Katie Gaddini & Isaac Butler

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. We're on vacation, but we still have an amazing show for you today. Katie Gaddini stops by to talk about her new book, Esther's Army, The Christian Women Who Power the American Right. But first, we'll talk to Isaac Butler about his new book, The Perfect Moment, God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars. Welcome, welcome, Isaac Butler.

**Isaac Butler** (0:30)
Thank you so much. It's so great to be here, Molly.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:32)
It's so great to have you. So let's talk about The Perfect Moment, God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars.

**Isaac Butler** (0:41)
Yes. Should I hold up a copy as a prop?

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:43)
Do you have a copy?

**Isaac Butler** (0:44)
I have a copy right here. Ready?

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:45)
Let's see it. Yeah. Boom. I actually have it. I just got it sent to me.

**Isaac Butler** (0:50)
Oh, great.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:51)
It's very beautiful. First of all, talk to me about the method and how you got from there to here.

**Isaac Butler** (0:58)
It doesn't maybe seem like the most obvious connection in the universe, right?

**Molly Jong-Fast** (1:01)
That's why I wanted to. I was going to and then I was like, no.

**Isaac Butler** (1:05)
Yeah, no, it's fine. I'm a person with a lot of different interests and I really love, you've written a book, you know this, you're going to be living with a subject for at least three years, sometimes more.
I don't want to write about something where I already know all the answers because that just gets real boring after a while. I think you can tell on the page when someone is just sort of reciting what they already know. So I like to do things that I think I understand pretty well, but also there are enough mysteries that actually my mind is going to be blown at various points because then I feel like I can recreate that on the page, and that's pleasurable for us all. In this case, my last book was The Method, How the 20th Century Learned to Act, which is kind of a biography of an idea, and that idea being what we sort of call the method, or what Stanislavski, the creator of it, called the system, which is this approach to acting. It's actually the first major interior focused approach on acting and how that transformed Russian popular culture and then American popular culture and theater and film and politics and all sorts of stuff like that. I loved doing that book. That book was a blast. I still love writing about acting. I'm still asked to talk about it. It's had a lovely long tail, which I'm unbelievably grateful for. While I was writing that book, there was an announcement that at the time it was canceled and then eventually it was turned into a postponement and then it finally did happen. But there was this announcement that a retrospective of the work of Philip Gustin, who's one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, was being indefinitely delayed because there were paintings with somewhat cartoonish renditions of Klansmen in them that he did late in life. The idea was the paintings themselves weren't explicit enough in their condemnation of white supremacy, and then even if they were, the very existence of those images could traumatize unsuspecting viewers. I was really, really fucking furious about this, I'll be honest. I was like, well, having lived through the culture wars of the 80s and 90s, and lived in DC, and my mom was involved, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
What happened here? Why are we on the left doing this now? I would be talking to younger people, I'd be like, it's like with the NEA 4 They would look at me and say, the what now?
That's when I realized maybe I needed to write a history about the culture wars in the 80s and 90s to start thinking about free expression as a left-wing value. Now, I should say shortly after I started writing it or thinking about it, stuff like the Don't Say Gay Bill and all this stuff happened halfway through writing it, Trump was elected. So I'm not here to say woke went too far or anything like that. I actually think for the most part, for the most part, left-wing sensorius is more like annoying and silly. Most of the time, it doesn't really tend to have very serious consequences. It's quite an asymmetrical thing. But I did want to reclaim and examine free expression through the lens of this particular very bizarre history of when the religious right declared war on American art in order to build power within the Republican Party. And even though sometimes the amount of money we're talking about here for grants or whatever is 150 bucks, one of the controversies over $150, this series of battles gave the religious right a permanent hold on the Republican Party, cost George HW. Bush re-election. I mean, major, major, major things happened as a result.