The Alt-Right and the Tombstone of Post-Modernism

For some time now, a few weeks at least, I have become fascinated with learning more about the alt-right, a shadowy and strange Internet subculture movement, which I longed to know more about. I’ve been drawn for journalistic reasons to see just what it is that Hillary Clinton regarded seriously enough to mention it openly in her now famous alt-right speech. I have returned with an appreciation for the fact that I was at first in error, I was seeking out a political movement to understand what they stood for, and instead I discovered a more or less countercultural movement, which has political elements.

I was a little taken aback by the discovery, mainly because everyone likes to talk about the alt-right as if they are full blown storm troopers, which I already knew was laughably mistaken. At its core I found a small leftist-style movement, founded on a repurposed Frankenstein’s monster of social justice principles, which exports itself through its trademark method of social activism, memes.

Now other people have spent time on the political drives of the alt-right, but I’m going to talk instead about how the alt-right is the tombstone of post-modern art. To begin I have to explain that modern art, and post-modern art even more so, are driven by different aims than the traditional art of Michelangelo and Peter Paul Rubens, who were guided by a classical standard of beauty and human excellence. Modern art is driven by fear of kitsch, or the fakery of art that is manufactured, crafted, rather than produced. Sir Roger Scruton, a renowned aesthetic philosopher, defines kitsch as “fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to decieve the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious." In an art world where everything has to be uncompromisingly authentic expression, classical standards of beauty won’t do, instead art must be head turning, taboo defying and even offensive so long as it is new and exciting. I’ll leave PragerU to underscore the point:

If that’s the case, then are Internet memes art? Is the daring and edginess of a meme proportional to its value? What after all could be more taboo defying than Pepe in a Nazi uniform or even Adolph Hitler himself?

This is perhaps the last standard in society that everyone can agree on, that Hitler was an evil man is obvious, but technically, in the amoral landscape of post-modern art he can just be another art statement, defying taboo and turning heads. Why, after all are images of Lenin ok on campuses if Hitler is not? What standards actually exist in art? Now before you think I’ve undergone some massive moral panic about the degradation of art and the potential for mass dictator worship, I’d like to point out that Hitler in his rehabilitated image is satirical, like in the 2015 German movie Er ist Weider Da. This however does not change the fact that post-modern art has finally broken the last taboo on its trail of destruction and iconoclasm, and has become like yet another internet conversation terminated abruptly by Godwin's law. While standing over the scene, looms a single genocidal maniac and a green frog for company, hanging poetic justice on the heads of those who destroyed beauty.