Like many Canadians, I enjoyed watching Meryl Streep go after Donald Trump during her recent Golden Globe speech. There was one part, however, that bugged me.If you recall, she began by noting that the room was full of the press, Hollywood types and “outsiders and foreigners.” In an obvious reference to the anti-elite sentiment that elected Trump, she called them among the most vilified groups in America.Focusing on the concept of “outsiders,” she went through a long list of Hollywood “A” types who had come from different parts of the US and around the world, noting that without them “football and mixed martial arts” would be all that was left -- and that is not “the arts.”Ouch!Insinuating that for a typical Trump voter high culture involves drinking beer in a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap while watching cage-fight highlights before Monday Night Football makes for fun commentary, but it does nothing to unify people. In fact the whole thing reminded me of the Voice of Fire controversy that enveloped our country a number of years ago.In early 1990 the National Gallery of Canada announced that it had spent nearly $1.8 million, 60% of its acquisition budget, on a work entitled Voice of Fire by the American artist Barnett Newman. First shown in Canada during Expo 67, the work consists of a huge canvas (almost 18-feet tall) with three wide vertical stripes on it — a red one in the middle, bracketed by two blue stripes.Art experts at the National Gallery explained that the painting was: “about seeing and being. It is a phenomenal painting in which our sensory experience of the work is stripped of all other associations, and through which the emphatic qualities of purely colored form are able to flood our consciousness with a sublime sense of awe and tranquility.”To many other Canadians, it was a canvas with three stripes on it.Concerned with government debt and deficits, the unravelling of the Meech Lake Accord and the planned introduction of the GST, there was a very un-Canadian outcry against the painting. More than one wag produced their own version, including a Nepean House painter, whose replica he entitled Voice of the Taxpayer.The head of the National Gallery probably didn't do herself any favours by describing the painting as a means of taking “us away from the devastating cares of everyday life.”Leadership of those opposing the purchase fell to the chair of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Communications and Culture, a Manitoba M.P. named Felix Holtmann, who famously said that: “It looks like two cans of paint and two rollers and about ten minutes would do the trick.”Despite hearings by Holtmann's committee and lots of media, the debate finally sputtered out. The National Gallery held a conference that fall to assess what had happened with the proceedings inspiring a book. From time to time retrospective articles have also appeared reminding Canadians of the controversy.Several themes seem to emerge when commentators look back on this episode. One is how hard it is to be a fearless art curator willing to stand up to the uneducated masses.The other is that Felix Holtmann was a pig farmer.It is impossible to read about Holtmann's involvement with the painting without being reminded that before entering politics he ran a pig farm. The implication from the commentators is clear — pig farmers must be uncultured. How could someone who raises hogs for a living possibly understand abstract art?  Don't people like that spend their time watching mixed martial arts and football?How much more elitist can you get?I understand that Voice of Fire was an important piece of art for a whole variety of reasons and I respect the independence of our galleries to make acquisitions without political interference.But I also see the danger of dividing the people into two groups — the cultured elite, and the rest of us.  What kind of a society do we have when we decree that pig farmers from Manitoba or house painters from Nepean are not allowed to have a view on modern art — particularly pieces that are being purchased with their tax dollars?This is not a theoretical question. The most common and accurate critique of Trump or his Canadian counterparts, Kevin O'Leary and Kellie Leitch, is that they divide people.But don't we see that every time the small “l” liberal side of this debate creates “us-and-them” situations that they are no better? It may be true that a great number of the unwashed are not schooled in high art or culture. But here is a message to Meryl Streep and all her supporters: dismissing their perspective out of hand is not going to create the type of open, accepting society that you claim you want.John Milloy is a former MPP and Ontario Liberal cabinet minister currently serving as the co-director of the Centre for Public Ethics and assistant professor of public ethics at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary, and the inaugural practitioner in residence in Wilfrid Laurier University's Political Science department. He is also a lecturer in the University of Waterloo's Master of Public Service Program.  John can be reached at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @John_Milloy.