One of the defining factors of Weimar Germany as the country slid into Nazism was the glorification of the ugly. The music was shreakish; they printed literature without punctuation as a ‘novelty’; a toilet nailed to a 2X4 was ‘art’. For a century they had emptied civilization of its glory, filling up the empty shell with banality. By the time old Adolf came along, nobody knew the difference. (This is all highlighted quite well in Peikoff’s “The Cause of Hitler’s Germany”).

There’s something horribly ugly, fascistic about modern America. Weird people marching unashamed through our public spaces; hideous crowds camping out unwashed and sullied in the plazas of storied centers of learning, chanting vulgarities and violence; rows-upon-rows of drug-addled homeless beside sunny beaches where we were wont to take our children, but no more. Up is down; right is wrong; ugly is beautiful. It’s all been done before; it’s all been seen before – and we know where it all leads.

In defense of the beautiful. The civilizational. Beautiful things fill our hearts with peace and our imaginations with wonder. Who can look at Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” and not feel the sense of limitlessness, of vastness that Hopper transmitted from an America on the move? The straight, clean lines and the generous use of light. Listening to a solo violin playing the haunting tunes of Pachelbel. Reading “Jerusalem” by Selma Langerlof, feeling the yearning and the heartache of the protagonists.

I think the attack on beauty is on purpose. It isn’t just an attempt to lower the pole-vault so all may leap over it, it’s not about ‘social justice’, though that is how they define their motives. It’s more insidious, more evil. It’s about the robbery of joy for the pursuit of political power. Make everyone miserable; turn everyone jealous (imagining they are more influential than they are destined to be) or envious (imagining all material wellbeing is ill-gotten), and then weaponize this. “Beauty is in fact not beautiful, in fact beauty is evil, and we will prove it by becoming so very ugly indeed.”

One of the amazing bait-and-switches that the nouveau-iconoclasts have (almost) succeeded at is making us feel guilty about who we are, about what we have (be it great or small). If you are beautiful, you should make yourself ugly. If your house is on the beach, you should welcome the troll-people. If you go to an elite school, you must join the hate-squads. Everything about you is illegitimate, so you must denounce it — then maybe we will let you forgive yourself.

But I think America (and the west) is waking up. I was reading an article today about the seismic shifts (20 point swings) in the opinions of young people over the last eight years. We Americans don’t want to be punished for an original sin we do not recognize; we are tired of being manipulated; and we don’t accept that our lives must exist as an apology for ourselves. We’re ready to again look at something beautiful, and breathe deeply and smile and say “Wow!”

That “Wow” is going to save the world.