Tyler Cowen:

The two candidates represent two diametrically opposed portraits of the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Should we expect beauty, grace and universality, or should we derive our feel-good sentiments about politics from righteousness, confrontation, and sheer dogged persistence and feelings of ultimate desert?

[…]

There really is a lot at stake in the Democratic primary; it’s our current sense of the aesthetic, and of desert, that drives what our substantive policy views will be twenty or thirty years from now.

I have to disagree with the basic distinction set up here: that only a certain type of politics (here, Obama’s) is ‘aesthetic’, whereas politics which is based on persistence and confrontation is anti-aesthetic, or, as Cowen terms it, ‘desert’. Perhaps I’m merely using different semantics than Cowen, but, as I understand it, this is a fundamentally flawed duality.

Instead, I see aesthetics and politics as metonymic qualities. That is, politics cannot be identified as more aesthetic or less aesthetic, since politics and aesthetics are equivalents. They are both struggles by humans to design the world according to their own plans. Hillary’s approach to designing the world is certainly markedly different from Obama’s, but hardly less aesthetic. The poet and the politician, then, are not so far apart, even when the poet claims apathy or the politician claims pragmatism.

That’s why this blog’s masthead styles it ‘an amalgamated journal’. The perceived differences between art and politics, society and culture, science and the humanities, are merely epiphenomena.