Another excellent, chilling, spot on piece
by Henry Giroux. — Molly
What is most revealing about the MAGA aesthetic is its studied ugliness. On one side stands the grotesque excess of beauty-pageant femininity—plastic smiles, ballooning filler lips, big hair, lacquered hair, stronger jaw lines, and hyper-sexualized nostalgia masquerading as “traditional values.” On the other emerges a parallel masculinist style: shaved or tightly cropped hair, rigid posture, militarized clothing, and the revival of authoritarian silhouettes unmistakably drawn from twentieth-century fascist pageantry. Take Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino’s long black trench coat, worn I would guess not for function but for theatrical authority. It is costume politics, a visual performance of domination meant to intimidate rather than persuade. As Arwa Mahdawi writes in The Guardian "The Zambian bum-stick chimps seem positively sophisticated in comparison."
This is not accidental. Fascist movements have always understood aesthetics as pedagogy—as a means of training people to feel power before they are allowed to think about it. As Walter Benjamin warned, fascism aestheticizes politics in order to mobilize the masses without granting them rights, replacing democratic participation with spectacle, ritual, and submission. Likewise, Susan Sontag observed that fascist aesthetics glorify obedience, hierarchy, and the eroticization of force, transforming domination into visual pleasure and cruelty into style.
The MAGA look follows this script precisely. It abandons democratic appeal for spectacle, substituting ethical substance with visual aggression and emotional coercion. Its ugliness mirrors its politics: cruel, nostalgic, obsessed with hierarchy, and openly hostile to pluralism. What we are witnessing is not bad taste but a deliberate visual language of authoritarianism—an aesthetic designed to normalize exclusion, glorify force, strip joy and imagination away from aesthetics, and prepare the ground for repression.
All of this is engineered by a president who, wears ill-fitting suites and takes over the Kennedy Center instituting a culture of vulgarity, and casually tells Norway he will pursue Greenland because he did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize. It would be easy to dismiss him as a narcissistic clown. That would be a mistake. He is a demagogue who despises democracy, targets people of color, revels in violence, creates a Gestapo-like personal police force that is unaccountable, and has elevated staggering levels of inequality and white supremacy into core principles of governance. At the same time, he funds the genocide in Gaza and buddies up with war criminals. He only appears to smile when he is insulting people and inflicting pain and violence. He is symbolic of an ugly ideology dressed in an equally ugly aesthetic. And in ugly times, such symbols are not incidental; they are warnings.
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