Isaac Butler is limbering up for an event at Politics and Prose, an independent bookshop and venerable Washington institution, but still has time to explain his arm tattoos.

They variously depict: a logo from his grandparents’ company in the 1960s; a satellite that his father worked on at Nasa; a “jaunty crab” for his wife, who finds crabs “hilarious”; an iris by Japan’s Utagawa Hiroshige for Butler’s daughter, Iris; a drawing of a scene from a production of The Seagull by the Russian theatre maker Konstantin Stanislavski; and an artwork by the American painter and photographer David Wojnarowicz that shows a house on fire.

Wojnarowicz emerges as an important player in Butler’s new book, The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars, a study of how the newly ascendant religious right pivoted from the cold war in the late 1980s to wage a domestic battle over contemporary art. It has earned praise from the actor of Ethan Hawke as a “scrupulously researched and blissfully told … gonzo history of American art and attrition”.

Sitting in the Politics and Prose owner’s office, where his books are neatly stacked for signing, Butler, 47, reflects: “It’s the birth of the modern culture wars. This is the first period where someone uses the term ‘culture war’ to describe what’s going on and so, to me, it’s like the world war one of the culture wars and we’re in the world war two right now. It is a very specific time where all art, all popular culture, is becoming politicised, is becoming a battleground, which is what we see happening again here.”

Butler, who was born and raised in Washington and now lives in Brooklyn, New York, was spurred to write the book in 2020 following the postponement of a retrospective of the American painter Philip Guston at the National Gallery of Art.

Guston, a lifelong anti-racist and a Jewish artist who had early works destroyed by the Ku Klux Klan, frequently featured odd, cartoony images of Klansmen in his late-period paintings. The arts establishment, gripped by a sudden moral panic, feared the images were not “sufficiently clear in their anti-racist point of view” and might upset viewers.

Butler reflects: “I was dumbfounded that people I would consider my allies, which is to say well-meaning leftwingers in the arts world, were going to do this to another artist, to a lifelong anti-racist. As a Jew, I was pretty mad about the erasing of the Jewish experience with the Klan, because if you’re gonna tell me that a Jewish painter painting the Klan is suspect, come on!

“I wanted to reclaim free expression as a leftwing value, because I was seeing more and more of my friends grow sceptical of the value of free expression. Which I think is an understandable reaction to how dire everything was and continues to be since 2020.”

Simultaneously, the right was resharpening its own blades. The rise of figures such as Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, and the implementation of “don’t say gay” laws felt alarmingly familiar to Butler.

“Every Republican candidate was tripping over themselves to figure out who could oppress and silence trans people more. All this stuff was happening again that felt so familiar to what I lived through and that was when I was like, oh, yeah, I want to write the history of this time that was so important to me. It was a crucible in which my identity was formed.”

It is a story born out of political frustration. The religious right had helped elect Ronald Reagan as president but, by the end of his second term, felt they had little to show for it; abortion remained legal and their legislative victories were sparse. As the cold war ended, they sought a new adversary to mobilise their base and gain a foothold in US politics.

Arch-conservatives such as Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson and Senator Jesse Helms sensed a new opportunity in targeting the arts, specifically art funded by the federal government through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a small agency whose entire budget has never cracked $500m. Sometimes the rightwing fury was directed at government grants as minuscule as $150.

The Rev Donald Wildmon, a preacher from Tupelo, Mississippi, whom Butler describes as looking like the bartender from The Shining but with a combover, became a central architect of this movement. Wildmon began by boycotting the sponsors of television shows like Three’s Company and Charlie’s Angels for being too sexy, before turning his sights on government-funded art.

“He is a true genius of political organising,” Butler says. “A diabolical one but he’s amazing at it. His main tactics were misrepresenting the art through taking pieces of it out of context, or describing a work of art that he hadn’t seen but in the most salacious of terms, and provoking this incredibly intense sense of grievance in his readership.

“The thing that the religious right did over and over and over again – they do it today; JD Vance is actually exceptionally good at this – is this idea that, ‘You expressing your point of view oppresses me, you enjoying your civil rights oppresses me. Even though I’m the second most powerful man in the country, other people having their point of view is actually oppression against me.’ They were exceptionally good at that. Wildmon recurs again and again and again because he is the one on the religious right who’s leading the cultural fight.”

Helms urged Republicans to abandon “conciliatory centrists” and aggressively court religious voters to secure the future of the party. He recognised that the arts were one of the few public squares where the perspectives of people with Aids and the LGBTQ+ community were being expressed, since they were largely shut out of mainstream films and television. He was determined to shut that down too.

Asked why the liberal establishment failed to counter this rising tide, Butler identifies two fatal flaws that continue to plague the Democratic party today. First, they underestimated their opponents. Just as many initially dismissed Donald Trump’s escalator descent as a clown show, the Yale-educated liberal elite of the 1980s looked at figures like Wildmon and Helms and dismissed them as “yokels”. Wildmon, for his part, relished being misunderstood and underestimated.

The second, and perhaps more devastating error, was the liberal fetishisation of compromise. Butler says: “It is this feeling that, if you’re attacking me, if I give you a little bit of what you want, you’ll calm down and we can work this out like reasonable people. It doesn’t work and we saw that under Obama, who would often compromise even before the fight started.

“What that ends up doing instead, like with a bully in school, is it signals to them that you’re vulnerable and they actually keep asking for more and more and going more and more on the attack. Symbolic defeats matter and when you give someone that you are actually legitimising their point of view.”

This dynamic reached a fever pitch in Washington at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In 1989 the museum, vulnerable because it lacked an endowment and relied heavily on federal funds, pre-emptively cancelled a retrospective of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe entitled The Perfect Moment, bowing to political pressure before the exhibition even opened.

The show included stark, unerotic images of gay men involved in BDSM practices, which Butler describes as “disturbingly cold” and resembling “pinned butterflies”. The Corcoran’s capitulation provided the religious right with a monumental victory, signalling that the arts establishment would censor itself to appease conservative outrage.

Other targets included Piss Christ, a photo by Andres Serrano that depicts a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass tank of the artist’s urine (Wildmon sent the image to every member of Congress); Wojnarowicz, an activist whose work provided moral clarity on the experience of gay men living with Aids; and the NEA Four, performance artists Tim Miller, John Fleck, Holly Hughes and Karen Finley, whose grants were revoked over queer and feminist subject matter and who then launched a landmark free-speech battle that went all the way to the supreme court.

The Perfect Moment explores how intertwined the arts and the Aids crisis were during this era. Artists were already heavily radicalised by groups like Act Up, born out of the trauma of watching their communities be devastated by a plague while the government looked the other way. They were therefore ready to fight back against censorship, though the relentless battles left many drained.

Butler argues: “One of the sad things about this story is that we did not emerge with a more active, permanent activist constituency for the arts in America. We got complacent and people were exhausted. A new generation of well-organised activist artists did not come to take their place and that’s one reason why we have wound up in the mess we’re in in terms of cultural funding and the government and the arts.”

The consequences of that failure are obvious today. Butler wrote much of The Perfect Moment during the first two years of the second Trump administration, watching in dismay as modern institutions fell into the exact same traps. He notes that Trump did not need to pass laws explicitly banning transgender rights on college campuses; he simply used the coercive power of money, threatening to cut research funding if universities did not comply with his demands for single-sex bathrooms.

“What the story of my book showed the right writ large is how incredibly coercive money can be. You actually don’t need to try to pass a law saying it’s illegal to say x. You just say, if you do x, we’ll cut your funding and then you let that do the work for you. There’s more of a chance that that will be found constitutional, especially at the courts we have today, whereas if you pass a law saying you can’t say x, y and z, people are gonna be like, that obviously violates the first amendment.”

In Butler’s telling, this strategy has effectively eroded the viewpoint neutrality that the NEA and other public institutions were designed to protect, leading to a politicisation of technocratic bodies meant to serve the public good. Today, the culture wars have mutated into an omnipresent, exhausting background noise.

While the 1980s battles were fought over genuinely provocative art, today’s skirmishes can be sparked by literally anything. “Now it is like, what soda do you drink? That a Black woman is playing Helen of Troy in The Odyssey. People are picking the dumbest fights about everything.

“The challenge of that is which of those fights do you bother having and which are the ones where you’re like, oh my God, grow up and move on? Because sometimes one can grow into a huge thing. It’s exhausting to have to think constantly, is this worth fighting about or not?”

The right’s ability to manufacture these grievances and make them appear as organic, widespread public sentiment – a tactic known as astroturfing – remains a masterclass in media manipulation. A prime example, Butler points out, is the recent panic over transgender participation in youth sports, an issue almost no one cared about a few years ago but which has now been weaponised into a highly effective, election-swinging issue.

The ultimate casualty of this decades-long war of attrition has been the accessibility of culture. During its heyday the NEA democratised the arts, funding not just provocative contemporary works but also rural folk art, traditional Native American crafts and stained-glass restoration in conservative, red-state communities. As the NEA’s funding and mandate have been systematically hobbled by conservative attacks, arts institutions have been forced to rely on wealthy donors to keep the lights on, inevitably making the arts more elitist.

For Butler, this reality is painful. He speaks with genuine sorrow about recent conservative attacks on the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Smithsonian Institution. “The Smithsonian is one of the greatest things that America does,” he says. “We have these first-rate museums of arts and culture and history and science and they’re free for anyone. What a great symbol of everything fucking good about this country and they’re like, no, we’re gonna put the squeeze on that as much as we can because we want to turn everything into a megaphone for our ideology. It is galling.”

Butler interviewed artists including Serrano, Miller, Fleck, Hughes and the Last Temptation of Christ screenwriter Paul Schrader, along with various arts administrators. He does not intend The Perfect Moment to be a prescriptive political manifesto; readers can join dots for themselves. But Butler does want them to contemplate the necessity of art.

“I hope this book inspires people, not to take to the streets or anything, but to think about how we frame culture, think about culture, fight about culture and the place of art in their lives and in the lives of our country, and the necessity of art – even art that doesn’t make money. The arts are a part of what it means to be a human being and I hope people will think about how we can re-enrich that resource that is so vital to who we are.”