In his much-applauded 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction”, German philosopher Walter Benjamin posited the thesis that “the logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticization of political life.” For Benjamin, this aestheticization of politics was logical because his understanding of fascism was as an ideology attempting to move a critical mass of the public to express a desire for “changed property relations” in society while also leaving those existing relations basically intact — the appearance of change without the effects of change, expression without consequence, aesthetics.

These aestheticized politics are not unique to the twentieth-century fascism Benjamin was directly writing about, nor do they require autocratic, one-party rule. Many present-day Western democracies bogged down in idiotic culture wars — including our own — are political systems of competing Left and Right aesthetics, which most often only benefit the status quo. We are treated to two interdependent and alienating aesthetic visions rather than a single and totalizing one.

There is certainly a temptation to call this situation two sides of the same fascist coin, but that diagnosis would be imprudent and ahistorical. Our Western aestheticized politics are not fascism (at least, not yet), even if a core tenet of the aesthetic expression is to toss around the term willy-nilly.

That’s not to say that our situation doesn’t have any parallels to the crises of the first few decades of the twentieth century. In both times, a small group of elites controls the political and economic systems, and they have rained down pain and humiliation on the lower and middle classes. Those elites have also managed to escape the consequences of their actions, but in many cases have become wealthier and more powerful.

Common people are once again angrily demanding different distributions of social and financial capital, and once again they are being satiated and nullified with aesthetics instead of justice.

Our politics are not equivalent to the fascist politics of the 1930s, but their aestheticization does uncover a vulnerability we have in common with those past societies that sank into fascism. All across our faltering political system, alienated people desperately hold on to deceitful and destructive narratives sold to them by artificial TV and internet personalities.

On this note, a critical difference between our cults of personality and those of the 1930s is that theirs were limited to the top of the hierarchy, whereas nowadays everyone is — potentially — a star.