My last post was all about the substance of what it means to be a nation. I argued that it doesn’t make any sense to talk about nations as if they are stable, discrete entities that persist in more or less the same form over centuries or millennia; it makes even less sense to describe genetic lineage as the essence of nationhood. A nation is, to quote the title of Benedict Anderson’s book on nationalism, an imagined community. It’s not a natural geographic formation; it’s a product of certain political, social, and cultural arrangements.
Nationalists of all stripes tend to consider certain types of cultural activity to be a natural product of the nation’s inner spirit; they associate their nation’s eternal characteristics with a certain aesthetic that must be constantly reaffirmed and reproduced in order to ensure the nation’s future cultural integrity. They have it backwards. “National” art does not faithfully broadcast a given nation’s unchanging features; intentionally or not, it iterates on a particular tradition to creatively reimagine it. Any aesthetic statement on the meaning of one’s country is necessarily going to be a creative act (in the sense of creating that meaning) more than a faithful report on objective conditions. There’s a reason why the defining art of America’s nationalist far right is AI slop instead of, say, precise reproductions of Gilbert Stuart paintings.
This raises a question: What is the aesthetic of liberalism? One of my favorite working literary critics, Becca Rothfeld, tackled that question in an essay published earlier this month. She ends up defining modern liberalism’s aesthetic as “a smug yet unconvincing performance of non-aesthetics [that] amounts to aesthetics too.” Its hallmark cultural products are “chains selling salad bowls, mixed-use developments featuring glassy apartment complexes, the television show Parks and Recreation, the grocery store Trader Joe’s, the word ‘nuance,’ glasses with rectangular frames, group-fitness classes, the profession of consulting, news startups focusing not on criticism or reporting but on commentary, and nonfiction that is a little too good for an airport bookstore but a little too slick and credulously economics-heavy for a literary magazine.”
I think Rothfeld is being a bit reductive here. A lot of the cultural touchstones she references feel dated; Parks and Recreation aired its final episode (other than a reunion special) a little more than a decade ago. Several months ago, in an appropriately savage review of Karine Jean-Pierre’s memoir of the Biden White House, Rothfeld wrote: “Jean-Pierre is an artifact of an age that looks recent on paper but feels prehistoric in practice — the age of pantsuits, the word ‘empowerment,’ the musical ‘Hamilton,’ the cheap therapeutic entreaties to ‘work on yourself’ and ‘lean in’ to various corporate abysses.” The “prehistoric” Hamilton had its off-broadway premier in the same year that Parks and Recreation went off the air.
If we’re going to understand the aesthetic of liberalism in the present day, we’d be better off looking for more recent cultural developments. Off the top of my head, here are some things Rothfeld omits from her analysis of liberal aesthetics but which merit a closer look: the new Superman movie, Woke 2.0, the colossal No Kings protests, the mass outpouring of sympathy for anti-ICE resistance in Minneapolis, Bruce Springsteen’s tribute to that resistance, the protestors in frog costumes in Portland, and the furor over Stephen Colbert’s cancellation. You might find some of this stuff cringe or annoying, but it all adds up to a cultural moment for liberalism that feels a lot angrier and a lot more militant than Rothfeld lets on.
Still, I don’t want to entirely discount Rothfeld’s point. That line about the “performance of non-aesthetics” is quite perceptive when applied to a particular faction of the liberal coalition—one that, unlike the examples I provided above, has its native habitat in Washington, D.C.
I take a non-aesthetic to be something devoid of texture, taste, or substance; a sensibility that conveys nothing precisely because it has no fixed points of reference; a jumbled set of habits and mannerisms that have been strenuously cultivated to avoid any offense or provocation and that therefore, by design, fail to arouse any strong emotions at all. Examples of this non-aesthetic might include an LLM’s cheerful response to a prompt, chill beats to study to, cinematography that abolishes shadows and makes all colors pop so that you don’t miss any nuance while watching movies on your phone, and a limited streaming series that acts as a sequel to a movie based off a comic book and is intended to set up another movie based off another, different, comic book.
There’s something cold, strange and a little off about all of these examples, because they’re all the products of machine learning and market analysis, not any human creative intentionality. None of them have any coherent form; they are all song-like, story-like, or movie-like, without exactly being any of those things. They all have this uncanny quality that allows them to capture your attention without actually engaging it, like a picture that always looks slightly out of focus.
The political equivalent of this anti-aesthetic is popularism: a politics drained of content and fixed values, and driven mostly by issue polling (or its proponents’ tendentious analysis of the most recent issue polling). This politics is highly rigid in its method and outputs, but it is also somehow gaseous and insubstantial; no one can really say what it is meant to accomplish. It is an LLM that has been instructed to win elections but not to govern; it is the aliens Kang and Kodos from that one Simpsons Halloween special where they impersonate Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. (Parks and Recreation and Hamilton, with their corny but legible and basically wholesome values, are not cultural popularism. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a Disney IP excrescence that wants to to skim off the prestige of 1970s paranoid political thrillers while sweatily avoiding any confrontation with actual politics, is cultural popularism.)
Against what she describes as (again, with an overly broad brush) actually existing liberalism, Rothfeld pits the now-defunct journal Partisan Review. I am a sucker for this move; a lot of how I approach researching and writing about politics is driven by a vain desire to recover something of the old Partisan Review spirit. Rothfeld writes:
One model for this kind of cultural production is the journal in which Trilling first published these lines: the fabled Partisan Review, a literary and political magazine that ran from 1934 until 2003 and that is perhaps the best that American cultural history—and certainly the best that American left-liberalism—has to show for itself. The Review published essays and roundtables alongside fiction from the likes of Kafka and Bellow. Its contributors argued about politics, but they also reviewed all sorts of art, from theater to paintings to novels. Its offerings were smart but never slick; its tone was learned but never condescending; its writers addressed the reader not as if she were a neophyte requiring illumination, but as if she were an interlocutor working out her principles in tandem. Its writers bickered with each other often—indeed, the magazine is bursting with passionate and sometimes bitter disagreement—but they never talked down to each other, much less to their audience. Its writers were proffering the most arduous efforts of their minds, and they were proffering them not in the certainty of rectitude or in the expectation of congratulations but in the hope of correction. The resultant essays were good because they were informed yet curious; the magazine as a whole was good because it was as variegated and crackling as the country itself.
Yes!!! My biggest issue with popularism is so much that I object to specific policies and strategies that the popularists recommend (though I often do, and I think the fact that popularism consistently cashes out in a kind of anodyne DLC throwback politics is highly suspect given the perverse and arcane predilections of the median voter). My biggest issue with the popularists is that I think the method in which people try to win contests for power says something about how they would wield that power. The contributors to Partisan Review didn’t just make the case for democracy against the Stalinists to their left and the Goldwaterites to their right; they also modeled a certain type of democratic argument and deliberation.
This nexus between how you do politics and the type of political world you create is inescapable. There is a clear logic that connects Trump’s rambling, raucous, weirdly voluptuous campaign rallies to the Internet fever swamp that fueled his rise, and both of these forces are clearly manifest in the character of his regime. My fear when it comes to a liberalism fueled by issue polling is that it also possesses a sort of authoritarian logic, albeit of a gentler variety. Popularism is a politics for people who have given up on persuasion, argument, and intersubjectivity; it is a “give the piggies their slop so they don’t cause too much trouble” sort of politics.
And who knows, maybe the cynicism behind this approach to politics isn’t totally unwarranted. Like much of the rest of the progressive Internet, I find myself bewildered and enraged, and ultimately sort of depressed, when I make the mistake of reading one of those New York Times focus group interviews. Maybe it’s a huge mistake for politicians to engage with voters the way I would prefer they engage with me. In aggregate terms, basically nobody read Partisan Review; Winter Soldier grossed $714 million at the box office.
But there has to be some compromise path here that involves both a bit of strategic pandering something like a more aspirational politics. Zohran Mamdani might be something of a model for how that would work. He certainly wasn’t above a little bit of pandering, but in his public communications (and organizing strategy) he also modeled a form of engagement that felt genuinely democratic. The No Kings rallies and the Minneapolis protests have a bit of the same spirit: sensitive to popular taste in their prevailing iconography but uncompromising in their values and ambitions.
Something like Partisan Review—or Becca Rothfeld’s writing, for that matter—is naturally going to be more of a niche taste. (The same is even more true of my own writing, as you can see from the difference in our respective platforms.) But I have to think there’s still some sort of place for it. As Rothfeld writes, “Good politics, like good art, does not lecture or declaim. It strains; it argues; it is an unending negotiation with the difficult and intransigent adventure of humanity.” That’s an ethos I think we should all try to emulate in our own idiosyncratic ways.