MAGA Aesthetics and Fascist Power: Spectacles of White Supremacy
Henry Giroux
February 13, 2026
LONG READ
Spectacles of State Violence and the Culture of Cruelty
The United States is not merely awash in brutalizing and murderous acts of state-sanctioned violence. It is being restructured by them. The killings of Rachel Good and Alex Pretti are not aberrations or tragic mistakes; they belong to a longer and darker history that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People once named with chilling precision. In earlier periods of American turmoil, such killings were called lynchings, acts “carried out by lawless mobs, although police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice.” Today, this violence extends well beyond the bullet and the baton. It takes form in the expansion of prison camps, what Thom Hartmann rightly calls concentration camps, the war on immigrants, and the routine assault on Black and brown lives made disposable through policy, indifference, and neglect. At the same time, the country is saturated with a culture steeped in fascist spectacle and authoritarian display. Under the Trump administration, aesthetics itself becomes a battleground, a weaponized field where power works on desire, memory, bodies, and pleasure to consolidate domination.
As Toni Morrison warned in her Nobel Prize lecture, oppressive language does not merely describe violence; it doesviolence, narrowing thought, erasing responsibility, and preparing the ground for cruelty. For Morrison, this is dead language “that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind… Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance.” In his monumental The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin chillingly grasped this danger with prophetic clarity, insisting that the connective tissue between state violence and the colonization of public consciousness lies in the corporate-controlled pedagogical apparatuses of print culture, screen culture, and social media. In a hyper-mediated society, as the historian Richard J. Evans argues, fascism does not rely solely on force or decree. It aestheticizes politics itself, converting violence into pleasure, domination into entertainment, and obedience into desire. That insight quietly underwrites much of what follows. This fusion of language, image, and power forms the theoretical groundwork for understanding how fascist aesthetics now operate in the United States.
Fascism Educates Before It Governs
We live in an age in which fascist aesthetics has become a powerful tool of authoritarian pedagogy, functioning, in part, to mobilize myth, emotion, ritual, and spectacle in order to celebrate fascist sentiments including white nationalism, racial and ethnic hierarchies, state terrorism, and the performative cruelty of the powerful, but also to crush dissent and prevent the redistribution of power.
Fascism educates before it rules, working through spectacle, cruelty, myth, facile beauty, and erasure long before it consolidates power through formal political institutions. In the Trump era, this spectacle-driven authoritarianism illuminates the aestheticization of power by offering pageantry and the pleasure of submission as beautifying practices that celebrate war, hierarchy, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, regressive individualism, and the militarization of everyday life. Fascism aestheticizes politics to render domination pleasurable, converting power into spectacle and obedience into desire, and this logic is now unmistakably visible in the visual culture that saturates Trump-era authoritarianism. Politics, in this sense, follows culture because political agency itself is culturally produced, not merely through policy or ideas but through affect, image, and embodiment.
Aestheticizing Power: Trumpism and the Visual Grammar of Fascism
The visual grammar of fascism is on full display in government-produced videos of immigrants filmed in chains and marched onto deportation planes, which transform state violence into spectacle, staging cruelty as administrative order and teaching the public who belongs and who is disposable. Trump’s grotesque, AI-generated fantasy of Gaza, recast as a luxury playground, extends this aesthetic logic outward, laundering colonial devastation through the visual grammar of real estate branding, imperial leisure, and technological fantasy. Violence is not denied in these images; it is aestheticized, stripped of history and consequence, and re-presented as progress itself. Cruelty, deportations, and ICE assaults on immigrants and people of color are recast as reality-TV entertainment through a steady stream of slick propaganda videos produced by the Department of Homeland Security.
White Supremacy as Pedagogy: The Nation as a Biological Project
The same pedagogy of contempt animates the circulation of grotesque spectacles, including images that depict Trump defecating from an airplane onto protesters below, a scatological allegory that converts hatred of democratic dissent into visual pleasure and collective affirmation for his followers. This aesthetic does not merely signal oppression; it luxuriates in it, inviting audiences to take pleasure in humiliation itself. At its core lies an unabashed embrace of white supremacy. MAGA spectacles, racist imagery, and governing policies are organized around the presumption of a racial hierarchy with whiteness fixed at the apex. White supremacy is not incidental to Trump’s politics; it is their animating DNA. As the historian Robert O. Paxton argued in The Anatomy of Fascism, a defining feature of fascism is the redefinition of the nation as a biological rather than a civic entity. Crucially, this redefinition is not transmitted only through doctrine or law but also through a dense pedagogical field of images, rituals, performances, spectacles, and cultural apparatuses that teach audiences how to see the nation, how to recognize enemies, and how to feel righteous in their exclusion.
Under the Trump regime, citizenship is severed from even the fragile promise of shared democratic values and anchored in racial belonging, a violent recalibration that redraws the moral and political map of the nation, determining who counts, who is disposable, and who must be expelled. In this logic, the very claim to citizenship by nonwhite populations is treated as a criminal act, and their presence in the United States is recast as a crime scene. Exclusion is elevated into civic virtue, while assaults on racialized communities are not only permissible but necessary. Such reasoning does more than authorize cruelty; it normalizes the language and practice of racial cleansing and, at its most lethal extreme, summons the specter of genocide itself.
Once the nation is defined as a biological project, exclusion no longer appears as excess but as necessity. What follows is a cascade of policies, images, and performances that give administrative form to racial hierarchy and train the public to accept cruelty as governance. This logic surfaces in policies that welcome only white South Africans as refugees, in the systematic weakening of civil rights protections, and in claims that immigrants with “bad genes” are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. It appears in the deployment of armed federal agents into states with disproportionately nonwhite populations, creating what civil rights advocates have described as a new and terrifying reality for targeted communities. Trump’s racist rhetoric is evident in his disparagement of people from African nations and Haiti as coming from “shithole countries,” and in his dehumanization of Somalis as “garbage.”
Trump’s embrace of white supremacy is further revealed in his claim, in an interview with the New York Times that the civil rights movement and the policies it produced hurt white people who were “very badly treated.” He extended this logic on the global stage, asserting in a speech to the United Nations that Europe faced a civilizational crisis because of mass migration, which he cast as a threat to Western culture itself. This worldview reached its most unvarnished expression when Trump posted on Truth Social a blatantly racist, AI-generated video portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, an image drawn directly from the archive of colonial and fascist racism. Such vile language and imagery would be at home in Ku Klux Klan pamphlets. As Susan Sontag observed, these authoritarian fantasies are inseparable from “the fetishization of dominance found in fascist aesthetics,” where cruelty becomes spectacle and racial hatred is staged as entertainment.
Cruelty as Spectacle: Rallies, Rituals, and Authoritarian Pleasure
Trump’s rallies intensify this toxic authoritarian aesthetic, transforming politics into a mass performance that fuses theatrical cruelty, racial grievance, white supremacy, and ritualized obedience. What emerges is a carnivalesque politics in which humiliation is rewarded, submission is celebrated, and dissent is disciplined through spectacle. This dynamic reaches a chilling apotheosis in the viral video of Kristi Noem posed like a plasticized Barbie doll before El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, where mass incarceration and authoritarian punishment are aestheticized as moral clarity, strength, and order. In this grotesque aesthetic performance, state violence is stripped of its brutality and re-presented as virtue, resolve, and national renewal. The scene lays bare a central truth: fascist aesthetics do not vanish with history’s defeat of earlier regimes; they are endlessly reinvented, adapting to new contexts while preserving their core logic of domination, cruelty, and enforced submission.
Taken together, these spectacles form a continuous pedagogical landscape of power, binding cruelty, obedience, and excess into a single visual regime. The gaudy reinvention of Mar-a-Lago as a gilded monument resurrects the visual language of the Gilded Age, converting obscene affluence into political virtue and inequality into patriotic display. A similar aesthetic animates the Jeff Bezos–backed propaganda film Melania, which, as Xan Brooks observes, operates less as a documentary than as “an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy,” ice-cold, grotesquely and spectacularly unrevealing. Brooks likens it to a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest, a spectacle in which couture, gold baubles, vacant glamour and designer dresses function as distractions, carefully diverting attention while power consolidates in the background and democratic institutions are quietly dismantled.
Across these images, fascism does not persuade through argument or policy; it stages itself. Power becomes seductive through spectacle, cruelty, and fantasy, teaching audiences not how to think politically but how to feel obedience, admire domination, and mistake violence for destiny. In this sense, MAGA aesthetics functions, borrowing Frederick Exley’s phrase from Pages from a Cold Island, as “a great human fungus” that poisons the atmosphere of society, rendering the present image of the United States “homicidal and menacing.”
What begins as a visual strategy does not remain confined to isolated images. MAGA aesthetics is not an isolated cultural phenomenon or a series of incidental excesses. It derives its power, and increasingly its legitimacy, from a dense ecosystem of authoritarian rituals, images, and performances that circulate across multiple sites and institutions.Nazi salutes by prominent figures such as Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, white nationalist songs embedded in Department of Homeland Security’s official recruitment efforts, fascist slogans and symbols normalized through online subcultures, and slick videos aestheticizing ICE assaults on migrants and protesters all function as mutually reinforcing scenes in a larger authoritarian drama. Amplified by the affective machinery of right-wing media, these rituals do more than communicate ideology, they habituate the public to force, fear, and racialized cruelty as ordinary instruments of governance. What emerges is not mere propaganda but a sprawling pedagogical racist juggernaut, one that saturates the senses, disciplines political imagination, and educates subjects to mistake repression for order and domination for strength. It is through this cumulative cultural/pedagogical conditioning, rather than through law alone, that fascism first secures its foothold.
Fascism does not announce itself only through emergency decrees, mass arrests, or the suspension of rights. It arrives first through images, styles, rituals, and pleasures that train people to experience power as desirable and domination as normal. Long before it rules, fascism educates. It works through spectacle and affect, through pageantry and performance, transforming violence into beauty and obedience into common sense. Sontag’s warning that fascism is the aestheticization of politics remains chillingly relevant because it names not merely a propaganda strategy, but a cultural logic through which social catastrophe is converted into spectacle and collective suffering into fascination.
MAGA Aesthetics and the Authoritarian Body
The resurgence of authoritarian politics in the United States has not occurred only through policy proposals, court rulings, or executive power grabs. It has advanced just as forcefully through images, bodies, performances, and styles that acclimate people to domination before they are invited, if ever, to think critically about it. As Umberto Eco argued in his reflections on Ur-Fascism, authoritarianism often takes hold first as an aesthetic project. Writing about Benito Mussolini’s regime, Eco noted that Italian fascism was “the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.” Fascism, in this sense, educates through appearances before it governs through law, habituating subjects to hierarchy, discipline, and submission as matters of taste, identity, and belonging. What Eco identified under Mussolini has not disappeared but migrated, reemerging in contemporary authoritarian movements that similarly treat style, spectacle, and affect as primary instruments of political formation.
Nowhere is this dynamic more visible than in the MAGA aesthetic, a contemporary cultural regime defined by studied ugliness, theatrical cruelty, and the normalization of domination as spectacle. Hyper-stylized faces overwritten with fillers and plastic surgery, square jaws, militarized postures, rigid masculinist displays, and pornographic performances of punishment and control have become central to the visual grammar of Trumpism. These aesthetics do not merely signal political allegiance; they operate pedagogically, shaping desire, disciplining bodies, and rehearsing violence as common sense itself. Long before authoritarianism demanded obedience through policy, it secured consent through culture.
MAGA aesthetics operates as an embodied politics, a way of teaching power through posture, gaze, and gesture rather than argument. It fuses cruelty with glamour, punishment with pleasure, and grievance with entitlement. Bodies are trained to feel dominant, armored against empathy, and hostile to vulnerability. This is not simply bad taste or vulgar display. It is an aesthetic formation that prepares subjects for authoritarian rule by making domination feel natural and resistance feel weak. MAGA aesthetics, in this sense, is violence before the blow, pedagogy before policy.
This cultural logic has a long intellectual genealogy. The MAGA aesthetic is not accidental. Fascist movements have always understood aesthetics as pedagogy, as a way of training people to feel power before they are allowed to think about it. Walter Benjamin warned that fascism aestheticizes politics to mobilize the masses without granting them rights, replacing democratic participation with spectacle, ritual, and submission. Susan Sontag likewise observed that fascist aesthetics glorify obedience, hierarchy, and the eroticization of force, transforming domination into visual pleasure and cruelty into style. As Sontag later argued, this aestheticization of power does not merely depict authority; it trains desire itself. In Sontag’s terms, the spectacle does not merely depict power, it trains the eye to desire it. The MAGA look follows this script precisely. It abandons democracy’s appeal to reasoned judgment, ethical responsibility, and public accountability, substituting civic persuasion with spectacle, visual aggression, and emotional coercion. Its ugliness mirrors its politics with chilling precision: cruel, nostalgic, obsessed with hierarchy, and openly hostile to pluralism. What we see here is not bad taste but a deliberate visual language of authoritarianism, an aesthetic designed to normalize exclusion, glorify force, strip joy and imagination from public life, and prepare the ground for repression.
This contemporary spectacle at work in the Trump regime offers a crucial point of entry into a much older and more dangerous cultural logic. Fascist movements have always understood that power must first be felt before it can be obeyed. Long before authoritarian regimes consolidated themselves through law and force, they worked through culture, mobilizing images, rituals, and pleasures that transform domination into beauty and submission into belonging. It is this deeper aesthetic logic that Walter Benjamin named when he warned that fascism resolves social crises not by redistributing power, but by aestheticizing politics itself.
At its core, MAGA aesthetics pays homage to the fascist subject, disembodied, cruel, racist, morally vacant, and rigidly militarized. It takes shape within a culture of images driven by corporate disimagination machines that dull moral sensibilities and anesthetize the injuries produced by gangster capitalism and its militarized techno-structures of domination and disposability. Within this visual regime, social change is not merely postponed but actively undone through the relentless circulation of images that normalize psychic numbness and political paralysis, training subjects to consume cruelty as spectacle. At the core of the MAGA aesthetic is a stylized performance of authoritarian masculinity that draws on the visual grammar of fascism to aestheticize command itself. It glorifies the body as militarized warrior, disciplined and armored, animated by what Sontag terms a “contempt for all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.”
Militarized Style and the Performance of Unaccountable Power
Hyper-controlled bodies, exaggerated rigidity, militarized dress, and resurrected authoritarian silhouettes work together to make domination appear natural, inevitable, and even desirable. Nowhere is this aesthetic more pronounced than in ICE, whose paramilitary uniforms project an image of communal power and solidarity forged through fear, coercion, and sanctioned lawlessness, rather than democratic consent. This logic was on full display in the costumed theatrics of Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, whose long black trench coat functioned less as clothing than as a visual performance of unaccountable authority, staging power as spectacle and intimidation as legitimacy. As the Wall Street Journal observed, the coat appeared disturbingly reminiscent of the wardrobe of Hermann Göring, a comparison later sharpened when Gavin Newsom remarked that it was as if the outfit had been lifted from SS regalia. Here, authority is neither argued for nor justified; it is worn. In this aestheticized register, power bypasses reason and forecloses dissent. What emerges is not merely spectacle, but an authoritarian pedagogy that teaches submission through intimidation, trains desire to admire domination, and shapes subjects prepared to mistake force for legitimacy.
What is taking shape in the MAGA aesthetic belongs to a long and well-established tradition in which culture functions as a form of political education, shaping how power is felt, admired, and internalized before it is ever justified. Fascist movements have always understood that domination must first be made emotionally compelling. Images, rituals, styles, and pleasures do the work that arguments cannot, training people to experience hierarchy as natural, discipline as beautiful, and violence as redemptive. This is the cultural logic Susan Sontag identified in her analysis of fascist imagery, where obedience is glorified, force eroticized, and submission transformed into visual pleasure. The sections that follow trace this aesthetic logic across fascist spectacle, eroticized violence, and even oppositional cultures, revealing how domination is learned long before it is enforced.
This logic reached its most refined expression in the films of Leni Riefenstahl, whose choreographed masses, monumental architecture, and hypnotic rhythms did not simply depict Nazi power but actively trained audiences to desire it, binding aesthetic rapture to political submission. That same logic resurfaces in cinema decades later, most disturbingly in The Night Porter, a film I once critiqued in Cineaste, where fascism is wrenched from its historical and genocidal foundations and recast as an intimate, eroticized psychodrama. By privatizing terror and aestheticizing cruelty, the film drains violence of its political meaning, transforming domination into a matter of psychological fascination rather than naming it for what it is: a collective crime organized by the state and sustained through culture. Crucially, even cultures of resistance have proven vulnerable to this aesthetic capture, where dissent itself can be stripped of its political force and refashioned as style.
Yet the struggle over aesthetics does not end with fascist spectacle; it also unfolds within movements that seek to oppose it. Early punk aesthetics, particularly in the work of Vivienne Westwood, sought to desecrate authority through ugliness, sexual provocation, anti-nationalist rage, and a refusal of respectability. As Mika Nijhawan observes, Westwood was a pioneer in producing grass-roots designs during the formative stages of the punk movement. Her clothes did not merely reflect punk fashion; they “dressed the entire movement,” giving visual form to its anger, refusal, and insurgent politics. In its earliest formations, punk was not simply a style but a cultural intervention, an assault on the fascist romance of order, purity, discipline, and heroic masculinity. It rejected the monumental, the uniform, and the disciplined body in favor of fragmentation, irony, and desecration, orchestrating outrage as a counter-pedagogy aimed at making authority appear ridiculous rather than sublime. Yet as punk was absorbed into consumer culture, its oppositional force was hollowed out, preserved as style while its political content was neutralized and repurposed within the very systems it once sought to challenge. Together, these examples reveal how gangster capitalism operates most effectively at the level of feeling, colonizing desire, suspending ethical judgment, and teaching people how to relate emotionally to violence, authority, and belonging long before coercion becomes explicit, normalized, or legally enforced.
Fascist Aesthetics as Political Education
The work of Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School, Václav Havel, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and others in the cultural politics tradition remains indispensable because it shifts our attention away from fascism as a purely political formation and toward culture as its enabling condition. Fascism does not seek democratic participation or critical consent; it substitutes spectacle for deliberation and affect for reasoned judgment. Politics becomes ceremony, war becomes pageantry, and domination is rendered beautiful, inevitable, and emotionally satisfying. In this sense, aesthetics functions as a form of mass education, a pedagogy that trains people to accept hierarchy as natural, to experience obedience as belonging, and to view violence not as a moral rupture but as a necessary expression of order.
This pedagogical power becomes most dangerous when fascist violence is severed from history and ethics and re-presented as intimate, seductive, or abstracted from collective responsibility. Fascist aesthetics does its most enduring work not through overt propaganda alone, but through cultural forms that dissolve political accountability into private feeling, fascination, and pleasure. As images circulate without context, repetition replaces judgment and affect displaces analysis. What emerges is not ignorance, but a trained indifference, a learned incapacity to connect spectacle to structure, desire to domination, or beauty to brutality.
What this history makes clear is that fascism is not imposed from above by force alone; it is learned, internalized, and normalized through culture. This insight lies at the heart of Gramsci’s insistence that “all politics is pedagogical.” Politics does not simply govern bodies; it shapes consciousness, habits, desires, and modes of identification. Education, universally understood, is the primary terrain on which this struggle unfolds. When schools, media, and cultural institutions discourage critical inquiry and reward conformity, they help produce the passivity and moral numbness on which authoritarianism depends.
Education therefore plays a decisive role in either reproducing or resisting fascist culture. When it challenges taken-for-granted assumptions, cultivates critical literacy, and nurtures solidarity rather than fear, it can disrupt the production of the fascist subject. But resistance to fascism cannot be confined to electoral politics or policy reform alone. Without a cultural foundation that sustains critical thought, collective responsibility, and democratic imagination, political action will remain fragile and easily undone. Fascist pedagogy works slowly, affectively, and persistently; countering it requires an equally sustained struggle over how people learn to see, feel, remember, and judge the world they inhabit.
Erotic Fascism and the Seductions of Cinema
Few cultural texts reveal this danger more clearly than The Night Porter. Often defended as a meditation on trauma, memory, or transgression, the film instead exemplifies how fascist violence can be transformed into a stylized erotic spectacle stripped of historical accountability. By recasting Nazism as an intimate psychosexual relationship between two consenting adults, the film evacuates fascism of its political, institutional, and genocidal realities. The concentration camp becomes a backdrop; the SS uniform, an erotic costume, and systemic terror is displaced by private obsession. Mass murder recedes, historical responsibility dissolves, and power is reduced to aestheticized desire.
This privatization of fascism is precisely what makes the film so dangerous. By aestheticizing domination and sexualizing submission, The Night Porter invites viewers to engage fascism at the level of fascination rather than judgment. Violence is no longer something to be confronted politically but something to be consumed affectively. In this sense, the film does not merely misrepresent fascism; it reenacts one of its central mechanisms, the conversion of terror into pleasure and history into style.
This danger was diagnosed with extraordinary clarity by Susan Sontag in “Fascinating Fascism.” Fascist aesthetics, she argues, eroticizes hierarchy, sanctifies discipline, and promises transcendence through submission. It glorifies the surrender of the self to power, offering ecstatic belonging in exchange for obedience. Fascination, in this account, is not a misunderstanding of fascism; it is one of its primary cultural instruments. When fascism is aestheticized, ethical judgment is suspended, historical memory erodes, and violence becomes thinkable precisely because it has been rendered beautiful.
Riefenstahl and the Architecture of Fascist Spectacle
The aesthetic logic that animates the classic film The Night Porter finds its most explicit historical expression in the films of Leni Riefenstahl. Works such as Triumph of the Will perfected the visual grammar of fascism: choreographed bodies, monumental architecture, rhythmic repetition, and the fusion of individual submission with collective exaltation. These films were not documentaries that happened to record Nazi power; they were propaganda machines that constructed reality to serve the image. As Sontag insisted, the Party rally existed in order to be filmed. The image did not reflect power; it produced it.
Riefenstahl’s films celebrate what Sontag identified as the fascist ideal: life as art, politics as beauty, and community forged through ecstatic self-control and obedience. Strength is eroticized, weakness despised, and critical reflection cast as contamination. The visual emphasis on purified bodies, synchronized movement, and reverent submission to the leader rehearses a political theology in which dissent appears as deformity and pluralism as decay.
The contemporary rehabilitation of Riefenstahl as a “pure artist,” detached from ideology, reproduces a profoundly dangerous fiction, the belief that aesthetics can be separated from politics. This refusal to judge fascist aesthetics politically is itself a political act. It allows authoritarian spectacle to survive as cultural form even when its explicit ideological content is disavowed, ensuring that fascist longings persist at the level of desire, style, and affect long after regimes fall.
Punk, Vivienne Westwood, and the Capture of Dissent
If fascist aesthetics secures power by making domination desirable, then resistance has often sought to disrupt that pedagogy at the level of style and sensation. Yet the now distant history of punk fashion reveals how vulnerable oppositional styles are to appropriation, commodification, and neutralization. Early punk, particularly in the work of the designer Vivienne Westwood, sought to desecrate authority through ugliness, sexual provocation, anti-nationalist rage, and a refusal of respectability. It attacked the fascist romance of order, purity, discipline, and heroic masculinity at its symbolic core by foregrounding disorder, deviance, and bodily excess. Westwood in both her politics and aesthetics embraced “the core of early punk [which] ‘was calculated anger’.”
In its earliest formations, punk was not simply a style but a cultural intervention, or as Malcolm McLaren observed, “It was never about having a Mohican haircut or wearing a ripped T-shirt. It was all about destruction, and the creative potential within that.” Punk rejected the monumental, the uniform, and the disciplined body in favor of fragmentation, irony, and desecration. It was an orchestration of outrage. It mocked nationalism, unsettled gender norms, and exposed the violence hidden beneath claims to moral order. Many punk bands such as The Clash and the Sex Pistols created art, music, and clothes as part of a social movement of which Westwood was a pioneering force in terms of her mix of aesthetics, fashion, and politics. In this sense, punk represented a counter-pedagogy, an attempt to unlearn obedience by making authority appear ridiculous rather than sublime. It was the Sex Pistols and Britain’s major subcultures singing fuck you to bourgeois culture in spite of a bad ending.
Punk’s visual language was gradually detached from its political context and absorbed into consumer culture. What began as an assault on domination was transformed into a marketable aesthetic. Transgression became style, shock became branding, and resistance was preserved only as surface. As Sontag warned in her reflections on photographyand spectacle, shock alone is never enough; it wears off, becomes familiar, and risks reinforcing the very structures it seeks to oppose. Punk’s absorption into fashion culture demonstrates a crucial lesson: fascism does not only impose its own aesthetics; it also colonizes those of dissent, draining them of political meaning while preserving their aesthetic form. In many ways, Westwood’s life offers a warning. Her radical merging of fashion and punk politics did not retain its political purity or even its integrity considering her eventual celebrity, status, business practices, and role in participating in consumer culture at the highest levels of elite participation. At the same time, her role in creating what might be called an anti-fascist aesthetic, her endless participation and support of the environmental movement, her support of sexual and gender freedom, and her support of Julian Assange makes clear that her role as a celebrity fashion designer and activist is no small tribute to her and offers a political and pedagogical example of the merging of the aesthetic, radical political beliefs, and activism.
Conclusion: The Making of the Fascist Subject
The rise of MAGA aesthetics cannot be separated from a longer history of cultural and social reproduction in the United States. Submission to authority, intolerance toward marginalized groups, ultra-nationalism, systemic racism, and rigid hierarchies of gender, race, and class have long been cultivated through schools, mainstream media, and a wide array of cultural institutions. Trump’s appeal to a mythic “better time,” coded as an era of racial dominance, patriarchal order, and unchallenged authority, draws directly from this authoritarian inheritance. Those who challenge these norms are routinely cast as threats to stability, tradition, and national identity, a dynamic that recalls Wilhelm Reich’s warning that fascism flourishes where individuality, sexuality, and dissent are systematically repressed.
The creation of the fascist subject must therefore be understood not as a purely psychological phenomenon, but as the outcome of sustained cultural indoctrination, a far-reaching apparatus of socialization and propaganda. The contemporary educational landscape too often fails to equip young people with the intellectual tools needed to question power, recognize manipulation, and resist domination. Trump’s language of “patriotism,” “traditional values,” and “law and order” feeds this hegemonic pedagogy by framing dissent as dangerous, deviant, or un-American. As Reich and Theodor Adorno recognized in different registers, mass education and mass media function as decisive instruments in producing subjects who come to accept hierarchy, exclusion, and cruelty as normal features of social life rather than as political choices demanding resistance.
MAGA aesthetics makes this process visible by rendering the pedagogy of domination immediate, affective, and embodied. Fascist movements have always understood that power must first be felt through culture. Fascism endures not because it persuades through reasoned argument, but because it seduces through spectacle, training people to experience domination as belonging and cruelty as strength. Images, performances, and styles perform this pedagogical labor long before policies are announced or laws are enforced. Aesthetics prepares the ground on which authoritarian rule becomes thinkable, even desirable, by shaping how people feel power before they are invited to think about it. As Lutz Koepnick argues in his essay “Aesthetic Politics Today: Walter Benjamin and Post-Fordist Culture,” “The fascist spectacle mobilizes people’s feelings primarily to neutralize their senses, massaging minds and emotions so that the individual succumbs to the charisma of vitalistic power” while consolidating state power.
If fascism aestheticizes politics to make injustice palatable, and domination attractive, then resistance must politicize aesthetics, reclaiming culture as a site of memory, ethical judgment, and democratic possibility. This means refusing the separation of beauty from responsibility, affect from history, and spectacle from power. The struggle against authoritarianism is therefore inseparable from the struggle over how power looks, feels, and is learned in everyday life.
The responsibility that falls to educators, cultural workers, and public intellectuals is thus profound. They are among the few agents capable of confronting the images and narratives that normalize authoritarianism while offering alternative visions of agency, justice, and democratic life. This work demands more than critique; it requires reclaiming education itself as a democratic practice rooted in historical consciousness, ethical responsibility, and collective imagination. Fascism triumphs not by persuading people to surrender their rights, but by schooling them, through culture and spectacle, to no longer recognize domination as injustice. Resistance, then, must begin where fascism does, in the struggle over culture itself. Only by reclaiming culture as a radical educational project capable of reshaping how people see, feel, and judge the world can we build a durable resistance, one able not only to confront fascism, but to prevent its endless return in ever more seductive forms.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.
February 13, 2026
LONG READ
Spectacles of State Violence and the Culture of Cruelty
The United States is not merely awash in brutalizing and murderous acts of state-sanctioned violence. It is being restructured by them. The killings of Rachel Good and Alex Pretti are not aberrations or tragic mistakes; they belong to a longer and darker history that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People once named with chilling precision. In earlier periods of American turmoil, such killings were called lynchings, acts “carried out by lawless mobs, although police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice.” Today, this violence extends well beyond the bullet and the baton. It takes form in the expansion of prison camps, what Thom Hartmann rightly calls concentration camps, the war on immigrants, and the routine assault on Black and brown lives made disposable through policy, indifference, and neglect. At the same time, the country is saturated with a culture steeped in fascist spectacle and authoritarian display. Under the Trump administration, aesthetics itself becomes a battleground, a weaponized field where power works on desire, memory, bodies, and pleasure to consolidate domination.
As Toni Morrison warned in her Nobel Prize lecture, oppressive language does not merely describe violence; it doesviolence, narrowing thought, erasing responsibility, and preparing the ground for cruelty. For Morrison, this is dead language “that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind… Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance.” In his monumental The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin chillingly grasped this danger with prophetic clarity, insisting that the connective tissue between state violence and the colonization of public consciousness lies in the corporate-controlled pedagogical apparatuses of print culture, screen culture, and social media. In a hyper-mediated society, as the historian Richard J. Evans argues, fascism does not rely solely on force or decree. It aestheticizes politics itself, converting violence into pleasure, domination into entertainment, and obedience into desire. That insight quietly underwrites much of what follows. This fusion of language, image, and power forms the theoretical groundwork for understanding how fascist aesthetics now operate in the United States.
Fascism Educates Before It Governs
We live in an age in which fascist aesthetics has become a powerful tool of authoritarian pedagogy, functioning, in part, to mobilize myth, emotion, ritual, and spectacle in order to celebrate fascist sentiments including white nationalism, racial and ethnic hierarchies, state terrorism, and the performative cruelty of the powerful, but also to crush dissent and prevent the redistribution of power.
Fascism educates before it rules, working through spectacle, cruelty, myth, facile beauty, and erasure long before it consolidates power through formal political institutions. In the Trump era, this spectacle-driven authoritarianism illuminates the aestheticization of power by offering pageantry and the pleasure of submission as beautifying practices that celebrate war, hierarchy, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, regressive individualism, and the militarization of everyday life. Fascism aestheticizes politics to render domination pleasurable, converting power into spectacle and obedience into desire, and this logic is now unmistakably visible in the visual culture that saturates Trump-era authoritarianism. Politics, in this sense, follows culture because political agency itself is culturally produced, not merely through policy or ideas but through affect, image, and embodiment.
Aestheticizing Power: Trumpism and the Visual Grammar of Fascism
The visual grammar of fascism is on full display in government-produced videos of immigrants filmed in chains and marched onto deportation planes, which transform state violence into spectacle, staging cruelty as administrative order and teaching the public who belongs and who is disposable. Trump’s grotesque, AI-generated fantasy of Gaza, recast as a luxury playground, extends this aesthetic logic outward, laundering colonial devastation through the visual grammar of real estate branding, imperial leisure, and technological fantasy. Violence is not denied in these images; it is aestheticized, stripped of history and consequence, and re-presented as progress itself. Cruelty, deportations, and ICE assaults on immigrants and people of color are recast as reality-TV entertainment through a steady stream of slick propaganda videos produced by the Department of Homeland Security.
White Supremacy as Pedagogy: The Nation as a Biological Project
The same pedagogy of contempt animates the circulation of grotesque spectacles, including images that depict Trump defecating from an airplane onto protesters below, a scatological allegory that converts hatred of democratic dissent into visual pleasure and collective affirmation for his followers. This aesthetic does not merely signal oppression; it luxuriates in it, inviting audiences to take pleasure in humiliation itself. At its core lies an unabashed embrace of white supremacy. MAGA spectacles, racist imagery, and governing policies are organized around the presumption of a racial hierarchy with whiteness fixed at the apex. White supremacy is not incidental to Trump’s politics; it is their animating DNA. As the historian Robert O. Paxton argued in The Anatomy of Fascism, a defining feature of fascism is the redefinition of the nation as a biological rather than a civic entity. Crucially, this redefinition is not transmitted only through doctrine or law but also through a dense pedagogical field of images, rituals, performances, spectacles, and cultural apparatuses that teach audiences how to see the nation, how to recognize enemies, and how to feel righteous in their exclusion.
Under the Trump regime, citizenship is severed from even the fragile promise of shared democratic values and anchored in racial belonging, a violent recalibration that redraws the moral and political map of the nation, determining who counts, who is disposable, and who must be expelled. In this logic, the very claim to citizenship by nonwhite populations is treated as a criminal act, and their presence in the United States is recast as a crime scene. Exclusion is elevated into civic virtue, while assaults on racialized communities are not only permissible but necessary. Such reasoning does more than authorize cruelty; it normalizes the language and practice of racial cleansing and, at its most lethal extreme, summons the specter of genocide itself.
Once the nation is defined as a biological project, exclusion no longer appears as excess but as necessity. What follows is a cascade of policies, images, and performances that give administrative form to racial hierarchy and train the public to accept cruelty as governance. This logic surfaces in policies that welcome only white South Africans as refugees, in the systematic weakening of civil rights protections, and in claims that immigrants with “bad genes” are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. It appears in the deployment of armed federal agents into states with disproportionately nonwhite populations, creating what civil rights advocates have described as a new and terrifying reality for targeted communities. Trump’s racist rhetoric is evident in his disparagement of people from African nations and Haiti as coming from “shithole countries,” and in his dehumanization of Somalis as “garbage.”
Trump’s embrace of white supremacy is further revealed in his claim, in an interview with the New York Times that the civil rights movement and the policies it produced hurt white people who were “very badly treated.” He extended this logic on the global stage, asserting in a speech to the United Nations that Europe faced a civilizational crisis because of mass migration, which he cast as a threat to Western culture itself. This worldview reached its most unvarnished expression when Trump posted on Truth Social a blatantly racist, AI-generated video portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, an image drawn directly from the archive of colonial and fascist racism. Such vile language and imagery would be at home in Ku Klux Klan pamphlets. As Susan Sontag observed, these authoritarian fantasies are inseparable from “the fetishization of dominance found in fascist aesthetics,” where cruelty becomes spectacle and racial hatred is staged as entertainment.
Cruelty as Spectacle: Rallies, Rituals, and Authoritarian Pleasure
Trump’s rallies intensify this toxic authoritarian aesthetic, transforming politics into a mass performance that fuses theatrical cruelty, racial grievance, white supremacy, and ritualized obedience. What emerges is a carnivalesque politics in which humiliation is rewarded, submission is celebrated, and dissent is disciplined through spectacle. This dynamic reaches a chilling apotheosis in the viral video of Kristi Noem posed like a plasticized Barbie doll before El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, where mass incarceration and authoritarian punishment are aestheticized as moral clarity, strength, and order. In this grotesque aesthetic performance, state violence is stripped of its brutality and re-presented as virtue, resolve, and national renewal. The scene lays bare a central truth: fascist aesthetics do not vanish with history’s defeat of earlier regimes; they are endlessly reinvented, adapting to new contexts while preserving their core logic of domination, cruelty, and enforced submission.
Taken together, these spectacles form a continuous pedagogical landscape of power, binding cruelty, obedience, and excess into a single visual regime. The gaudy reinvention of Mar-a-Lago as a gilded monument resurrects the visual language of the Gilded Age, converting obscene affluence into political virtue and inequality into patriotic display. A similar aesthetic animates the Jeff Bezos–backed propaganda film Melania, which, as Xan Brooks observes, operates less as a documentary than as “an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy,” ice-cold, grotesquely and spectacularly unrevealing. Brooks likens it to a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest, a spectacle in which couture, gold baubles, vacant glamour and designer dresses function as distractions, carefully diverting attention while power consolidates in the background and democratic institutions are quietly dismantled.
Across these images, fascism does not persuade through argument or policy; it stages itself. Power becomes seductive through spectacle, cruelty, and fantasy, teaching audiences not how to think politically but how to feel obedience, admire domination, and mistake violence for destiny. In this sense, MAGA aesthetics functions, borrowing Frederick Exley’s phrase from Pages from a Cold Island, as “a great human fungus” that poisons the atmosphere of society, rendering the present image of the United States “homicidal and menacing.”
What begins as a visual strategy does not remain confined to isolated images. MAGA aesthetics is not an isolated cultural phenomenon or a series of incidental excesses. It derives its power, and increasingly its legitimacy, from a dense ecosystem of authoritarian rituals, images, and performances that circulate across multiple sites and institutions.Nazi salutes by prominent figures such as Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, white nationalist songs embedded in Department of Homeland Security’s official recruitment efforts, fascist slogans and symbols normalized through online subcultures, and slick videos aestheticizing ICE assaults on migrants and protesters all function as mutually reinforcing scenes in a larger authoritarian drama. Amplified by the affective machinery of right-wing media, these rituals do more than communicate ideology, they habituate the public to force, fear, and racialized cruelty as ordinary instruments of governance. What emerges is not mere propaganda but a sprawling pedagogical racist juggernaut, one that saturates the senses, disciplines political imagination, and educates subjects to mistake repression for order and domination for strength. It is through this cumulative cultural/pedagogical conditioning, rather than through law alone, that fascism first secures its foothold.
Fascism does not announce itself only through emergency decrees, mass arrests, or the suspension of rights. It arrives first through images, styles, rituals, and pleasures that train people to experience power as desirable and domination as normal. Long before it rules, fascism educates. It works through spectacle and affect, through pageantry and performance, transforming violence into beauty and obedience into common sense. Sontag’s warning that fascism is the aestheticization of politics remains chillingly relevant because it names not merely a propaganda strategy, but a cultural logic through which social catastrophe is converted into spectacle and collective suffering into fascination.
MAGA Aesthetics and the Authoritarian Body
The resurgence of authoritarian politics in the United States has not occurred only through policy proposals, court rulings, or executive power grabs. It has advanced just as forcefully through images, bodies, performances, and styles that acclimate people to domination before they are invited, if ever, to think critically about it. As Umberto Eco argued in his reflections on Ur-Fascism, authoritarianism often takes hold first as an aesthetic project. Writing about Benito Mussolini’s regime, Eco noted that Italian fascism was “the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.” Fascism, in this sense, educates through appearances before it governs through law, habituating subjects to hierarchy, discipline, and submission as matters of taste, identity, and belonging. What Eco identified under Mussolini has not disappeared but migrated, reemerging in contemporary authoritarian movements that similarly treat style, spectacle, and affect as primary instruments of political formation.
Nowhere is this dynamic more visible than in the MAGA aesthetic, a contemporary cultural regime defined by studied ugliness, theatrical cruelty, and the normalization of domination as spectacle. Hyper-stylized faces overwritten with fillers and plastic surgery, square jaws, militarized postures, rigid masculinist displays, and pornographic performances of punishment and control have become central to the visual grammar of Trumpism. These aesthetics do not merely signal political allegiance; they operate pedagogically, shaping desire, disciplining bodies, and rehearsing violence as common sense itself. Long before authoritarianism demanded obedience through policy, it secured consent through culture.
MAGA aesthetics operates as an embodied politics, a way of teaching power through posture, gaze, and gesture rather than argument. It fuses cruelty with glamour, punishment with pleasure, and grievance with entitlement. Bodies are trained to feel dominant, armored against empathy, and hostile to vulnerability. This is not simply bad taste or vulgar display. It is an aesthetic formation that prepares subjects for authoritarian rule by making domination feel natural and resistance feel weak. MAGA aesthetics, in this sense, is violence before the blow, pedagogy before policy.
This cultural logic has a long intellectual genealogy. The MAGA aesthetic is not accidental. Fascist movements have always understood aesthetics as pedagogy, as a way of training people to feel power before they are allowed to think about it. Walter Benjamin warned that fascism aestheticizes politics to mobilize the masses without granting them rights, replacing democratic participation with spectacle, ritual, and submission. Susan Sontag likewise observed that fascist aesthetics glorify obedience, hierarchy, and the eroticization of force, transforming domination into visual pleasure and cruelty into style. As Sontag later argued, this aestheticization of power does not merely depict authority; it trains desire itself. In Sontag’s terms, the spectacle does not merely depict power, it trains the eye to desire it. The MAGA look follows this script precisely. It abandons democracy’s appeal to reasoned judgment, ethical responsibility, and public accountability, substituting civic persuasion with spectacle, visual aggression, and emotional coercion. Its ugliness mirrors its politics with chilling precision: cruel, nostalgic, obsessed with hierarchy, and openly hostile to pluralism. What we see here is not bad taste but a deliberate visual language of authoritarianism, an aesthetic designed to normalize exclusion, glorify force, strip joy and imagination from public life, and prepare the ground for repression.
This contemporary spectacle at work in the Trump regime offers a crucial point of entry into a much older and more dangerous cultural logic. Fascist movements have always understood that power must first be felt before it can be obeyed. Long before authoritarian regimes consolidated themselves through law and force, they worked through culture, mobilizing images, rituals, and pleasures that transform domination into beauty and submission into belonging. It is this deeper aesthetic logic that Walter Benjamin named when he warned that fascism resolves social crises not by redistributing power, but by aestheticizing politics itself.
At its core, MAGA aesthetics pays homage to the fascist subject, disembodied, cruel, racist, morally vacant, and rigidly militarized. It takes shape within a culture of images driven by corporate disimagination machines that dull moral sensibilities and anesthetize the injuries produced by gangster capitalism and its militarized techno-structures of domination and disposability. Within this visual regime, social change is not merely postponed but actively undone through the relentless circulation of images that normalize psychic numbness and political paralysis, training subjects to consume cruelty as spectacle. At the core of the MAGA aesthetic is a stylized performance of authoritarian masculinity that draws on the visual grammar of fascism to aestheticize command itself. It glorifies the body as militarized warrior, disciplined and armored, animated by what Sontag terms a “contempt for all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.”
Militarized Style and the Performance of Unaccountable Power
Hyper-controlled bodies, exaggerated rigidity, militarized dress, and resurrected authoritarian silhouettes work together to make domination appear natural, inevitable, and even desirable. Nowhere is this aesthetic more pronounced than in ICE, whose paramilitary uniforms project an image of communal power and solidarity forged through fear, coercion, and sanctioned lawlessness, rather than democratic consent. This logic was on full display in the costumed theatrics of Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, whose long black trench coat functioned less as clothing than as a visual performance of unaccountable authority, staging power as spectacle and intimidation as legitimacy. As the Wall Street Journal observed, the coat appeared disturbingly reminiscent of the wardrobe of Hermann Göring, a comparison later sharpened when Gavin Newsom remarked that it was as if the outfit had been lifted from SS regalia. Here, authority is neither argued for nor justified; it is worn. In this aestheticized register, power bypasses reason and forecloses dissent. What emerges is not merely spectacle, but an authoritarian pedagogy that teaches submission through intimidation, trains desire to admire domination, and shapes subjects prepared to mistake force for legitimacy.
What is taking shape in the MAGA aesthetic belongs to a long and well-established tradition in which culture functions as a form of political education, shaping how power is felt, admired, and internalized before it is ever justified. Fascist movements have always understood that domination must first be made emotionally compelling. Images, rituals, styles, and pleasures do the work that arguments cannot, training people to experience hierarchy as natural, discipline as beautiful, and violence as redemptive. This is the cultural logic Susan Sontag identified in her analysis of fascist imagery, where obedience is glorified, force eroticized, and submission transformed into visual pleasure. The sections that follow trace this aesthetic logic across fascist spectacle, eroticized violence, and even oppositional cultures, revealing how domination is learned long before it is enforced.
This logic reached its most refined expression in the films of Leni Riefenstahl, whose choreographed masses, monumental architecture, and hypnotic rhythms did not simply depict Nazi power but actively trained audiences to desire it, binding aesthetic rapture to political submission. That same logic resurfaces in cinema decades later, most disturbingly in The Night Porter, a film I once critiqued in Cineaste, where fascism is wrenched from its historical and genocidal foundations and recast as an intimate, eroticized psychodrama. By privatizing terror and aestheticizing cruelty, the film drains violence of its political meaning, transforming domination into a matter of psychological fascination rather than naming it for what it is: a collective crime organized by the state and sustained through culture. Crucially, even cultures of resistance have proven vulnerable to this aesthetic capture, where dissent itself can be stripped of its political force and refashioned as style.
Yet the struggle over aesthetics does not end with fascist spectacle; it also unfolds within movements that seek to oppose it. Early punk aesthetics, particularly in the work of Vivienne Westwood, sought to desecrate authority through ugliness, sexual provocation, anti-nationalist rage, and a refusal of respectability. As Mika Nijhawan observes, Westwood was a pioneer in producing grass-roots designs during the formative stages of the punk movement. Her clothes did not merely reflect punk fashion; they “dressed the entire movement,” giving visual form to its anger, refusal, and insurgent politics. In its earliest formations, punk was not simply a style but a cultural intervention, an assault on the fascist romance of order, purity, discipline, and heroic masculinity. It rejected the monumental, the uniform, and the disciplined body in favor of fragmentation, irony, and desecration, orchestrating outrage as a counter-pedagogy aimed at making authority appear ridiculous rather than sublime. Yet as punk was absorbed into consumer culture, its oppositional force was hollowed out, preserved as style while its political content was neutralized and repurposed within the very systems it once sought to challenge. Together, these examples reveal how gangster capitalism operates most effectively at the level of feeling, colonizing desire, suspending ethical judgment, and teaching people how to relate emotionally to violence, authority, and belonging long before coercion becomes explicit, normalized, or legally enforced.
Fascist Aesthetics as Political Education
The work of Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School, Václav Havel, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and others in the cultural politics tradition remains indispensable because it shifts our attention away from fascism as a purely political formation and toward culture as its enabling condition. Fascism does not seek democratic participation or critical consent; it substitutes spectacle for deliberation and affect for reasoned judgment. Politics becomes ceremony, war becomes pageantry, and domination is rendered beautiful, inevitable, and emotionally satisfying. In this sense, aesthetics functions as a form of mass education, a pedagogy that trains people to accept hierarchy as natural, to experience obedience as belonging, and to view violence not as a moral rupture but as a necessary expression of order.
This pedagogical power becomes most dangerous when fascist violence is severed from history and ethics and re-presented as intimate, seductive, or abstracted from collective responsibility. Fascist aesthetics does its most enduring work not through overt propaganda alone, but through cultural forms that dissolve political accountability into private feeling, fascination, and pleasure. As images circulate without context, repetition replaces judgment and affect displaces analysis. What emerges is not ignorance, but a trained indifference, a learned incapacity to connect spectacle to structure, desire to domination, or beauty to brutality.
What this history makes clear is that fascism is not imposed from above by force alone; it is learned, internalized, and normalized through culture. This insight lies at the heart of Gramsci’s insistence that “all politics is pedagogical.” Politics does not simply govern bodies; it shapes consciousness, habits, desires, and modes of identification. Education, universally understood, is the primary terrain on which this struggle unfolds. When schools, media, and cultural institutions discourage critical inquiry and reward conformity, they help produce the passivity and moral numbness on which authoritarianism depends.
Education therefore plays a decisive role in either reproducing or resisting fascist culture. When it challenges taken-for-granted assumptions, cultivates critical literacy, and nurtures solidarity rather than fear, it can disrupt the production of the fascist subject. But resistance to fascism cannot be confined to electoral politics or policy reform alone. Without a cultural foundation that sustains critical thought, collective responsibility, and democratic imagination, political action will remain fragile and easily undone. Fascist pedagogy works slowly, affectively, and persistently; countering it requires an equally sustained struggle over how people learn to see, feel, remember, and judge the world they inhabit.
Erotic Fascism and the Seductions of Cinema
Few cultural texts reveal this danger more clearly than The Night Porter. Often defended as a meditation on trauma, memory, or transgression, the film instead exemplifies how fascist violence can be transformed into a stylized erotic spectacle stripped of historical accountability. By recasting Nazism as an intimate psychosexual relationship between two consenting adults, the film evacuates fascism of its political, institutional, and genocidal realities. The concentration camp becomes a backdrop; the SS uniform, an erotic costume, and systemic terror is displaced by private obsession. Mass murder recedes, historical responsibility dissolves, and power is reduced to aestheticized desire.
This privatization of fascism is precisely what makes the film so dangerous. By aestheticizing domination and sexualizing submission, The Night Porter invites viewers to engage fascism at the level of fascination rather than judgment. Violence is no longer something to be confronted politically but something to be consumed affectively. In this sense, the film does not merely misrepresent fascism; it reenacts one of its central mechanisms, the conversion of terror into pleasure and history into style.
This danger was diagnosed with extraordinary clarity by Susan Sontag in “Fascinating Fascism.” Fascist aesthetics, she argues, eroticizes hierarchy, sanctifies discipline, and promises transcendence through submission. It glorifies the surrender of the self to power, offering ecstatic belonging in exchange for obedience. Fascination, in this account, is not a misunderstanding of fascism; it is one of its primary cultural instruments. When fascism is aestheticized, ethical judgment is suspended, historical memory erodes, and violence becomes thinkable precisely because it has been rendered beautiful.
Riefenstahl and the Architecture of Fascist Spectacle
The aesthetic logic that animates the classic film The Night Porter finds its most explicit historical expression in the films of Leni Riefenstahl. Works such as Triumph of the Will perfected the visual grammar of fascism: choreographed bodies, monumental architecture, rhythmic repetition, and the fusion of individual submission with collective exaltation. These films were not documentaries that happened to record Nazi power; they were propaganda machines that constructed reality to serve the image. As Sontag insisted, the Party rally existed in order to be filmed. The image did not reflect power; it produced it.
Riefenstahl’s films celebrate what Sontag identified as the fascist ideal: life as art, politics as beauty, and community forged through ecstatic self-control and obedience. Strength is eroticized, weakness despised, and critical reflection cast as contamination. The visual emphasis on purified bodies, synchronized movement, and reverent submission to the leader rehearses a political theology in which dissent appears as deformity and pluralism as decay.
The contemporary rehabilitation of Riefenstahl as a “pure artist,” detached from ideology, reproduces a profoundly dangerous fiction, the belief that aesthetics can be separated from politics. This refusal to judge fascist aesthetics politically is itself a political act. It allows authoritarian spectacle to survive as cultural form even when its explicit ideological content is disavowed, ensuring that fascist longings persist at the level of desire, style, and affect long after regimes fall.
Punk, Vivienne Westwood, and the Capture of Dissent
If fascist aesthetics secures power by making domination desirable, then resistance has often sought to disrupt that pedagogy at the level of style and sensation. Yet the now distant history of punk fashion reveals how vulnerable oppositional styles are to appropriation, commodification, and neutralization. Early punk, particularly in the work of the designer Vivienne Westwood, sought to desecrate authority through ugliness, sexual provocation, anti-nationalist rage, and a refusal of respectability. It attacked the fascist romance of order, purity, discipline, and heroic masculinity at its symbolic core by foregrounding disorder, deviance, and bodily excess. Westwood in both her politics and aesthetics embraced “the core of early punk [which] ‘was calculated anger’.”
In its earliest formations, punk was not simply a style but a cultural intervention, or as Malcolm McLaren observed, “It was never about having a Mohican haircut or wearing a ripped T-shirt. It was all about destruction, and the creative potential within that.” Punk rejected the monumental, the uniform, and the disciplined body in favor of fragmentation, irony, and desecration. It was an orchestration of outrage. It mocked nationalism, unsettled gender norms, and exposed the violence hidden beneath claims to moral order. Many punk bands such as The Clash and the Sex Pistols created art, music, and clothes as part of a social movement of which Westwood was a pioneering force in terms of her mix of aesthetics, fashion, and politics. In this sense, punk represented a counter-pedagogy, an attempt to unlearn obedience by making authority appear ridiculous rather than sublime. It was the Sex Pistols and Britain’s major subcultures singing fuck you to bourgeois culture in spite of a bad ending.
Punk’s visual language was gradually detached from its political context and absorbed into consumer culture. What began as an assault on domination was transformed into a marketable aesthetic. Transgression became style, shock became branding, and resistance was preserved only as surface. As Sontag warned in her reflections on photographyand spectacle, shock alone is never enough; it wears off, becomes familiar, and risks reinforcing the very structures it seeks to oppose. Punk’s absorption into fashion culture demonstrates a crucial lesson: fascism does not only impose its own aesthetics; it also colonizes those of dissent, draining them of political meaning while preserving their aesthetic form. In many ways, Westwood’s life offers a warning. Her radical merging of fashion and punk politics did not retain its political purity or even its integrity considering her eventual celebrity, status, business practices, and role in participating in consumer culture at the highest levels of elite participation. At the same time, her role in creating what might be called an anti-fascist aesthetic, her endless participation and support of the environmental movement, her support of sexual and gender freedom, and her support of Julian Assange makes clear that her role as a celebrity fashion designer and activist is no small tribute to her and offers a political and pedagogical example of the merging of the aesthetic, radical political beliefs, and activism.
Conclusion: The Making of the Fascist Subject
The rise of MAGA aesthetics cannot be separated from a longer history of cultural and social reproduction in the United States. Submission to authority, intolerance toward marginalized groups, ultra-nationalism, systemic racism, and rigid hierarchies of gender, race, and class have long been cultivated through schools, mainstream media, and a wide array of cultural institutions. Trump’s appeal to a mythic “better time,” coded as an era of racial dominance, patriarchal order, and unchallenged authority, draws directly from this authoritarian inheritance. Those who challenge these norms are routinely cast as threats to stability, tradition, and national identity, a dynamic that recalls Wilhelm Reich’s warning that fascism flourishes where individuality, sexuality, and dissent are systematically repressed.
The creation of the fascist subject must therefore be understood not as a purely psychological phenomenon, but as the outcome of sustained cultural indoctrination, a far-reaching apparatus of socialization and propaganda. The contemporary educational landscape too often fails to equip young people with the intellectual tools needed to question power, recognize manipulation, and resist domination. Trump’s language of “patriotism,” “traditional values,” and “law and order” feeds this hegemonic pedagogy by framing dissent as dangerous, deviant, or un-American. As Reich and Theodor Adorno recognized in different registers, mass education and mass media function as decisive instruments in producing subjects who come to accept hierarchy, exclusion, and cruelty as normal features of social life rather than as political choices demanding resistance.
MAGA aesthetics makes this process visible by rendering the pedagogy of domination immediate, affective, and embodied. Fascist movements have always understood that power must first be felt through culture. Fascism endures not because it persuades through reasoned argument, but because it seduces through spectacle, training people to experience domination as belonging and cruelty as strength. Images, performances, and styles perform this pedagogical labor long before policies are announced or laws are enforced. Aesthetics prepares the ground on which authoritarian rule becomes thinkable, even desirable, by shaping how people feel power before they are invited to think about it. As Lutz Koepnick argues in his essay “Aesthetic Politics Today: Walter Benjamin and Post-Fordist Culture,” “The fascist spectacle mobilizes people’s feelings primarily to neutralize their senses, massaging minds and emotions so that the individual succumbs to the charisma of vitalistic power” while consolidating state power.
If fascism aestheticizes politics to make injustice palatable, and domination attractive, then resistance must politicize aesthetics, reclaiming culture as a site of memory, ethical judgment, and democratic possibility. This means refusing the separation of beauty from responsibility, affect from history, and spectacle from power. The struggle against authoritarianism is therefore inseparable from the struggle over how power looks, feels, and is learned in everyday life.
The responsibility that falls to educators, cultural workers, and public intellectuals is thus profound. They are among the few agents capable of confronting the images and narratives that normalize authoritarianism while offering alternative visions of agency, justice, and democratic life. This work demands more than critique; it requires reclaiming education itself as a democratic practice rooted in historical consciousness, ethical responsibility, and collective imagination. Fascism triumphs not by persuading people to surrender their rights, but by schooling them, through culture and spectacle, to no longer recognize domination as injustice. Resistance, then, must begin where fascism does, in the struggle over culture itself. Only by reclaiming culture as a radical educational project capable of reshaping how people see, feel, and judge the world can we build a durable resistance, one able not only to confront fascism, but to prevent its endless return in ever more seductive forms.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.
