Evidence has recently emerged that our country’s capacity to throw a really big party at the White House is embarrassingly low. Insufficient. Things have arrived at the point where heads of state are frequently entertained in temporary tents somewhere on the White House grounds. At long last, the kind of leader needed to address this challenge has come forward, and the executive branch has put its foot down.  Then put another foot straight over to the right, and down, then left over to the starting position and…voilà! We are dancing the waltz.

You will have heard about a proposal unveiled in late July to construct a new, old-school 90,000-square-foot ballroom in the east wing of the White House, to the off-key tune of crystal, gold and around $200 million to be raised privately by the president and his supporters.

In a strange way, this is a political Cinderella story come true. The outsider candidate magically achieves his wildest political ambitions and then, having been long excluded from the party by snobbish elites, not only writes the guest list but also builds the ballroom — and pays for it.  As I recall, that story ends in mice and pumpkins.

Still, a top-notch ballroom would be a useful addition to the White House, which is a famously incoherent piece of architecture and generally stifling with respect to official and social functions. The east and west wings of the White House themselves are of relatively recent vintage, and the House as a whole has been hacked, remodeled and tweaked so many times (two major fires, swimming pools inside and out, balconies, solariums, bowling alleys, gardens, tennis courts, basketball hoops, greenhouses, bunkers, movie theaters, press rooms) that it cannot be said with a straight face that this particular proposal significantly impairs the original design.

The ballroom will gobble up a lot of nice open space on the south lawn and is likely to be overbuilt in a questionable taste. On the other hand, the exterior will blend seamlessly with the building’s existing appearance, and the typical observer will probably not, in the end, be able to easily decipher the new from the old, or older.

In the meantime, I believe many foreign diplomats would be grateful for improved chances to hobnob and curry favor with American politicians. In order to broker new trade agreements, for example, a large party venue may be as useful as six technical committees. In addition, the east wing of the White House is notoriously underutilized. I doubt anyone will mourn the disappearance, in that location, of the First Lady’s office nor the calligraphy studio used to produce handwritten invitations to White House events. In short, a new White House ballroom of grand proportions seems very much in keeping with the natural evolution of American politics, it responds to a reasonable functional demand, is a politically expedient upgrade to a previously modified building, and should probably be built.

Concerns regarding this proposal, from my point of view, arise not in relation to what is to be built, or why, but rather how.

The project’s starting position is a belief that America should be governed by a moral order and body of values that are nameable, specific, and true. In the absence of such values, we are vulnerable to anarchy and the undue influence of unwelcome foreign ideas. This column previously examined a White House pronouncement that all future federally funded buildings in the United States should be designed in the neoclassical style, and pointed out some of the failings of this approach. The proposed ballroom, not surprisingly, will be strictly faithful to this edict.

Now the “General Services Administration Memo” plot thickens, since one of its primary authors — cultural critic Justin Shubow — is the director of the National Civic Art Society, a nonprofit devoted to promoting neoclassical architecture.  On the NCAS board of directors is architect James McCrery II, who was tapped to design the White House ballroom. For a federal design commission with this budget and prominence, the usual practice would be to host a national competition, not unlike the way large construction projects are put out to bid.

McCrery, privately hand-picked for the job, has suggested in an interview that God helped him to discover architecture by revealing “His will.” This is one place where Christianity enters the story, linking the ballroom design with fuzzy concepts of virtue, ethics and righteousness.

In this story, virtue makes itself known through beauty. Here, beauty is not fluid and fleeting but solid and knowable: It is marked by visual harmony, legibility, coherence, traditional symbolism, and obedience to rules of composition (like certain mathematical proportions, the classical “orders,” Roman arches, and so forth).

This type of beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, which is a democratic way of talking about it.  The beauty of neoclassical architecture, according to statements from Shubow and McCrery and countless other ideological neoclassicists, is absolute: their beauty is timeless, self-evident, formulaic, historic, and non-negotiable.

They speak seriously of an “aesthetic objectivity” in relation to their architectural preferences, connecting anchor ideas of virtue and truth to the Greco-Roman language of architecture. From here, the neoclassical style may be linked in sneaky fashion to American nationalism, European ancestry, democracy and Christianity. Why any Mediterranean, slave-holding, aristocratic and Zeus-driven society should provoke so much patriotism in the United States is not exactly obvious, but the executive branch of the American government has become, to be sure, provoked.

In the architectural renderings above, produced by McCrery’s office for the White House, all of these notions of rules-based beauty are on display.

It is here that the implied ethical content of neoclassical architecture finds expression through a traditional aesthetic considered beautiful without the need for any particular beholder, and in this way the proposed White House ballroom projects a certain kind of authority.

Asserting this authority is its more profound and politically meaningful function, in my view. By asserting, defending, and sponsoring an official, national style of architecture, the current administration points aggressively to Greece and Rome as root sources of truth, affirming an implied social pecking order — with western European ancestry at the top. One of the admirable things about Modernist and Brutalist architectural design in public buildings (the kind so disliked at the moment by the White House) is that it goes sort of mute on the slippery topic of beauty; it refuses to offer a recipe or definition. It shrugs.

Closing the loop, this is the inevitable “western civilization” part of the ballroom project story. The sad part. When architecture is used to suggest something about ranked social inheritance, or roots, or legacy, or virtue, or truth, that architecture is misused. The neoclassical fetish of the White House sounds a lot like genetic engineering, or some kind of eugenics of design. The underlying logic is unkind, narrow-minded and dangerous. It is a short jump to “degenerate art” and other propagandistic gunk.

No wonder the architectural drawings for this deluxe ballroom appear oddly bleached, like some blighted coral reef. One-style-suits-all is unhealthy for the many. For the select few, it’s a ball.

Jon Calame teaches art history at the Maine College of Art and Design and the University of Southern Maine. This column is supported by The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.