The new aesthetic for the conservative base can be reasonably well-understood as a cooptation of the alt_ or insurgent aesthetic. It offers something like the liberating euphoria which progressives felt about 20 years ago. Conservatives can like, tweet, dox,
spam, hack, and everything else which formerly were chiefly the playground of the other side. The surge of dopamine delivered by these aesthetic behaviors can be understood as a delayed version of the 1996 internet, specially branded and targeted at those
who were not part of the earlier phase and resent both its participants and their value system.
This is totally true for the alt_right, and the survivors of those heavily dopamined days of the 90s should know it better than anyone else (unless they're still doped out on Intel, or just stuck wherever they landed). In my case I felt this turnaround with all the bitterness of the culturally displaced, starting four years ago.
You're right Max, this kind of thing always happens and one has to move on, that's the personal lesson.
However, the alt-right is only a hipster suburb of ultra-conservatism, and I think its aesthetics are a detail. Just as the big mistake of the dopamine binge was to think that everyone was about to join your wild high (precarious cognitarians as the leading edge of class consciousness!), so in our day, the alt-right is just another bunch of nerds with attitude. It looks big when you stumble into one of their chat rooms, or cafés if they actually have such things (maybe in the Milwaukee suburbs?). It's not really so big though, just as the counter-globalization movement wasn't.
I've moved on to different questions.
Here's one of them. It turns out that on closer examination, what has really metastasized over the past 20 years is the corporate capitalist grip on the sprawling, palpitating world of religious communitarianism. This is the cancer you can see in Mitch McConnel's eyes, this is what Amy Coney Barret embodies to extremes of smug pathology, and this is the only explanation for the kinds of insanities that have come out of Donald Trump's mouth over the last few days in particular. Only people who judge their daily lives by what some pastor tells them concerning God and the Devil could possibly accept the concocted drivel of pro-life, pro-gun, leader-cult nationalism that is now served up, to overwhelming effect, by the cynical pols of the so-called evangelical movement. It's not really a movement, though, but an exactingly constructed motivational machine, by far the most dangerous political technology in the world. White supremacy, neonazism, extreme libertarianism and the alt_right are just feeder streams that swell this foaming current and give it the complexity and power to dominate a declining imperial order, which it is still doing in the US despite Joe Biden's win. I think the old liberal/progressive hegemony has been all but overwhelmed by religious nationalism. We better fight for our worlds, folks, because if not we are going to lose them all.
On the left, we have always wanted to believe that the rapaciousness of monopoly capital would drive the workers and peasants to our side. "The real enemy is the Koch brothers and their dark money," we'd say, "and the rest of the confusion will disappear once that becomes clear." Now it's urgent to identify, not just the leaders and their aims, but the entire cultural/political complex that is giving the present its twisted and disheartening character. Because as conditions get worse, the veil doesn't fall. No, the religious fervor grows. Katherine Stewart has written what seems to be the best book on this stuff, and she puts the growth dynamic in a nutshell:
"That’s the way inequality works. On the one hand, it creates concentrations of wealth whose beneficiaries are determined to manipulate the political process to hold on to and enhance their privileges. On the other hand, it generates a sense of instability and anxiety among broad sectors of the wider public, which is then ripe for conversion to a religion that promises authority and order."
That's Karl Polanyi's double movement. The alienation of globalized capitalism grows by leaps but bounds - but the powers that emerge to stop it prove much worse than the disease they were supposed to cure.
On that basis, a gang of monopoly capitalists have created a national popular religion, and right now they hold the Senate, the Supreme Court and the Presidency of the United States. These folks have global reach, and anyone who was justifiably worried about Opus Dei a few years ago, has not seen anything yet. The cosmological battle is already three-quarters won, and we hyper-educated godless anarchists from the cities have barely even noticed it was happening. To fight back, we need something a lot more powerful than another tech-driven euphoria. Without a transcendent sense of cross-racial, multigendered community to match the horrid archaisms of the right - and without some new version of the Messiah, I'd say - we are cooked.
Walter Benjamin understood this kind of thing very well, but his categories are far too out of date to help us. It's time for the contemporary left to develop, not just a new ecological aesthetics, but even more, an updated version of political theology.