/lit/ - Literature

>>9051752
>Movements much further to the right in Europe have had robust artistic elements

i think that this is in part why we don't. the american encounter with totalitarianism in the 20th century left a broad and looming shadow: not only in our incredible mistrust of centralized state information (yet one more contributing factor that, when mixed with our lineage of antinomeanism, has helped the current surge in populism), but, along with that, the TYPE of politics that were propagandized during the war and post-war period as "totalitarian" were a particular branch of rhetoric.
so you point to the italian futurists--other examples might be the theoretical works of sorel and schmitt--both who took the aesthetic image-myth as the ultimate and best way to weed beneath the endless conversations of a desiccated liberal parliamentarism and actually impact the minds of the proletariat/das volk.
so, point 1: aesthetics have been excised from the american political arena ever since it encountered first the volk-inspired anti-modernism of fascism, and then the full-scale integration of marxist aesthetics viz. the soviet encounter thereafter.
i think you are absolutely right: there is a reason why right-wing movements have such robust elements of aesthetics and art--this is simply because they understand, more than the dry coldness of leftism today (which is ironic, given marx/adorno/marcuse/ranciere's very passionate notions of art and politics), that one of the fundamental runestones of political existence is: romanticism. isaiah berlin is the thinker to check out if you are interested in how alt-righters both appropriate romanticism and simulatenously try to repress it. see, for instance, edmund burke for maybe the most enduring and most important figure on splicing aesthetics into what we might see as modern conservatism.

first point: after its encounter with fascism and totalitarianism, liberalism self-consciously rejected the romanticism and aestheticism of reactionary politics in favor of an ideal of rational deliberation based on individual freedom (locke, rawls, habermas).

great question, btw.

>>6942981
>>6942990