The Wanderer’s Aesthetic
Hillary Clinton lost the U.S. Presidential election — at least in-part — because she is a woman. The exact implications of that statement, and the reasons as to why Clinton lost, are a bit more complex than sheer headlines, but one has to concede that American voters acted partly from sexism. Trump got away with rape; Clinton took the blame for Bernie’s downfall. Trump never released his tax returns; Clinton’s FBI vindication was still treated with skepticism by both red and blue voters. Trump won; Hillary lost.
Saying that, Theresa May succeeded in winning her snap general election and securing the highest percentage of voters in the past 25 years of party history. No doubt there are those who dismiss May simply because of her gender, but sexism functioned with demonstrably less effect in the UK’s last election than in America. May proves that — past a certain point — gender plays no part for voters. Most likely, Clinton’s biggest mistake in the 2016 elections was her failure to obey Napoleon’s cardinal rule of battle: “Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake.” Theresa May, by contrast, has always kept that in mind. The stupidity of Dianne Abbott, and the sheer moral bankruptcy of Jeremy Corbyn, Tim Farron, and Nigel Farage have always shone through, May not obstructing them from the public view. A year post both elections, however, Theresa May remains considerably more hated than Clinton. Ruling out both gender and strong opposition as the reason for that public hatred, The Shill triumphs in our explanation of why that is.
That is to say that May’s greatest weakness comes from her lack of “Strong and Stable” leadership. The conservative party, over the last few years, has developed into a bastion of what I’d call moral brutalism. That term isn’t meant to be normative — not at all — but more so a description of how the Tories have adapted their foreign and internal policies to most directly confront the recession. Spurred on by Farage and UKIP, the Tories had to adapt so that they wouldn’t lose their more heavily conservative voters, playing to those further on the right in the knowledge that Milliband appeared too foolish to win their centrist voters. As Corbyn grew to present a bigger demographic threat than British nationalists, the Conservatives managed to absorb post-Brexit UKIP voters, safe in the knowledge that the further-left end of their voter spectrum could not bring themselves to vote Labour.
The end result of that political pragmatism is moral brutalism. Developed particularly over the last two years, May’s post-Brexit strategy represented something of a re-election policy. The Conservatives had to retain their voters on the right, and pushed for harsher immigration policies and less market regulation so that they might do so. Morally, their standpoint represented the key tenets of conservativism: that liberalism is a pragmatic fad, swelling and growing in order to overtake the morality of the day, but constitution-less in its approach to government. Brutally, May and co. capitalized on this principle to bring order to a divided Britain.
One might be confused as to why Theresa May’s hardline conservatism brought even her own voters to hate her. The British public, after all, still voted for her even if begrudgingly, and seemed perfectly willing to do so in order to quell the rise of Corbyn. In the past year, there has been little mention of sexism directed towards May, and Labour’s voting force has grown quieter and quieter regarding the Conservatives’ policies.
But when a leader appears too unwell and physically weak to speak at their own conference, their entire conservative aesthetic is undermined. That leader no longer appears a paragon of industrial Britain, but a figure too weak to hold up their own policies. Visualizing politicians as versions of Atlas — holding their own weighty views across their backs — we see that those politicians have to pair quite accurately with what they preach in order to be respected.
Moreover, when that same leader is succeeded by videos of a charismatic, intelligent, rising star in their party — able to calmly and clearly explain the justification for moral brutalism — then their strength is made comparatively even less weak. Literally hours after Theresa May’s coughing fit at the Conservative Party Conference, Jacob Rees-Mogg appeared to salvage some of the Tories’ traditional legitimacy. When confronted with a rather aggressive protestor, Rees-Mogg replied respectfully and firmly. He reasonably assessed the arguments made, and managed to portray a vision of something that Conservative voters had not seen in a while; that of a strong and stable leader.
Returning to our vision of Atlas, one has to be consistent in how they carry an ideology. Josef Stalin could not carry an ideology of anti-essentialist liberalism, just as Mahatma Gandhi couldn’t advocate for anti-regulationist capitalism. For a leader to truly represent their party and beliefs — presenting no converse notion of impurity or insincerity — there must exist the notion that their personality matches their politics. The reason why Rees-Mogg is revered and May despised stems precisely from this; that Theresa May is unable to give off the notion of a strong, stable leader which her policies dictate.
There’s a rather infamous painting by Carl Friedrich Gauss entitled Wanderer Over the Sea of Fog. When I first saw the painting, it was as the background on a YouTube video; a concert recording of Strauss’ Tod Und Verklarung. Upon the soaring of some arpeggiaic tutti, rising above the orchestra and up to the domed ceiling of the concert hall, the faintest glimmer of movement could almost be seen as a translucent oasis in the corner of the picture. Gauss’ painting — though completely still — appears to be alive, as it moves with the music of Strauss, some renaissance testament to the sky above and earth below, filling the space between with infinitesimal moments of detail colored in the mind.
It is only when the outward human matches the inner purpose that a politician becomes truly respected. In a strange, Randian manner, the politicians which we — the people — love are those which embody the ideals that they preach. We want to see the human incarnation of strength and leadership as a physical edition, not the hollow shell of that person’s politics. In looking to represent brutalist morals, the moralist must be brutal in all that they do; they must stop for no-one, insisting that their idea of what is right — wandering like the proverbial wanderer — represents some absolute morality which they, the politician, is actually able to support. Without that perfect mimicry, as Napoleon says again, “A throne is only a bench covered with velvet.”
