I’ve been thinking about how fascism is as much an aesthetic movement as it is a political one — the original fascists’ cults of modernity,
I’ve been thinking about how fascism is as much an aesthetic movement as it is a political one — the original fascists’ cults of modernity, mechanization, and efficiency; the marble-statue-avatar RETVRN guys and secretly-funded-by-the-Mormon-church cottagecore TikTok influencers of today; the eugenicist and white supremacist obsession with the “perfectibility” of the human form and with idealized (white) masculinities and femininities; Trump’s endless muttering about “good genes”; Peter Thiel’s and Bryan Johnson’s eagerness to delve into the modern equivalents of occultism and alchemy in pursuit of eternal youthfulness and vigor; GamerGaters’ and their ideological descendents’ habit of treating “pronouns in bio” or a copy-paste of an interlocutor’s selfie avatar as a mic-drop rebuttal; etc., etc. The idea that the beautiful (it is generally not acknowledged in this framework that “beauty” is a matter of contingent and ever-changing cultural norms) is morally good (same note) while the ugly (same note) is morally bad (same note!) is certainly not exclusive or original to fascism, but its role in fascism is noteworthy because of this conjoining of aesthetics to politics.
This isn’t very well-developed, and undoubtedly if I were to pick Paxton back up and take more notes, or indeed spend the time to properly study Benjamin, I would have a clearer and stronger argument. But I don’t think I’m getting too far out over my skis in saying that a core element of fascism is disgust, and the use of disgust to motivate violence.
(Just this week right here in Ultra-Liberal Boston™, a fascist was so disgusted by the sight of a senior citizen wearing a respirator, presumably to try not to catch COVID-19 — the ongoing, highly contagious, airborne pandemic still killing hundreds every week in the US, in case you’ve forgotten — that he tried to murder her by hurling her under a train.)
Of course revulsion is also a kind of obsession (famously, consider the Nazi regime’s exhibitions of “Degenerate Art”), and aesthetically fascism is as fixated on the objects of its hatred as it is on its supposed ideals of beauty. And obviously obsession whether “positive” or “negative” distorts and deranges one’s thinking.
A thing that worries me is the ongoing eagerness of avowed non- and even anti-fascists to deploy this kind of moralized disgust. It does not take much effort to find people who consider themselves committed liberals or even leftists using ableist, ageist, and fatphobic language about Trump. Or remember those murals of him and Putin making out, or the balloon of him as a petulant, diaper-clad baby? But it’s not just him, of course! Liberals said all manner of misogynist and transphobic things about Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin, for example. Plenty of leftists believe economic class is the only real axis of oppression under capitalism, and love to deride “idpol” and laugh about how “cringe” “winemoms”, or “tumblr they/thems”, are.
Look, too, at the success fascists have had leveraging disgust to promote laws and policies they fully intend to use to try to drive all queer people out of public life. Few if any people with power are willing to say “we should listen to sex workers and pornographers about the dangers of these bills to restrict and control access to information on the internet,” and this too is weaponized disgust, aesthetics-as-morals.
It’s taking this line too far to say that disgust is per se fascist; to feel at least somewhat repulsed by puke and shit and rot and other non-metaphorical filth is not entirely unsalutary (though conversely to see cleanliness as virtue is much more problematic), and to feel nauseated by acts of cruelty is surely an unalloyed moral good. But to be disgusted by a person or people — as distinct from harm they do to others — be they “ugly” or “weird” or “gross” or unclean or unhoused or sick or disabled or fat or queer or trans or any other things, even, more challengingly, be they fascists themselves — is, if not necessarily fascist in itself, a critical point of weakness. It’s a door, maybe just unlatched, maybe ajar, maybe flung wide, that fascism can walk through, and once it starts getting through the door, well, you’ve heard the story about the Nazi bar.
The surest way to immunize yourself against fascism’s insidious ability to work even well-meaning people around to accepting inhumanity by starting with the people they think are the ickiest, is to steadfastly and immovably refuse to find any people icky; to relentlessly search your heart for any shred of revulsion against your fellow humans, and incinerate it.
Also, the surest way to immunize yourself against COVID-19 is to make sure you’re up to date on your vaccine shots and to wear a high-quality N95 or equivalent respirator anytime you’re in an indoor and/or crowded public place. Come on, people. This shouldn’t still need to be explained.
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