The Right Must Believe In What Its Good Aesthetics Represent

Being conservative is cool again, and the only source declaring that observation more emphatically than the right itself is New York Magazine.

Gracing the magazine’s cover this week is a photo of hot, young, Trumpy right-wingers sipping hard seltzers and taking selfies at a MAGA inauguration party. The story, written by Brock Colyar, dubs the new “young right” the “Cruel Kids’ Table,” but describes — and photographs — them like an exclusive fraternity whose most vocal critics are those who secretly covet an invite.

What Colyar interprets as “cruel” is partially the ill-calculated commentary of drunk partygoers and partially the invincible, uncancellable attitude of rebellious youth whose message to the nasally assistant principals of the world is “I don’t really care, Margaret.”

The most obvious explanation for the right’s new appeal to young people is that it’s always been “cool” to be countercultural, and now that the left has captured the institutions, to be a conservative is to be a rebel. When the reigning archetype of the left is a pro-obesity activist in rainbow tights with a beard and fake boobs, it’s an act of aesthetic rebellion to throw black-tie parties with hot young people wearing tuxes and evening gowns, MAGA hats optional.

If clean-cut jawlines and haircuts are Pete Hegseth-coded now, bring it on. But why is this cover story by a left-wing journo doing a better job at conveying an appealing “right-wing” aesthetic than the right’s own raw milkmaids and meme lords?

There are a lot of things that pass for a “conservative” aesthetic, whatever that means. Aaron Renn contends that the aesthetics of the right can be broken down into four categories: a retro or classical “RETVRN” that launched a thousand tradwife Instagram accounts, the futuristic aesthetic of the tech and crypto bros, neofascist memery, and the folksy MAGA world of Bass Pro and Hulk Hogan. If you agree with that division, the infamous calendar filled with glossy, semi-pornographic photos of “ultra right” babes in the kitchen wearing nothing but MAGA hats and aprons — an aesthetic which has been unfavorably compared to the New York Magazine cover photo — is an unholy marriage of the first and fourth.

The New York Magazine imagery doesn’t fit neatly into any of those categories. What do you do with a crypto ball in a neoclassical building where glamorous outfits are topped off with red MAGA hats?

Renn adds that “although the conservative leadership class often lives the same lifestyle as the mainstream one — the ‘stuff white people like’ or ‘air space‘ aesthetic — that mainstream aesthetic is left coded.”

This, he says, “creates a powerful aesthetic barrier to the right achieving cultural power in America.” City kids downing booze and taking selfies at glitzy cocktail parties used to be left-coded. Colyar’s cover story is an admission that that aesthetic barrier is coming down. That’s why his cover photo is an instant instrument of cultural power for the right, and a more effective one than many explicitly “right-wing” aesthetics.

You can tell Colyar, a representative of the urban left which sees itself as the cultural and artistic elite, is awed at how attractive — in a cultural as well as a physical sense — these new ambassadors of the right are. That’s why, despite his attempts to paint the young right as mean and overly white, he can’t help depicting them positively. He might be judging the “model type in a fur coat with a vaguely European accent” out for a smoke because she’s married to an “alt-right activist,” but at the same time he’s impressed by her because she’s beating his side at their own game.

The “modern elites” of the left, after all, “aren’t cool. They aren’t envied; they’re dweebs,” as political science professor Benjamin Mabry puts it. The gender studies grads and pantsuit-clad Hillary Clintons represent what he calls a “managerial” understanding of aesthetics, in which aesthetics are considered the realm of the upper 20 percent who are there because of their academic or technical expertise. But, because managerial credentials are no replacement for true brilliance or beauty, those self-professed elites often cannibalize the aesthetics they inherited. DEI administrators aren’t creating beauty and neither is Dr. Fauci.

But a right-wing influencer class isn’t a sufficient replacement for that managerial bureaucracy, no matter how glamorous. Mabry insists we must “not accept the sharp divide between the aesthetics of the top and of the rest.”

Aesthetics are, in his definition, “the exterior manifestation of excellence in culture and identity, the signifiers that a man sees himself as different from the others and participates in a social environment of his own kind.” He describes them as a declaration of loyalty “to a community and its principles,” whether the aesthetic is French or classical or goth or WASPy.

The Western canon is a testament that aesthetic beauty and excellence follow from a belief system that believes in the existence and inherent godliness of those things. Being generally proud of its roots in Christendom, the right has a massive philosophical advantage in the aesthetic war, even if it has serious infrastructural disadvantages. But creating cultural excellence takes more than LARPing as 1950s housewives or Roman statesmen.

“Aesthetics in continuity with the past do not play dress-up, but see what was best and incorporate it in a modern way, distinct to each community’s unique history and past,” Mabry says. They interact with a sense of cultural identity, which is why the culturally homeless modern West is so bad at them, and also why “conservative” calendar creators are bad at them too. If aesthetics are a declaration of loyalty, then the best way to create good aesthetics is to be loyal and devoted to something truly good and excellent.

That’s not to say the young “influencers” partying over inauguration weekend are the aesthetic future of the right. But Colyar’s depiction of them is compelling because it captures an authentic cultural identity: as he put it, “everyone in this set kept referring to themselves as ‘normal.’”

No matter how cliché some of its attendees might be online, the party was real, and the attendees were far more “normal”-looking than airbrushed calendar cam girls.

Just as good parties produce good aesthetics, so do good beliefs and good communities. For now, it doesn’t take much to win the aesthetic war against DEI consultants and cross-dressing dudes. But if the right wants to maintain cultural and artistic relevance, it’s going to have to treat that role more like a responsibility and less like a meme. To really create good aesthetics, you have to believe in what they represent.

Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.