Trump’s Superior Political Aesthetics

Jag Bhalla

27th February 2025

Do you yearn for pre-Trump times? If so, there’s a chance that you may be adrift at sea clinging to the debris of cherished conventional wisdom that has been wrecked. A decade after his rise, many of the old guard resist facing that Donald Trump succeeded by using a sounder psychology and a superior political aesthetics (I explain what I mean by that phrase below). Superior in the sense of having a sounder grasp of empirical political behavior. Sounder precisely because it isn’t beholden to certain elite ideas and tastes that dominate the minds of the leadership of his opponents (since those ideas and tastes are mainly held by a privileged minority, they can be an electoral liability). Trump’s more realistic psychology and more effective political style aren’t the only factors, but they’re crucial for an accurate account of his strengths. You can’t counter the political energies he has harnessed without articulating and grasping his artful appeal.

This essay argues that the neglected field of political aesthetics should play a central role in the rescue operation. It can guide the new thinking needed to rebuild a seaworthy politics. As philosopher Crispin Sartwell has written, politics cannot be fully understood “except as an aesthetic environment.” And "there can be no entirely de-aestheticized politics." As we’ll see Trump used smarter political aesthetics than his opponents, many of whom pride themselves on their high intelligence. Yet somehow their sophisticated-seeming sort of “rationality” tends to discount that winning in politics means making the most emotionally and aesthetically compelling case.

Consider the deer-in-the-headlights disarray of the Democratic party which the New York Times reports still has “no coherent message.” As one of its national political reporters put it too many Democrats explain away the 2024 election by claiming “there’s nothing we could’ve done because the voters are stupid.” This has the same stratospheric “level of condescension they brought to electorate concerns over inflation, immigration, and Biden’s age.” That voters-are-stupid vibe lurks behind Senator Chuck Schumer’s remark that “average working families … didn’t realize how much we had done … for them.” Democrats seem “like a party out to pasture, a party that is not rising to the moment at all,” as Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid said on a Wisdom of Crowds podcast.

The Art of Politics

The benefits of political aesthetics are center-staged in the work of Irish columnist and Orwell prize winner Fintan O’Toole. Adding the skills of a theater and literary critic to those of a political analyst, O’Toole detects three key ingredients in Trump’s appeal. He deploys a “potent form of aestheticized reactionary politics” combined with “comic-authoritarian” tactics. To that he adds the emotional or affective icing on the cake of a “politics of self-pity.” That recipe enabled Trump to buck bad pieties that are basically hegemonic among Democratic party operatives (and their political consultants and media allies). A salient example is adherence to what historian of ideas Perry Anderson calls “economic reductionism.” He finds that rational choice theory is “hegemonic over wide areas of … social science.” Most political professionals are trained to axiomatically presume that voters always rationally seek to maximize economic self-interest (a view that seems to me far more aspirational than empirical). This is a case of what the French call a “déformation professionnelle” — a mindset narrowed by a profession’s premises and approved of procedures. These professional biases can incubate a trained incapacity that is abetted by self-serving and self-flattering ideas (that duo can be a deep well of delicious delusions). Precisely this pattern of elite error was noticed by George Orwell who wrote that “those at the top had trained themselves to be impenetrably stupid” about the unseemly arrangements that their status rests on. Such blind spots shared by the powerful recur enough to warrant a label, let’s call them hegemoronic (a compression of hegemonic and moronic).

Orwell had a nose for that brand of high-brow twaddle. The kind of polished poppycock and credentialled incompetence that non-elites can readily see though: “one has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Betrand Russell noted a similar vulnerability among the over-educated, there are “views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.” Entry into an elite often involves induction into believing (or at least spouting) prestige-signaling pieties as well as strictly adhering to its approved of methods (see footnote 1). These elaborate elite beliefs often flatter the velvet-roped vanities of those over-invested in their supposed higher intelligence (or so-called merit). And, of course, a key function of elite consensus is to first and foremost protect and police their own positional interests. John Stuart Mill famously feared the “despotism of custom” since it hindered progress, but perhaps its strongest form is the “despotism of prestige.” The desire to acquire prestige, or fear of losing it, can operate as a powerful disincentive to rocking elite boats (prestige is one of the prime tools in what philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò calls “elite capture,” whereby radicals are corralled and seduced into serving the status quo). Higher ups vigorously and viciously guard their hierarchic privileges on pain of exile into the non-elite non-player-character masses. That’s true of Democratic party brass despite their egalitarian rhetoric, as sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has documented their “pursuit of social justice seems subordinate to the pursuit of affluence and influence.”

18th-Century Aesthetics Can Explain our State-of-the-Art Politics

In a lecture that can be streamed here, O’Toole explains how Trump’s political style brilliantly, if unwittingly, is in synch with Edmund Burke’s work on aesthetics. For those not up on state-of-the-art 18th-century aesthetics, Burke laid out a “theory of taste and of morals” and a “science of duties” in his ground-breaking 1757 book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. That trio taste, morals and duty were deemed inseparable and they necessarily shaped politics. Burke’s views on this should perhaps be given extra weight since he was a practicing politician, not just an ivory-tower or armchair scribbler. Back then it was widely presumed that “politics was about the artful management of man’s feelings and passions.” So says the introduction to a recent edition of Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (which was written to respond to Burke). Schiller’s book sought to raise “the soul-forming fine arts to the rank of a philosophical science.” For these thinkers, the business of aesthetics was the broad study of feelings, sensations, and passions (a sense of aesthetics still active in our term anesthetic). Aesthetics wasn’t only about art or ornamentation; it was centrally concerned with soul-formation and the political ramifications thereof. Especially since aesthetic trends strongly influence personal and political preferences among elites. That shouldn’t be as odd as it might sound, consider that in 1981 Margaret Thatcher said her mission was to use here economic policies “to change the soul.” As I’ve argued here, Thatcherized souls still rule us.

Burke's powerful insights created a “rupture from previous aestheticians.” His key move was to sharply distinguish beauty from sublimity. Beauty arose from love, the sublime from terror. The positive pleasures of beauty differed radically from the darker charms of certain kinds of fear. Crucially, in Burke’s view sublime-spurred negative emotions were always stronger than beauty’s positive ones.

Here’s a key passage:

“The passions which belong to self-preservation turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime. The passions belonging to self-preservation are the strongest of all the passions.”

We now often use the word sublime simply as an intensifier, but Burke used it to mean whatever generates powerful “negative pleasures” (which he defined to be not the same thing as pain). In situations where an onlooker feels safe, spectacles of life-threatening terror can generate a thrilling aesthetic attraction. Hence the lure of horror movies, tragedies, and Trump rallies.

Burke’s sublime vs beautiful framework fits the 2024 election, which could be loosely cast as fun versus fear (though as we’ll see Trump’s brand of political fear came with a side order of twisted fun). The Democratic party deployed a duo of “joy” and supposedly upbeat economic data. The tone of Kamala Harris’s campaign resembled that of a glossy ad for a luxury perfume, an elite lifestyle must-have rather than a political vision attuned to the troubles of struggling and embittered masses (like almost all recent Democrats, she channeled Reaganite optimism alongside corporation-friendly policies that continued his top-serving priorities, see footnote 2). In contrast, Trump conjured a chaotic collage of menacing sentiments, painting from the darker side of the Burkean palette. O’Toole calls this the “reactionary sublime,” which was leavened with a particular kind of cruel comedy (more on that shortly). He evoked and orchestrated anger, resentment, and desire for vengeance. Let’s not forget how strong the psychology of revenge is. Millenia ago wrathful revenge was described as “sweeter than dripping streams of honey, that swarms in people's chests and blinds like smoke,” by Homer. Judging by today’s TV and movies, little has changed.

Democrats carped that the negative “vibes” that Trump leveraged or sowed and fanned were at odds with the upbeat economic data. In characteristically clumsy fashion they tried to use stats and charts to discount or disregard documented fears over economic security. Pundits like Paul Krugman looked at their charts and a week before the election declared that the economy was “glorious.” Yet for those not wearing spreadsheet-spectacles, on the ground food prices remained 25 percent higher than before the covid-19 pandemic and on election day “68% of voters said the economy was not good." Is it so surprising that the majority of the working-class voted against the happy talk style of Democrats. Harris’s campaign decried Trump’s “politics of fear,” exposing a weakness in its grasp of the logic of emotion. There’s a widespread confusion in our culture that opposes rationality to emotions. This casts emotions as irrational even though feelings are a form (fast) thinking and they often rest on sound reasons. Only those who have been lucky or privileged enough to have never encountered real fear can feel it isn’t an all-trumping emotion. And surely economic fear is solidly rational given long working-class experience (as a recent Politico analysis put it "those living in more modest circumstances have endured at least 20 years of setbacks”). Again, as Burke noted negative emotions, especially fear over self-preservation, typically take priority: the terror of the sublime generates the "strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." Trump harnessed this supremely potent emotion.

Politics, Tech-Dexterous Artists, And Receding Reality

On the vexed relationship between reality and politics, O’Toole’s lecture quotes media theorist Walter Benjamin: “the logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.” Benjamin wrote that in Berlin in 1936 where political life was dominated by intricately stage-managed mass spectacles like Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies. Nazi leaders were also reaching large audiences by new mass media tech like radio, film and magazine images. Benjamin saw that artful use of new tech would inevitably lead to large “changes in perception” and ensuing “social transformations.” Thus, tech-dexterous artists were key players. Some artists created a “secular cult of beauty” or “theology of art” (see footnote 3). Others “denied any social function” for their work (implausibly), retreating under the motto of “art for art’s sake” (with its tacit preaching of anti-politics, often translating into little more than art for the artist’s ego’s sake). Perhaps the most influential are those who used their artistry to serve political ends, for example to replicate the “cult of the movie star” for politicians. The archetype of this is Leni Riefenstahl’s technically innovative Triumph of the Will (1935) which spread the art-enhanced spirit of Nuremberg rallies throughout Germany. Riefenstahl’s "sophisticated camerawork turn[ed] Hitler into something like a Hollywood star." Hitler himself paid a great deal of attention to the aesthetics of his regime. And political optics have become ever more paramount since (that’s of course no longer limited to or characteristic of fascism as Benjamin suggested).

O’Toole provocatively inverts Benjamin’s “logical outcome” by saying that the “more political life resembles art the more fascistic it becomes.” He seems to be using fascistic loosely in the sense of a well-known line from Hannah Arendt: totalitarian rulers create conditions in which “the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exist[s].” Nowadays distortion and spin aren’t so exclusive to fascism, but as a recent essay updating “Benjamin’s Warning” by Alex Stern in Commonwealth Magazine puts it: “While not equivalent to fascism, the aestheticization of our politics does reveal a vulnerability that our society shares with those that succumbed to fascism.” Even in fledgling forms Benjamin foresaw that artful use of tech meant naked reality would find it harder to compete. Our political imaginations and perceptions are dominated by technologized imagery that tends to be by design livelier than life (a great Shakespeare phrase). Bare reality can seem dull by comparison. Benjamin feared that “the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.” 90 years later it is all far more complex, with addictive social media awash in cutesy memes that are interwoven with horrific livestreamed evils, like those from Gaza.

Beyond open propaganda, Benjamin presciently feared that “distraction as provided by art presents a covert control.” Imagine how he might feel about our constant blitzkrieg of algorithmically-personalized emotionally-manipulative diversions. We’re force fed infinite affective fireworks inches from our faces, delivered by Burkean tech that leverages and amplifies powerful negative emotions (often optimizing for engagement by enragement). This omnipresent onslaught produces perilous epistemic conditions for any workable democracy. Can we trust that the imagery saturating our public realm is conveying an accurate picture of reality? Or are these impressive aesthetic powers more likely to be used to seduce or steer or manipulate us for commercial or political purposes? Similar concerns about the integrity of public information were a key factor in Albert Einstein’s generally relatively little-known advocacy of socialism. In 1949, about a decade after Benjamin's essay, Einstein wrote that when "private capitalists ... control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education)” it becomes "extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights." It’s unwise to ignore the gravity of such distortions that warp the fabric of democracy.

For a perverse present-day example of reality needing to compete against theater O’Toole cites right-wingers rejecting news coverage by claiming footage was staged. Supposedly “child actors” were used in video of school shootings like Sandy Hook. O’Toole fears we’ve reached “perhaps the final stage of the aestheticization of politics, it's a world turned upside down, reality is all theater, victims, even the small children are sophisticated performers acting out scripts." Such spin and reality distortion aren’t confined to fringe right-wingers. They occur in “sensible” media and politics also. Consider the concerted efforts required to hide Joe Biden’s cognitive decline from “Day 1 of his presidency.” Or ponder what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls mainstream “journalism’s great sin” of camouflaging Israel’s open apartheid for decades, while mischaracterizing it as “the only democracy in the Middle East.” Plus, the conditions ripe for Trump to ply his Burkean sublime flavored fear-driven politics were long cultivated by Democrats and most of their mainstream media allies. They largely downplayed the economic immiseration of fellow citizens while benefitting disproportionately from Krugman's top-skewed “glorious” economic gains. Since the 1980s the average member of America’s bottom half has gotten income gains 1/180th of those in the top 10%, and 1/590th that of those in the top 1%, (details here).

Breaking with the Political “Grammar of Uplift”

As O’Toole says in his lecture, right from the beginning Trump “went for the full sublime” in barnstorming Burkean fashion. His 2015 campaign broke with the “grammar of uplift” that had dominated political rhetoric (Reagan's morning in America, etc.). Instead, Trump painted a bitter picture of “American Carnage.” He depicted Democrats as sources of the nation’s terrifying decay and offered safety under his protection (the savior psychology of “I alone can fix it”). But in typical having-it-both-ways style, as O’Toole notes, atop the terror “it’s very striking that the most common word Trump uses in his rhetoric is beautiful.” Trump uses both dimensions of Burke’s aesthetics, both the beautiful and the sublime.

Trump’s latest campaign declared “I am your warrior, I am your justice. For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” With what O’Toole calls an “instinctive sort of genius” Trump did “exactly what a dramatist would do, which is to embody in an individual all of these vast invisible forces of terror.” This resonated with the crippling material and emotional climate of the economically precarious (those imperiled and impoverished masses beset by “deaths of despair”). In O’Toole’s view Trump successfully cast Harris as a monstrosity leading the obscure forces of “the woke,” unleashing hordes of murderous immigrants. He even more absurdly stoked fears of a “sinister plan to abolish the suburbs.” That may seem way off base, but as Burke theorized, obscurity actually adds to the strength of sublime effects. Trump’s rallies were collective spectacles where his fans enjoyed Burke’s “negative pleasures” alongside camaraderie and the safety in numbers of a like-minded crowd. His rag-tag coalition was united by the bonds of a powerful negative solidarity. They coalesced on a vicarious “adventure of revenge” against shared foes. Chief among those opponents were the professional managerial class (PMC) that had become so prominent in the Democratic party (they’re the frontline enforcers of what Damir Marusic and Shadi Hamid call “cultural authoritarianism,” the top-down imposition of changes in manners and allowable speech that many found irksome). In such conditions, the politics of personal material gains can easily take a back seat to the Homeric honey-beating emotional rewards of vengefully punishing perceived enemies.

Comic-Authoritarian Politics, Laughing All the Way to the White House

The other often underappreciated ingredient in Trump’s appeal is his weaponized wit. “Trump is America’s biggest comedian,” as O’Toole wrote in a New York Review of Books essay called Laugh Riot. “His … put-downs, honed to the sharpness of stilettos, are many people’s idea of fun. For them, he makes anger, fear, and resentment entertaining.” Trump’s “cruel laughter” was crucial in cultivating a community of kindred spirits. Trump built “a sense of cultlike authority by using the collusiveness of comedy, the idea that the leader and his followers are united by being in on the joke.” Trump developed a “comic-authoritarian politics,” a lively mix of “vaudeville and vituperation” that had “advantages over the older dictatorial style.” And in a step beyond Burke, Trump’s recipe added the potent spice of what O’Toole calls “the politics of self-pity.” He was “pitiless in his ridicule of the targets of his contempt while allowing his audience to feel deeply sorry for itself.”

In addition to his wilier emotional playbook, Trump showed a mastery of classical rhetoric that his supposedly smarter opponents lacked. As Aristotle wrote, effective persuasion has three components: ethos, pathos, then logos. Your ethos, that is your character, or how you present yourself is foremost. If you can’t present a trustworthy persona, whatever else you say is unlikely to be persuasive. The next step, pathos, was about what emotions you orchestrate (as Burke and Schiller knew, but today's rationalist policy crowd ignores). And only if you’ve done both ethos and pathos well enough might the logos or logic of your argument stand a chance of being effective (otherwise it can be too easily simply dismissed). Trump labored to look and behave very differently than typical politicos. He expertly used imagery to connect with the working class. Alongside his gaudy gold-heavy glitz, he donned the garb of a garbageman or a fast food worker (moves typically mocked by Dem-leaning media).

Meanwhile Harris looked and acted essentially just like all the leaders (of both parties), who had smilingly shafted America’s underclass for decades. She blew over a billion dollars elaborately burnishing her luxury-brand vibes by appearing with a parade of plutocrats and wealthy celebrities. A prior case of this frequent Democratic party clumsiness over class and unwitting comedy occurred in a Barak Obama 2007 speech in Iowa: "Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately? See what they charge for arugula?" There were no Whole Foods stores in Iowa at that time. Democrats presented themselves as “a party that embodies a contented American status quo” as a Harpers post-mortem on the election by Matthew Karp put it.” They represented “the nerve center of American capitalism, ideological production, and imperial power ... Harris raised far more money than Trump, from a much broader and deeper bench of wealthy elites.” Enough of the electorate feared the continuing effects of that same contented status quo to elect Trump.

Trump’s Sounder Political Psychology

On top of his superior political aesthetics and his “comic-authoritarian” style Trump also deployed a sounder social psychology. The gist of that smarter psychology is well captured in yet another fertile quote from Orwell, who analyzed the psychology of totalitarian regimes in his review of Mein Kampf written in 1940:

Hitler “grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.” But Hitler “knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.”

The shipwrecked conventional wisdom in today’s democracies is that politics is driven largely by self-serving motives and the “hedonistic attitude” that Orwell detected. Appeals to so-called self-interested political realism or the politically palatable are often decisive. However alluring that might seem, a politics built entirely around the logic of feelgood policies lacks the maturity, fortitude, and resources to face the hardships of tough times. Only a childish worldview seeks to ignore the grown-up reality that many things that don’t feel good still must be done. In a New York Review of Books essay Ben Tarnoff maps the immaturity of much of our leadership class, calling it the politics of “Big Baby.” He in effect notes another case of hegemoronic ideas, calling out both “reactionary infantilism” and “liberal infantilism” flavors (see footnote 4). You’ve likely heard of ”puberty blockers,” well it’s as if much of our leadership class has been heavily dosed with cultural maturity blockers, to obstruct the transition to reality-facing political adulthood.

Mixed into the “reactionary infantilism” another stream of Trump’s grab bag montage of messages actually allows him to tap into parts of human psychology that seek larger purpose or meaning. As Orwell notes, many people have a drive to work for something beyond themselves and their narrow self-interest. This other-oriented drive summons the ability to endure arduous efforts or incur costs and make sacrifices for a grand mission. The basic motivational contrast could be cast as mercenary versus meaningful, a politics of narrow self-interest versus loyalty to a greater goal. A democracy that can’t motivate its citizens to work for or incur costs for the greater good actively courts collapse. Our carrots-only political class seems to ignore than we face rivals that can marshal such efforts.

A Political Force as Strong as Eros

In a surprising way Trump leverages a complex drive for the socially-approved-of purpose that Orwell referenced and that archaic Greeks called thymos. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama defines thymos as “that part of the soul that craves recognition and dignity.” In ancient Greece thymos is what motivated duties and demanding activities to serve your community. The elite competed to express their thymos in heroic efforts to extend or protect the collective wellbeing of their polity. We don’t really have a good English word that does it justice, but thymos was once felt to be a drive as powerful as eros. In a now insufficiently famous metaphor, Plato imagined the human soul as a two-horse chariot steered by reason. One horse tended to pull in ignoble self-serving directions, it was called eros, the other helped the rational charioteer to seek honorable ends, its name was thymos (later tripartite terminologies of reason, will, and desire, lose many important and powerful subtleties).

As photographer and writer Chris Arnade recently wrote the classical heroic “archetype is kind of at odds with the modern liberal project, which favors the individual over the community.” It was once widely understood that "being a hero doesn’t mean conquering and ruling. It means, first and foremost, serving a community, acting selflessly; the hero trades their physical suffering for communal praise, and a certain status.” Sadly, somehow our culture’s conceptual pretzels now direct hero worship towards the most supremely selfish sociopathic hyper-capitalists. Their extraordinary talents and efforts systematically serve their own greed, a situation that many still-revered political thinkers have warned of since Plato called it “the greatest of all plagues.”

Compare Harris’s weak slogans (if you can even remember any of them) like “Let's win this,” against Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” The former are less clearly linked to a rousing collective mission. Plus, Trump is able to be open about what is presumed to be electorally impossible since it is deemed politically unpalatable. He doesn’t always offer only a bed of roses (e.g., he has said that the pain of his tariff policies “will be worth it”). Besides, if your grand mission simply centers self-advancement, it ensures that the majority will be left out. So-called meritocracy (or cognitive supremacy) is built to serve the most talented, the few not the mediocre or supposedly unmerited masses (that they are always the majority exposes a deep tension between meritocracy and democracy). As philosopher Michael Sandel has argued liberal “meritocracy has betrayed the working classes.” Again Trump signaled that he recognized the dignity of blue-collar workers and connected with their tastes (e.g., hosting a fast food dinner at the White House). Besides, even meritocracy’s winners face egoism’s plentiful pathologies (like the loneliness epidemic, or a lack of purpose, in what The Atlantic recently called this “Anti-Social Century”). This kind of so-called cognitive supremacy often cashes out in quite stupid, counterproductive, and even self-destructive ways. For instance, in the massively misinterpreted "tragedy of the commons," which it typically taught to our political class as declaring it "rational" to gain by destroying what you yourself depend on. A truly hegemoronic idea that ordinary common sense readily sees through — what exactly is rational about collective suicide?).

These deeply differing pictures of political psychology undergird the lazy liberal trope that Trump’s working-class followers are gullible and voting against their financial interests. Most political pros can’t imagine the psychology that Plato and Burke describe, where people have powerful pro-social or other-oriented and non-hedonistic motives. The oddity here is that history testifies against the Democratic leadership class’s hegemoronic view of politics as necessarily a what’s-in-it-for-me game. In a classic case of trained incapacity, Robert Putnam, of Bowling Alone fame, notes the: “standard social science view” is that “economics drives everything.” But he adds that’s the “one thing we’re sure of is that that story is not true.” There is much evidence that most ordinary people have loyalties that trump their financial interests (as an aside, it is unwise to trust those who have no love for or loyalty to something beyond their own greed). Political scientist Larry Bartels summarizing a review of empirical evidence reports that financial “self-interest ordinarily does not have much effect upon the ordinary citizen’s sociopolitical attitudes.” The driving factor in voter judgment is typically “their social and psychological attachments to groups." Likewise, on the role of economic reductionism, linguist and analyst of political rhetoric George Lakoff has written “Voters base their choices on values, connection, authenticity, trust, and identity, not lists of policies. Policy matters, but it must always be framed in terms of moral values.” Trump’s appeals include moral elements, they often aren’t limited to the mercenary. Seeing these ethical aspects is complicated by the fact that liberals and conservatives mean different things by the term moral. As Jonathan Haidt has documented liberal morality focuses on three pillars harm, fairness and liberty, conservatives add three more, loyalty, authority and purity. Hence on some issues what seem morally necessary to one side can feel morally abhorrent to the other.

Again, the faith that so-called rational economic self-interest is always the paramount political consideration is highly hegemoronic. Sociologist James Davison Hunter has written that the culture of our leadership class is excessively self-interested and "profoundly ignorant". He finds that it has largely “abandoned concern for the common good,” which has dethroned what was once the central task of politics (more precisely it has outsourced the very idea of the common good to markets and mainstream economists who defer to a questionable cash-based “ethics”). Also departing from the professional consensus of the political class Hunter argues that a “society’s political economy … is culturally constituted.” Remedies for our political quagmire will require a rebuilding of our “cultural infrastructure,” a task for “thousands of scholars, novelists, poets, journalists, and writers.” The mission is to develop a less self-centered culture, which would reverse a long selfward trend (for more on this see Art and Our Cult of the Self). But the importance of affective politics is largely ignored by the premises of the academic disciple of political science (which axiomatically casts voters as homo economicus, the rationally ruthlessly greedy cartoon that disrespects much of our humanity). Flesh and blood humans are not like the simplified robotic self-maximizers that are needed to make the math and logic of economics and political science seem tractable. Nor do most voters spend much time on the minutiae of policy or on formal political arguments. It is truer to say that they develop their political inclinations via cultural means: "not by listening to speeches on political philosophy, but by applauding heroes, scapegoating villains, and weeping for victims" (so wrote a drama critic quoted by Elisabeth Anker in Orgies of Feeling , in a section on the role of melodrama in the rise of liberal individualism).

Ignoring all that evidence, Democratic operatives and media continue to cast Trump supporters as irrational or gullible and persist in centering self-interest above all other motives. Besides Trump being a gifted salesmen offers differing messages to different factions, often contradictory, but nonetheless effective. He uses targeted appeals to collective loyalties and to more selfish interests (tax cuts for the rich, deregulation for his new fans in tech, etc.) The Democratic party’s skybox-level disdain from-on-high adds an ugly undertone to its glossy joyful inclusive surface. Too many democrats haven’t hidden their smug condescension while they have a decades-long record of helping capitalists exploit struggling workers (see footnote 5). Here yet another Orwell insight can help. Orwell wrote that free markets were “for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse … than that of the State” (that’s from his review of a key capitalist text, Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom). Business-friendly leaders of both parties have for decades used the state to strengthen capitalism’s private tyrannies.

Our Beautifully Self-Destructive Elites

A tweak to a quip associated with media theorist Marshal McLuhan is in order. He supposedly said “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” But now hyper-capitalists make our tech, and then their tech remakes (or distorts) us. The hyper-distracting hyper-aestheticized hyper-atomizing tech we face now (spawn of “post-moral techbros”) is far worse than that which Benjamin feared (what he was dealing with was like a pea-shooter compared to the systematic strafing of an airfield’s worth of full-armed fighter jets that we now face). But even back in Benjamin’s time he could see the risk that humanity's self-alienation might reach “such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” He writes that a fitting fascist futurist slogan would be “Let art be made, though the world perish.” This refers to Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto which cast war as art. The manifesto’s doctrinal declarations include that “War is beautiful.” Benito Mussolini often quoted Marinetti and said, “Without futurism there would never have been a fascist revolution.” This futuristic tech-focused philosophy that there is artistry and beauty and joy in destruction is on the march again. It can be seen in the tech right (which journalist Gil Duran amusingly calls the Nerd Reich). For example, influential Silicon Valley overlord Mark Andreesen in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” lists Marinetti as a patron saint.

This type of aesthetics-driven destructive thinking is surely apocalyptically apter today than in Benjamin's time. Elites are so absorbed in pursuing elegant lifestyles that their aesthetics acts as a political anesthetic. Our leadership class is politically asleep at the wheel (in 2022 political theorist Mike Davis wrote of ruling classes with "no rational analysis... no plan”). Too many in the overclass invest vast effort in pursuing stylish consumption as the poor suffer, and the biosphere burns. This should be seen as a truly terrifying spectacle of hegemoronic elites luxuriating in lives of elegant evils (this represents an innovation beyond the banal kind to “cheerful evils,” as promoted by courtier optimists like Steven Pinker, described here).

It’s as if the operative motto of our aesthetics-obsessed rulers is: May elegant elite lives be enjoyed, though the world perish.

Jag Bhalla is Editor of Everyday Analysis.

1. One prolific source of such sophisticated and studious stupidities is overreliance on a beloved theory (as an 18th-century quip puts it “The most ingenious way of becoming foolish, is by a System”). Such intellectual enthrallments risk what a Nobelist has usefully called “theory induced blindnes s.” It can cause monotheorism, a zealous faith that you possess the all-encompassing one true theory. I argue that in complex domains polytheorists, with skills in multiple conceptual systems, can be safer guides.

2. For more on the dark history of such optimism see here.

3. For more on this sort of displacement of religious energies, see here.

4. See also Liberalism’s Failure by Fun.

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