This fascinating @BaskinJon piece will stick with me for a while. But I think the tentative conclusion--that an aesthetic of the triumph of the individual conscience can be a satisfactorily sublime counterweight to fascist aesthetics--doesn't work. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/08/14/the-unbearable-toward-an-antifascist-aesthetic/

First, I don't think there can be a successful mass aesthetic in the negative mode. There can obviously be an aesthetic of resistance to an extant regime--which is itself *for* something: the destruction of tyranny--but not of resistance to a hypothetical one.

Second, I don't think the individual can bear the weight of a mass aesthetic. The conscience is irreplaceable and irreducible, to be sure, but you need an ethic/aesthetic beyond the self to counter the fascist appeal that actualizes the self through transcending the self.

The insufficiency of the tentative conclusion, though, only underscores the importance of the main point of the essay: There's no contender for a non-fascist aesthetic that takes the alienation of liberalism seriously, and lacking one, we're gonna end up playing the old hits.

One idea that comes to mind is Solidarity. Whereas the sublimity of the fascist aesthetic is in the celebration of the triumph of the strong over the weak, the ethic-aesthetic of Solidarity celebrates the higher communal strength of the nourishment & integration of the weak.

This allows the individual to transcend the alienated self in a communal struggle--but the struggle isn't for (what De Koninck would call) an alien good (of the state), but rather for the common good by which *both* each individual *and* the community are actualized.

Any non-liberal politics will be at least in part an aesthetic politics, if only because liberalism is something of an anti-aesthetic politics. Smart anti-/post-liberals need to be thinking about what that aesthetic is going to be, lest we guilelessly re-derive old evils.