Ezra Klein

One thing this whole movement takes very seriously is aesthetics.

And at every level of it, from Trump himself, who is very concerned with how the people around him look, how the spaces around him look, concerned in his own way with beauty, all the way down to these people like BAP, who at least put a certain conception of beauty, the physical form, at the center of their politics.

Yeah.

One of the things that I think is interesting here is I do think they're on to at least this, which is that aesthetics has been almost an empty ground of politics for a long time.

And I do think there's a hunger for more beauty in our lives, for politics to have aesthetic opinions.

And so I'm curious how you weigh that, the sort of constant performance and camp of this movement, but also the kind of consistent belief that one of the problems with modernity is we've abandoned having sufficient views and emphasis on the beauty of our surroundings, our spaces, of our culture.

I...

I think about this actually a lot, and I've wanted to try to figure out how to do something about it.

It does seem to me that the left has done too little thinking about its own aesthetic.

One thing about the Zoran Mamdani campaign is it had a real aesthetic.

It had colors.

He dresses in a very certain way everywhere.

Obama, of course, you go back to the famous, you know, hope and change posters.

You go back to that movement.

It had in its own way an aesthetic.

But one reason I think you see a much more thoroughgoing one in MAGA, an aesthetic that runs through not just the candidate and their graphic design, but the things they put on Twitter about architecture, the executive orders about classical architecture and beauty, what should be in a museum.

is because it's fundamentally a movement about the past.

And so it gives you the capacity to choose an aesthetic from the past you prefer and say that, that is beauty.

And I think that when you're dealing with liberalism or other forms of left ideology or more left ideology in the American context,

It's harder because you can't as naturally reach backwards.