The Cruelty of Aesthetics in the Age of MAGA Politics
S. E. Anderson
The Cruelty of Aesthetics in the Age of MAGA Politics
The doctrine from which the concentration camps were born was very simple, and for that very reason very dangerous: every foreigner is an enemy, and every enemy must be eliminated; and a foreigner is anyone who is perceived as different, because of their language, religion, appearance, customs, and ideas.
Primo Levi, "Europe of the Concentration Camps (1973).
Cruelty has always been a political weapon, but in the current historical moment it has acquired a distinctive aesthetic form. By MAGA aesthetics, I mean a visual and affective regime in which domination is staged as spectacle, violence is rendered stylish, and exclusion is performed as common sense. It is an aesthetic that does not persuade through argument or policy. It educates through images, bodies, gestures, and scenes of humiliation, training people to feel obedience before they are asked to think critically at all.
This aesthetic did not emerge from nowhere. The aesthetics of cruelty haunt the darkest chapters of modern history, from the genocidal destruction of Indigenous peoples in North America and the enslavement of Africans, to the industrialized torture and extermination carried out by Nazi Germany. In each case, cruelty was not only enacted; it was ritualized, justified, and made culturally legible. Violence became thinkable because it was made visible in ways that erased the humanity of targeted groups.
What is chilling today is how close this logic has moved to home. The march of neo-Nazi groups through Gore Park and downtown Hamilton was not an isolated eruption of extremism. It was a public performance of hate, a rehearsal staged in civic space, designed to intimidate, provoke, and normalize a white nationalist presence. Such spectacles belong to a broader transnational culture in which cruelty is increasingly displayed rather than hidden, and in which reactionary movements borrow freely from U.S. authoritarian aesthetics.
These displays are not disconnected from the legalized terror inflicted elsewhere. In the United States, immigration enforcement agencies such as ICE routinely stage violence against immigrants and people of color as bureaucratic necessity, transforming raids, detentions, and deportations into media-friendly spectacles. Cruelty here is administrative, racialized, and increasingly theatrical. What travels north is not ideology alone but style: the normalization of intimidation, the glorification of force, and the conversion of suffering into political theater. Yet something more is at work than the acceleration of state violence. There is a visible pleasure in cruelty, an enjoyment taken in the suffering of designated enemies, coupled with an ugly aesthetic that turns domination into entertainment. Violence is not only justified; it is consumed.
In the MAGA aesthetic, cruelty appears in multiple registers, most visibly in the “Mar-a-Lago face”: plastic smiles, exaggerated cosmetic enhancement, and beauty-pageant nostalgia staged against prisons, detention centers, and armed authority. Taken as a whole it signals a politics that treats the body as a surface to be engineered, disciplined, and branded, a mask of dominance and emotional vacancy masquerading as strength.
Among MAGA men, a fever dream of authoritarian masculinity proliferates across TikTok, YouTube, X, and other platforms. They stage themselves as strongmen-in-training: squared jaws clenched in hostility, hyper-muscular bodies forged in gym rituals that double as moral theater, and rigid, armored postures where repression hardens into aggression and vulnerability is converted into cruelty. Digital culture intensifies this pedagogy, turning aggression into identity and domination into performance. These are not harmless displays but embodied lessons, teaching that power resides in hardness, compassion is weakness, and democracy itself is a feminized liability.
Canada is not immune to these lessons. When neo-Nazi symbols appear in our parks, bodies draped in white sheets and faces concealed, echoing the Ku Klux Klan and the ICE shock troops occupying U.S. cities, the MAGA aesthetic is no longer imported but enacted. When migrants are cast as threats rather than neighbors, and cruelty is excused as realism or security, the aesthetic logic of MAGA politics has already crossed the border. The danger lies not only in borrowed slogans or flags, but in the slow acclimation to spectacle, fear, and exclusion as ordinary features of public life.
Fascism has always understood that culture is its first battlefield. Long before rights are revoked or institutions dismantled, people are trained to desire authority, admire domination, and mistake cruelty for strength. Aesthetics functions here as pedagogy, shaping affect, memory, and consent.
To confront the cruelty of MAGA aesthetics in Canada is therefore not a matter of taste or decorum. It is a democratic necessity. Making these aesthetics visible disrupts their power, exposing how violence is staged, how hatred is normalized, and how fear is cultivated. Culture can educate for cruelty, but it can also educate for resistance. The choice is neither abstract nor distant. It is already being rehearsed in our streets. ///
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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