Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
Politics is performance. In our academically domesticated circles we may indulge the illusion that politics is the intellectual sparring of ideas. But that is not true. Politics deals with questions of power and rule. Liberals have always won this fight by making their ideas hegemonic. In this way even political opponents were eventually forced to implement liberal programmes. Hayek's theory of social change is right, to be sure: ideas arise in a small circle of scholars. But most people's access to a political idea is not intellectual engagement; it comes through diffuse feelings of belonging, through a sense that a certain politics makes one's own life better; through vibes.
Conveying vibes works best with an aesthetic of one’s own. That includes art, music, architecture, fashion, and much more. The political right has found a new, successful aesthetic for itself. It no longer consists of corduroy jackets, combat boots, marching music, or right-wing rock. The New Right wears Ralph Lauren, listens to „L’Amour Toujours” by Gigi D’Agostino, drinks White Monster, shares edits of European nature, and plays with symbols of fascist mythology over videos like „1 Hour of Chud Agarthan Esoteric Schizo Music to Survive the Kali Yuga”. And whoever did not understand that last sentence is simply uncool. The same goes for the political left. Attending an Ikkimel concert on 1 May in Berlin-Friedrichshain, then posting the matcha brunch with the girls on Instagram from your iPhone, matters more than a consistent worldview.
One can lament this state of affairs and go on philosophising, politically unsuccessfully and self-referentially, in the academic ivory tower about obscure niches of the history of liberal ideas (the author pleads guilty), or one develops an aesthetic of one’s own. The good news: we have points of connection for a liberal aesthetic. The history books are full of it, whether one looks at the national symbolism of the German Vormärz in the nineteenth century or thinks of the high point of neoliberal hegemony in the 1980s and 1990s. We think of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at Camp David, of „It’s Morning Again in America”, of endless growth, of „I Was Made for Lovin’ You” by Kiss, Gerhard Schröder in a Brioni suit on „Wetten, dass ..?”, or Times Square around the turn of the millennium.
It is our task to translate this aesthetic into the present and develop it further. Gangster rap, with its neoliberal topoi, is an obvious point of connection in music. Ultimately, though, all cultural symbols can be charged politically, provided liberal actors actively claim them accordingly. But how do we recognise a liberal aesthetic? For a liberalism whose vision is the colourful coexistence of utopias after Robert Nozick, the mosaic would be the obvious choice; the colourful warmth of the patchwork rug instead of the cold concrete floor of collectivism. But here liberalism faces a challenge still unsolved: if a particular aesthetic is defined by a clearly delimitable form, how do I build a mosaic when I do not yet know the final form at all?
I don’t know; but we should simply begin to build the mosaic. Spontaneous order and all that – let’s see what happens.
