There were, as expected, comforting messages on social media from some boldface names: Wolfgang Tillmans re-posted an image of the Statue of Liberty weeping; Tania Bruguera placed a black ribbon over a map of the United States; Vik Muniz posted an homage to Bas Jan Ader, titled, I am too sad to Tell You.

But it was playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda— liberalism’s poster boy for all things constitutional—who summed up the suffocating anxiety of the US creative classes best. He tweeted: “I said BREATHE. (I am talking to myself too, y’know).”

Yet relearning how to inhale under newly asphyxiating political and cultural circumstances is only part of the novel skill set art world liberals will have to successfully master to get through the next four years. As I write this, reports are coming in about pro-Trump youth driving around in their cars waving Confederate flags in Blacksburg, VA. In contrast, my 14-year-old son notified me yesterday morning that he was joining a school-approved march on Trump Plaza in Manhattan.

In keeping with Trump’s xenophobic, race-baiting, sexist, authoritarian, and opportunistic rhetoric, the president-elect has opened a number of highly public geopolitical battlefronts. These include wars on, among other real and pseudo entities, Mexican immigrants, Islam, minorities, the Clintons, political elites and the so-called liberal media.

But a larger Trump enemy has gone mostly unmentioned, even as it looms larger than the sum of the real estate mogul’s individual targets. That enemy is critical culture—the kind that often challenges power in the name of tolerance, transparency, accuracy and sheer experimentation. Make no mistake: What Trump has done by leveraging white America’s mass delusion of ethnic decline is officially declare a war on culture.