Ezra Klein

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.

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.