposed spending cuts, including abolition of all state funding for the arts, action that would have made Michigan unique among the 50 states.

Engler’s proposal raised a maelstrom of opposition from artists receiving state subsidies and others on the cultural left. Leon Cohan, chairman of the Michigan Council for the Arts, termed the proposal to abolish state funding “a mishmash of semi-intellectual, reactionary baloney.” Sam Sachs II, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, said the action tended to confirm the state-subsidized art community’s suspicions that “yahoos are taking over.” Nancy Malitz, arts critic for the “Accent” section of the Detroit News, a poor would-be imitation of the “Style” section of the Washington Post, framed the proposal as proof “of an anti-intellectual attitude that makes people uneasy about the arts as a form of expression.” This is a problem limited to America, Malitz complained, not Europe, where state-subsidized artists are treated as “visionaries.”

The anti-Engler frenzy built into a crescendo on May 1, when one thousand demonstrators staged an “arts attack” at the state capitol in Lansing against the proposal. Much of their anger was directed at D. Joseph Olson, an Engler supporter, attorney, and insurance executive who serves as a director of the Lansing Symphony Orchestra. In an adversarial column entitled “‘Arts Ogres’ and Killer Bees,” Olson characterized arts subsidy-seekers as “killer bees . . . driven not by reason but by some instinctive urge to attack anyone who disturbs the hive and to sting and sting again.” Cultural leftists attacked Olson and Engler as “fire-breathing,” “misguided zealots” adhering to a “stringently ideological, shortsighted anti-arts policy.”

Despite the rhetorical onslaught, Engler signed an executive order abolishing the Michigan Council for the Arts. On May 1, the Republican-controlled Senate failed to overturn Engler’s order, despite the “arts attack” surrounding the capitol. Under Blanchard and liberal Republican William Milliken, the arts council was subsidizing rich areas at the expense of the poor and middle class. Public records show the MCA distributed more than one-third of its grants between 1981 and 1986 to artists in Oakland and Washtenaw counties, Michigan’s wealthiest two counties on a per capita basis and home to less than one in seven state residents. Artists in 24 of Michigan’s 25 counties did not receive any grants from the MCA during the same five-year period. MCA funding for the Cranbrook Academy of Arts and related facilities increased 742 percent from $45,900 in 1975 to $340,582 in 1990, while inflation rose only 239 percent. Famous as liberal commentator Michael Kinsley’s alma mater, Cranbrook also has the distinction of being in Bloomfield Hills, which has the highest per capita income in the state.

Engler responded to these powerful class arguments as any neoconservative Republican might. He caved in to Republican plutocrats who support state funding for the arts and reinstated “temporary” tax dollars for three years to fund a new Michigan arts council. “The governor doesn’t mind seeing money for capital improvements or structural improvements and maintenance,” spokesman John Truscott said after Engler met privately on August 7 with subsidy-seekers, including Republican billionaire A. Alfred Taubman, who controls Sotheby’s, an international auction house. The Detroit News said Engler emerged from the meeting “looking like a man who had been taken to the woodshed.” Or a bank.

Engler threw a bone to critics and named Olson to the new MCA board, action that Cohan compared to “putting a fox in the chicken coop.” He need not worry. Engler’s tax-cut plan provides only palpable property tax relief for Macomb County and Downriver Detroit, and he has begun to bitterly attack the press for his own handler’s incompetence. The smart money in Lansing is that Engler will become a one-term governor in 1994, just in time to make his “temporary” rein-statement of the council “permanent.” Except for Olson, all of Engler’s appointees to the new council are statists, and include Shahida Mausi, director of the Detroit Council for the Arts and an evaluator for the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1990, Mausi’s deputy, James Hart, penned this remarkable statement in City Arts Quarterly, subsidized by tax dollars from Joe and Josephine Six-Pack in Macomb and Downriver: “In the terrific street-level noise of a synchronic cultural clash, the bump and, yes, sometimes blood of multi-racial conflict is the whisper of this new multi-cultural polis.”

This polis, Hart says, is “Anti-Paternalistic, Anti-Racist, Anti-Sexist, Anti- Colonial, Anti-Imperialist, with long-held questions about essentialist naturalism and the natural unity of biology.” To date, Engler has not given any indication that he understands the statement’s significance, although I’m sure Irving Kristol would.