Use and Uselessness
On Fascist Aesthetics in the Age of AI
If it is no longer debatable that the second Trump administration is a fascist regime,1 it is also clearly the case that it differs, in some ways, from historical antecedents. One unanswered question that has puzzled and fascinated me is the role of aesthetics in Trump’s movement. What—if anything—does his AI-addled and adolescent meme culture share with Mussolini’s rationalism, for example, evinced to this day by affecting structures like the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana? Even Trump’s commitment to a caricatured notion of “Greco-Roman classicism” is always rendered with maximum kitsch—gold leaf, spray paint, and cartoonish overproduction—rendering any connection to the past essentially beside the point.
At first, reeling from the schlock of it all, it can be tempting to believe that right wing aesthetics suck badly because no one with any meaningful artistic training ends up harboring such reactionary ideologies. Indeed, Richard Golson notes that many have historically argued that fascism and culture are “fundamentally antithetical terms.” Unfortunately as well as historically, this has been simply untrue. (See for example Ezra Pound, noted poet and committed fascist.) In that case, is aesthetic debasement a unique feature of Trump’s movement?
Maybe!
On the one hand, it may well be the case that postmodern fascism—that is to say, fascism born in the neoliberal era—was doomed to spiral downward, learning all the worst lessons from a culture ostensibly liberated from any strictures or universal criteria for evaluating the quality of art. On another, Trumpian aesthetics are also consistent, do not explore the myriad possibilities blown open by the flat ontology of the market but instead tend to consolidate around certain themes and forms.
One of these forms has to do with the notion of “slop”—a term coined to describe AI’s now ubiquitous, low-quality, high volume imagery. Infinitely fungible, slop is low-quality on purpose: as Anna Kornbluh would have it, what matters isn’t the content that’s being consumed so much as the act of consuming itself. Whether scrolling through Tik Tok or keeping a streaming channel open regardless of what’s on it, slop encourages the kind of “depressive hedonia” that Mark Fisher identified back in 2009—a compulsive inability to stop seeking low-grade enjoyment at all hours of the day. A terror, in other words, of silence.
Insofar as stuff goes down easier when you don’t have to think about it, the point of this kind of “immediacy style” capitalism is the smooth flow that keeps people scrolling no matter what. More is more, in this sense, because advertisers make more money the longer you keep an app open. This is the same logic behind Netflix CEO Reed Hastings admitting that he sees the company’s main competitor as “sleep.” If we’re looking for unifying features of fascist aesthetics in our contemporary moment, slop has to be a serious contender: extending from the internet to material reality, it usefully contextualizes much about Trump’s approach, right down to his bad copies of neoclassicism.
But there are at least two other consistencies worth raising, both having to do with identity. The first is the most obvious: fascist aesthetics are historically white. We can attribute this universal continuity to Aimé Césaire’s observation that fascism’s origins are to be found in the European colonial project, which divided the world into superior and inferior races in order to commit atrocities hundreds of years before Hitler’s ascent.
This claim is further corroborated by Hitler’s now notorious study of Jim Crow America, in which he found much to inspire. While fascism clearly holds no monopoly on authoritarian violence, its aesthetic expressions have been developed within the very regimes responsible for inventing notions of whiteness as implicit or explicit justifications for brutality, and therefore express its worldview.
Secondly, of course, fascism is relentlessly and aggressively patriarchal. Obviously, the much-discussed phenomenon of “Mar-A-Lago face” testifies to the important role that women have played in validating the fascist project, which in cultural terms has always prioritized and relied upon a ruthless re-entrenchment of traditional gender norms. Yet, the terms of women’s participation—and the terms of what counts as valid in the aesthetic sphere—are being set by men.
Notably, despite some overriding consistencies, the expression of white masculine sensibilities in the aesthetic realm is also shifting. As philosopher Robin James points out, contemporary right-wing culture has turned against the notion of taste itself, privileging the performance of domination and control over discernment of any sort. In the manosphere/podcast bro universe, almost all culture smacks of femininity and queerness, so controlling those processes is more “manly” than understanding them:
Today, humanistic labor like writing, drawing, and communication has been thoroughly feminized, both by its association with women and by its demonetization. Prompting AI to write, draw, or communicate allows people (men) to do those things in ways that position them not as doing women’s work, but as masters of a subordinate.
In this sense, slop and normative white masculinity are naturally aligned. Slop is both elevated and embraced by a kind of specifically white, (aspirationally) ultra wealthy, tech-bro masculinity almost precisely because it is tasteless—if all art is feminine, being incapable of judging it becomes a badge of honor for reactionary masculinity.2
The ultra-wealthy have always been a scourge, but the one-percent of a hundred years ago also felt it was important to contribute to civil society. Fascists are always and forever irredeemable, yet their aesthetic sensibilities have never before mirrored this depravity so directly.
Perhaps the best-known theorization of the art’s relationship with politics comes from Walter Benjamin’s mostly posthumous essays, written in the context of Naziism. Most famously, Benjamin’s theory of “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” posited that the capacity to photographically copy artworks on an industrial scale inaugurated a new era in which artworks—stripped of the aura accrued by their immersion in a particular tradition and context—became vulnerable to new meanings when circulated in the public sphere. This is not merely an historical observation but a caution: “Fascism,” Benjamin concludes, “attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.”
Liberated from the responsibility to improve the lives of its constituencies, fascist regimes use aesthetics to allow for a public expression of their grievances, allowing them to feel represented sufficiently to bolster a given regime. In this sense, fascism “aestheticizes politics,” making things that are one way appear in a quite different way. Gas prices are down, actually. Even if they aren’t, inflation is good now.
Still: if the loss of art’s aura allows it to be manipulated, fascists are not the only parties capable of exerting an influence. If fascism aestheticizes politics, Benjamin writes that“Communism responds by politicizing art.” This provocative, final line goes un-elaborated, at least in the essay in question. It seems to imply that art’s loss of an aura is a double-edged sword, that since art has been shown capable of altering people’s sense of reality, communists should take advantage of this potential to combat fascism’s reverse move.
Yet even if, from an historical perspective, using art to raise class consciousness has proven not terribly successful in affecting material change, I would still argue there is no need to politicize that which is always already political. Inheriting but adapting Benjamin’s tradition of critical theory, philosopher Jacques Rancière instead sees politics and aesthetics at something of a continuum: politics and aesthetics are both sense distributions, he argues—contests over the right way to arrange relations. Move things around in one, and the other is shifted by extension, though not always in the same ways.
Refusing every easy implication, Rancière seems hesitant to acknowledge that politicized art is the stuff that’s going to change our view of reality. Aesthetics and politics are connected and overlap in meaningful ways; but having lived through more of the 20th century than Benjamin did, it’s hard to not to see Rancière’s view as an acknowledgement that art does not have the revolutionary potential that Benjamin had hoped. Art may change our understanding of the world, but where does that leave us when that understanding is nowhere reflected in the halls of power? Science too helps us see the world differently, yet we’re careening towards climate catastrophe all the same.
For Rancière, real politics only happens when an excluded group makes manifest and utterly inescapable the arbitrary basis for their exclusion, revealing power in its full and illegitimate contingency. Politics isn’t the day-to-day management of a regime (because where’s the contestation in mere business as usual?); it is instead an irruption that forces the world to acknowledge the truth of injustice and the falsity of power. You can’t force that kind of shift—with art or anything else. As the uprisings of 2020 showed us, you also can’t predict what comes afterwards.
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Still, it would be nice to have some new infrastructure to use in the meantime. In the same way that the 1% of 2026 has demonstrated negative interest in the philanthropic development of its forbearers (the great museums, railroads and so on built by nevertheless terrible people), this generation’s authoritarians want to burn things more than build them. Mostly that’s got to be seen as a mercy, given how bad they appear at the latter.
So maybe the distinction does come back to one between art and aesthetics; 20th century fascism made use of the former, where Trumpism has only the latter at its disposal. If art and civil society are linked through institutions like museums and public buildings, Trump’s dismantling of those same things can be seen as quite aligned with his embrace of internet aesthetics that share a nihilistic core: he actually loathes art, and any aesthetics produced by his worldview are given off as so much byproduct—bad gas emanating from a demolition site.
Think of all the examples: home depot decor, plastic surgery, AI slop, and now, meta glasses/pervert glasses/cop glasses. These aren’t artistic cases but simply mass-produced shit unified by a vaguely off-putting aura, if we want to use that word. But if this is the difference between 20th and 21st century fascisms, what remains consistent, beyond the white patriarchal slant that also characterizes everything normative?
For me, what fascist entanglements with aesthetics comes down to us use or utility. Mussolini’s modernism and Trump’s kitsch are both bent wholly towards a unified purpose. For Mussolini it was modernization of a specific kind, which aimed to unify notions of the individual and the State, aimed to construct a contradictory edifice that allowed a regressive commitment to (for example) traditional gender roles while still allowing people to feel modern and even revolutionary, heroically individualized and part of a collective project at once.
In the same way that modernism in fascist Italy was useful for consolidating a unitary vision of futurist Italianità, fascist aesthetics in the age of AI serve to support the regime, albeit in almost the opposite manner; for Trump, the idea is cartoonish regression rather than utopian ambition, destruction over construction, razing over raising. A dream fitting for the moment, I suppose, or actually maybe this is just the incidental effect. To call his worldview an “idea” implies that there’s anything behind it beyond grift—and I don’t think there is.
Everything in Trump’s apprehension of reality is oriented around scamming people so he can make money, and every artistically-adjacent phenomenon he comes into contact with should be read according to how useful it is to this purpose. Kid Rock is useful because he performs aggrieved masculinity in ways that validate and cathartically energize a voting constituency that has abandoned everything but anger. Memecoins and associated internet ephemera are useful because they are the direct mechanism of scamming that allows the Trump orbit to profit spectacularly. Mar-A-Lago Face is useful because it performs conformity and obedience in a particularly totalizing manner. Pervert glasses are useful because tech companies are equally invested in the fascist project of controlling the population (whether through capturing our personal data or using AI to erode our capacities to read and think) and using the means of that control (data) to create new profit mechanisms on a planet whose physical resources are dwindling.3 Even The Village People’s ode to queer living is useful for Trump because it allows him to traffic in what has become utterly and supremely banal, so ubiquitous that we don’t have to think about what it means, so generic that it stands in for the “normal” and appeals to “common sense” (which always means white people and their sensibilities). In other words, Trump likes “YMCA” because it’s played at every wedding in America; it’s useful because people recognize it.
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Antiutility is the opposite of fascist aesthetics—anywhere art exists with an indeterminate relation to its reception. Organizing antifascist aesthetics means embracing the useless, the superficial, the pleasurable. Arguably, all art is like this. But I suggest that some genres/practices/sensibilities have been interpreted as uniquely useless in ways that have run afoul of leftist aesthetics in a masculine mold. The crush is one of these. So is (not coincidentally) anything femmephilic.
As Sophie Lewis writes,
Femme is indispensable to anticapitalism because it tilts our collective horizon away from anti-utopian compromise and toward what makes life worth living: roses with our bread, and hormones too.
A bit later, she previews the point of theorizing out from femmeness, so that everyone might understand the lessons it tries to teach:
More than envisioning the people who currently feel themselves called to the identity “femme” directing their energies toward one another, the femmephilic horizon I’m squinting at is non-identitarian, antiwork, and universalizing in its movement of mutual holding, decorating, exalting, and babying. This is less about connecting existing femmes and more about unleashing the femme in all of us, in the sense of care-hunger and pleasure-giving.
As useless as “antiwork” and as “decorating,” as vital as pleasure itself, all art that’s worth anything exists beyond the question ‘what can this do (for me)?’ And while anything can be pitched to a purpose, art so manipulated loses whatever aura it was able to accrue in its circulation through our economy.
By useless I do not mean disinterested, do not mean some false claim about art existing beyond politics or culture. What I mean is that it has no necessary telos. It does not want anything from you. It may change the way you see the world or lead to an evening of innocuous enjoyment or cause a heated debate on the walk home. But it does not require these from you, does not require anything in particular in order for it to be experienced in its full vitality. It keeps potential open.
All art does things. But real art is irreducible to any one intention placed behind its deployment. Political art is both vital and technically useless. It is not a tool with use-value. It is particularly useless to capital and the State, which are so often the same thing. Notwithstanding the bundle of contradictions that is the contemporary art market or the publishing industry, these works are useless for the maintenance and propagation of any one ideology, perhaps especially dominant ones.
Nonreproductive sex is useless (and political). Experimental music is the same. Dinner parties are useless. Crushes and essays and abstract paintings are useless. These and their like are the only treasures worth carrying into whatever future will be ours.
It’s not.
We had a great chat about this, if you want to hear more.
What I mean is that if oil is finite, selling consumer data becomes more appealing as a potentially infinite resource. Of course, this presumes that people will be able to continue existing on a planet sucked dry.
This is both smart and provocative. Thank you.