Ezra Klein

If you're so focused on critiques of the past, then endlessly you have to modernize it.

So Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda has a real aesthetic.

And what it does is it combines an aesthetic of the past into this multicultural update.

So it's simultaneously honoring it and critiquing it.

But that's actually hard to do.

And so I think sometimes one of the reasons that the left has more trouble answering the question of what is beautiful is that the past is not a safe place for it to go.

The difficulty is for that aesthetic that the left is very skeptical of technology and that AI in particular has widened that skepticism.

And so if you can't have an aesthetic of the future that is in some ways sci-fi-y and a little techno-punk...

then you're not left with very much because you don't like the past.

You're not comfortable with the future.

Donald Trump is president in the present.

And I think it's hard.

But I will say, I think this is one of the places where I'm most sympathetic to a thing happening

In the new right, even if I don't like where they take it, which is culture is very powerful and the aesthetics of culture are very powerful.

And Trump's version of it is very specific with UFC on the lawn for, you know, the 250th and, you know, and Hulk Hogan at the at the RNC.

His aesthetics in a funny way, very camp.

But they're at least very central to him and his vision of politics.

And we're in a much more visual culture.

The way the platform has moved is much more visual.

And I don't think political movements do not have both a visual identity and a visual perspective, a perspective on what is beautiful and what is to be culturally prized are going to compete well in this era.