02 Mar 2026

Crashing in the same car

Kate Wagner opens a new series on fascist aesthetics

Dear Leader as Master Chief from the game HALO via @WhiteHouse on X the everything something.

Today: Please join us in a fiery welcome for our newest Hydra, journalist and architecture critic Kate Wagner.

Issue No. 513

Toward an Understanding of Fascist Aesthetics, Part I
Kate Wagner

Toward an Understanding of Fascist Aesthetics, Part I

by Kate Wagner

The question of whether or not we are living “in fascism” is, I’ve always thought, a kind of useless one, mostly because history does not go backwards: today there is not a “return” to fascism so much as an integration of fascist tendencies and practices—the fetishization of youth and violence, annihilationism, policies of racialized extermination, etc.—this time carried out within the economic structures and the smooth, financialized logic of neoliberal “optimization.” It would be closer to the truth to say that we are living in an unfortunate new historical moment that does not yet have a name. Still, there are clear corollaries between our “neo” fascism and the fascisms of the 20th century, which are visible in politics and in art alike, and they are worth exploring.

At the end of February, I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel devoted to the topic of fascist aesthetics today with the literary theorist Anna Kornbluh at the Chicago branch of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Over the course of an hour and a half of wide-ranging discussion that coursed from Lauren Sanchez’s boobs to AI slop, a number of patterns emerged around questions regarding today’s fascist aesthetics—whether they are a mass movement, how they relate to the fascisms of the past, and how critics and artists can help to set a new and better course for artistic production. I’ll be addressing these questions in a series of essays for Flaming Hydra, this being the first.

Walter Benjamin’s observation that fascism is the aestheticization of politics remains unambiguously true. The task of the critic may then become the politicization of aesthetics.

Let’s begin by saying that all fascist aesthetics are:

Anti-intellectual. Superficially, the fascist is anti-intellectual in order to maintain his Volkish bona fides. This is true even while he is posing as the opposite, as a kind of benevolent sophisticate; JD Vance, an obvious member of the Yale set who publicly disavows “elites” and ostentatiously poses as a man of the people (via an immutable quality granted to him at birth by way of his “Hillbilly” upbringing) is actually a pretty good example of this dynamic. We see the same impulse in the Traditional Architecture space where, while the beauty and superiority of classicism are heralded over modernism, specific arguments are lacking as to the rather contentious history of developments within classical and neoclassical architecture, because that would mean acknowledging that questions of beauty aren’t so cut and dried.