On the aesthetics of Liberalism

There’s a debate on whether the Liberalism’s apparent collapse is because of its (lack of) aesthetics. The arguments:

1. Becca Rothfeld claims liberalism doesn’t have defining aesthetics and that’s bad

2. Oz says liberalism used to have its own aesthetics but it’s lost them because it transformed ‘from a project to a procedure’

3. Cass Sunstein says liberalism doesn’t have aesthetics and that’s fine

I side with Sunstein: liberalism encompasses a large spectrum of political opinions, but celebration of diversity and belief in freedom of thought and expression are core in almost all of them. So, of course, how can there be a unifying aesthetic to liberalism? The whole point of the project is to let different ideas flourish. The great thing about liberalism is that it produces a huge range of wildly different movements that co-exist: the high-brow and the low-brow, the crass and the refined, the esoteric and the accessible, the conservative and the revolutionary, the conventional and the avant-garde. Never before in history have we had so much basically free access to so many different ideas and styles; never before has a system been so tolerant even of movements that seek to undermine and overthrow it.

The problem with liberalism’s aesthetic isn’t that it does not have one, but that a narrow cultural class projects one onto it: one that is grating to the most readers. Look at the first and second links above: their style is stereotypical of the people who write for premium publications — the style of elitist erudition, high-brow snark, obscure-artist-or-philosopher namedropping, Latin or Greek vocabulary where everyday English would suffice; the kind of writing that features things like ‘who is [liberalism’s] Riefenstahl?’, ‘this has all the thumos of a castrated newt’, and that refers to popular films as ‘a cinematic scourge’. In short, a tone that is contemptuous of everything the average person likes.

There are many reasons why belief in liberalism is waning, and I don’t claim that journalists’ grating tone is the most important one (if I had to choose the most important factor, I’d say it’s that liberalism is a victim of its own success: though it has massively increased quality of life, it has increased expectations even beyond that, and the gap is what’s causing dissatisfaction); but it is a factor, and since we’re discussing aesthetics here, it’s what I’ll focus on.

Many of us feel we’re being talked down to: our tastes and preferences are dismissed as meaningless slop, if not morally offensive. No wonder so many are turning against ‘the elites’. Now, as many people have pointed before, ‘elites’ is a misleading term, because there are different groups of elites, many of which intensely dislike each other (most people speak of cultural vs business elites, though this is too broad a categorisation; e.g. within business elites, you have old-school industrialists, billionaire tech entrepreneurs, and corporate executives; these groups don’t see eye-to-eye either). But most elites across groups do have things in common: they are generally well-educated and usually rich (sure, newspaper editors and top civil servants don’t consider themselves rich, and compared to business executives they aren’t; but their salaries are still multiples of the national average). And so they are lumped together in the eyes of a lot of people. When one group talks down to them, the people respond with hostility to all of them. As a result, an increasing number of people distrust everyone at the top of the liberal order — politicians, journalists, business leaders, academics. So, when someone like Trump comes along — someone who, though an elite himself, creates an image as an enemy of the elites, an image that’s reinforced by the hostility most elites show towards him — many people vote for him.

But it’s not just the masses: cultural elites are themselves turning against liberalism. They may still consider themselves liberal, but they blame most of the ills they perceive in society on liberalism’s permissiveness, mainly as it’s expressed through liberalism’s manifestation in the economy — capitalism: it’s the fault of Netflix that films are dumbed down; it’s the fault of TikTok that people have short attention spans; it’s the fault of Youtube’s algorithm that people are radicalised. In fact, the relationship between capitalist output and consumer preferences goes both ways: corporations don’t so much shape preferences as respond to them (though the two are reinforcing each other). Netflix films are dumbed down because people watch them while scrolling on their phones, and they struggle to follow anything that’s not heavy on exposition. Taylor Swift is not rich because Spotify and record labels force her music on us, but because we choose to listen to her albums on repeat and pay hundreds of pounds for concert tickets. TikTok would never have taken off if people didn’t like short-form content.

But many elite liberals don’t see it that way. They feel that capitalism is not producing the outcomes they want, and the content they believe the rest of us should consume, and so capitalism is at fault, and companies must be better regulated, and social media banned (at least for children), and ticket prices should be capped, and, and, and. But this response is itself illiberal: though you can be a liberal and believe in market regulation (arguably, this is the main difference between liberalism and libertarianism: liberals believe in market regulation, with a view to increasing fairness or safety), you cannot really claim a liberal mindset when your main beef with the market is that it’s not producing the kind of art you think it should. It’s very arrogant to want to reform a system because the mainstream aesthetics it produces aren’t to your liking.

Though I am critical of this attitude, I do have sympathy for it. I don’t like many of capitalism’s outputs: I don’t like factory farming, I don’t like Starbucks, I don’t like TikTok, I don’t like Kindles, I don’t like fast fashion, I don’t like gyms, I don’t like Scandi minimalism, I don’t like that every high street looks the same. But I would rather live in a bad culture that is bad because most people around me like bad things, than a culture that is bad because someone thought their definition of good is objectively right, and therefore forced it on everyone else. The difference is that in the former system, if I don't like something, I can try to change it.

Here I have to preempt a common counterargument: we’re not calling for regulation to ban the Avengers, people say, but to ensure that capitalism’s winner-takes-all dynamic does not result in only the Avengers and artless sequels getting produced. The fallacy in this argument is that it confuses concentration with diversity: yes, consumption of pretty much any art form is pretty uniform; but access to different ideas and forms has massively expanded. It is not true that only Marvel films get made: it is easier than ever for anyone to produce and distribute films, songs, books, clothes, furniture, craftworks, anything, and so more of these things are being produced. If your problem with capitalism is that it results in homogeneity, well, that claim is factually wrong. To use an artless analogy: if culture is a buffet, capitalism has hugely enlarged the dishes on offer; it’s just that most people choose to eat the same course.

You might still object to this state of affairs: you might still dislike the fact that the Avengers gross more than a million indie films put together, and Beyonce is a billionaire while your incredibly talented singer roommate is penniless. But why do you dislike it? If it is because you think this means indie art forms will disappear, I’ve already addressed that: the opposite is happening, indie artefacts are proliferating. If it’s because you think the gap between megastars and everyone else is fundamentally unfair, well… that may be so. But two things to keep in mind: first, the fact that the gap is widening doesn’t mean that indie artists have it worse than before. The penniless artist has always been a stereotype. Second, though you may want to blame liberal society and capitalism for this gap, your real enemy here is that many people simply prefer to pay hundreds of pounds to see Beyonce than go to an indie gig. Perhaps capitalism encourages this to an extent, but I think it’s implausible that pop fans are brainwashed zombies. They have agency. If you are unhappy about how they exercise it, about the choices they make, then instead of trying to tear down the system, and instead of talking down to them, and berating them, try to explain why they should seek entertainment and edification elsewhere. And don’t do it by attacking the things they like; do it by extolling the things you think they should like.

Which brings me to what liberalism really needs: a change not only in the substance that liberal leaders have to offer, but also in their tone. (It is interesting to me that substance-wise, populists and centre liberals can be surprisingly similar: both have a tendency to pander to the voice of the people — the former through instinct, the latter technocratically, via polls and focus groups — rather than guiding, educating, and uplifting their audience. Trump’s TACOs the moment his latest gamble arouses ire is very similar to Starmer’s 15-or-so u-turns.)

Though populists’ and liberals’ rhetoric and tone are different, they both start from the premise that everything is broken (Make America Great Again), even when things are better than ever. If everyone campaigns on a platform of fixing a broken system, instead of elevating and continuing the progress of one that has already produced the most wealth and cultural and artistic diversity in the history of humanity, then most of us will come to accept the delusion that are stuck in a downward spiral as fact.

Our elites can and should do better. They should be more optimistic, and kinder: they should try to persuade without contempt and snark. They should celebrate what works. Instead of bemoaning the pockets of decay in mainstream culture, they should laud the examples of excellence they witness. And… if they feel something is lacking, then they should produce it. If critics like Rothfeld and Oz feel liberalism has lost its aesthetic mojo, they have the power (and the platform!) to define a new aesthetic.