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If there is a tangible effect on our politics resulting from artworks and entertainment products such as Miranda’s, it is in their degrading of the political discourse. Politics are more infantilized, tribal, performative, and symbolic because of such works. Their overall political effect is in all directions negative.

No doubt emptier statements than this have been printed in The Atlantic, but its meaninglessness in the context of contemporary American life is worth observing. It is a farce to imagine that artworks about the plight of immigrants in any way help attend to the material problems of how the nation’s immigration and asylum systems are to be run.

Lin-Manuel Miranda opened “What Art Can Do,”

Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren’t writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, “We love the status quo.” We’ve just dirtied the word “politics,” made it sound like it’s unpatriotic or something. ... My point is that it has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I’m not interested in art that is not in the world.

Rarely are the politics of an artwork, even when it addresses political matters directly, any more penetrating than the statement of a problem. Rarely does art treat political subjects with the complexity found even in quality journalism. Expecting artists to contend with social scientific data, to carry out the work of think tanks or propose legislation, would be silly. Instead, what political art does proffer is the experience of recognition. For many, finding in art an expression of their political concerns asserted in a voice not their own can be terribly affecting, because it is validating.

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