The MAGA Theory of Art

There is a fable that persists in even themost respectable quarters, perhaps because it has retained its power to shock for more than half a century. Get any card-carrying liberal into a sufficiently confessional mood and she will tell you, sotto voce, that there was one domain in which the Nazis were perversely and chillingly formidable: the domain of the aesthetic. Even the Nazis’ detractors hailed their movies as sensations. Most famously, Susan Sontag noted in her landmark essay “Fascinating Fascism” that Nazi uniforms bristled with sex appeal, that the films of Leni Riefenstahl had a curious allure. Thus Walter Benjamin and a generation of subsequent theorists argued that fascism was, at its core, an all-too-successful effort to aestheticize politics. In this telling, the problem was not that the Third Reich was too vulgar or too mawkish; on the contrary, it was too coolly sophisticated—so much so that it framed the violence it wrought as weightless spectacle. When Hitler organized rallies or choreographed marches, he was like a child arranging toy soldiers in rows, only to delight in the drama of knocking them over. It is tempting, then, to take one look at the shambolic flailing of the Trump administration—the ham-handed takeover of the Kennedy Center, the tawdry gilding of the Oval Office, the AI slop, the women with too much filler, the men on too many steroids who boast about eating too much meat, the tweets with their erratic capitalization, the general air of carnival grotesquerie—and conclude, as Karl Marx did, that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce.” Of course, there are obvious continuities between MAGA and its antecedent on the Rhine. “Fascism is theater,” Jean Genet wrote of the Nazis, and it is hard to think of a politician with more theatrical flair than Trump, who adores Andrew Lloyd Webber and once harbored ambitions of becoming a Broadway producer. If Hitler fostered “the modern era’s first full-blown media culture,” as the film scholar Eric Rentschler claims, then Trump is surely responsible for the postmodern era’s first full-blown social media bonanza. He has the Führer’s instinct for pageantry, the Führer’s gift for glister and grandiosity. Trump’s resentments, too, recall those of his forbears. In his study of Nazi art policy, the historian Jonathan Petropoulos writes that art collecting was important to top brass in the party because it served “as a means of assimilation into the traditional elite.” Much to their chagrin, their political ascendency had failed to confer the cultural capital they craved; now they had to seize prestige by other means. The MAGA gentry is more resigned; Trump and his lackeys more or less accept their status as philistines and content themselves with exacting revenge on the gatekeepers, yet their air of wounded arrivism is all too familiar. Here it may seem that the similarities come to an end. After all, the Nazis ran a well-oiled operation. They deployed experts to appraise the art they looted; they siphoned enormous sums of money into a vast and ever-metastasizing bureaucracy devoted to Nazi museums, with an eye to cultivating a distinctively Nazi sensibility; they staged meticulous military performances. While Trump has hosted motley rallies, and even made one deflating attempt at a military parade, he has yet to produce any of the disciplined displays that so effectively reduced the bodies of their participants to raw geometries. Above all, MAGA lacks the aesthetes who are dutifully trotted out as evidence of fascism’s scandalous refinement. Who is the MAGA Hugo Boss, the MAGA Leni Riefenstahl, the MAGA Knut Hamsun, the MAGA Gabriele D’Annunzio, the MAGA Ezra Pound? Mar-a-Lago has more in common with any suburban Cheesecake Factory than it does with the monumental austerities of Albert Speer. AND YET WITH EACH passing day, I become more convinced that Marx’s famous slogan is overdue for a revision. First as farce, he should have said, and then as farce again. In reality, the preponderance of Nazi art was schlocky and sentimental, even though its better incarnations could be harsh and severe. In the Party’s early years, a faction headed by soon-to-be Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels defended the avant-garde—but by 1934, Hitler had sided with Goebbels’s rival, the lower-ranking official Alfred Rosenberg, and thereby against modernism. Henceforth, official Nazi policy criminalized the “degenerate” art of the Expressionists and favored realist works in the “blutblo” (Blut und Boden, or blood and soil) tradition. These völkische artifacts idealized German peasants and eschewed experimentalism. The atmosphere they summoned was one of cuckoo clocks and doilies; the art consisted of idyllic landscapes and portraits of ruddy peasants by the likes of Werner Peiner and Arthur Kampf. Unsurprisingly, Nazi leaders decorated their homes in an ostentatiously folksy style, rather like Trump eating McDonald’s in the White House. Far from aestheticizing politics, then, many prominent Nazi officials were quite explicit about their intention to crudely politicize art—and never more so than when it came to the most widely disseminated mass media of the day: film. Goebbels, sounding much like a student in a media studies seminar, liked to insist, in Rentschler’s paraphrase, that “all films were political, most especially those that claimed not to be. “ As it happened, most claimed not to be. Of the 1,094 feature films produced under the auspices of the Reich during its reign of terror, 941 were genre films. Yet by Goebbels’s own admission, even these nominally empty entertainments were suffused with subtle politics. Their task was not to stuff viewers with slogans but to divert and thereby to lull, to provide the stock of tropes and images from which mass desire could be fashioned. In Trump’s America, there is a largely unrecognized analog. The evangelical film industry has quietly functioned as an alternative to Hollywood since the early aughts, churning out the same sort of feel-good and discreetly reactionary fare for close to two long decades. Blockbusters like God’s Not Dead (2014) are virtually unknown outside of Christian nationalist circles, yet the movie grossed over $60 million and has spawned a five-film (and counting) series. MAGA may not have an avant-garde to speak of, and it may have made few incursions into the citadel of the highbrow—but at the movies, the Reich and the republic seem to converge if you squint. IN HIS CLASSIC study of Weimar-era film, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), friend of the Frankfurt school Siegfried Kracauer maintains that “the films of a nation reflect its mentality in a more direct way than other artistic media” because they “address themselves, and appeal, to the anonymous multitude.” Who was the “anonymous multitude” in 20th-century Germany? Both Weimar and Nazi cinema catered to an aspirational middle class that could not reconcile itself to its newfound impoverishment. From 1924 to 1928, the ranks of the white-collar professional class burgeoned, even as working conditions in offices worsened. “With regard to their occupational and economic plight innumerable employees were no better off than the workers,” Kracauer wrote. Yet instead of learning to identify with the proletariat, this employee class persisted in seeing itself in increasingly brittle and archaic terms. Resentful office workers did not muster any solidarity: They doubled down and “endeavored to maintain their old middle-class status.” Successful films of the Weimar era and its totalitarian successor therefore flattered the “pronounced ‘white-collar’ pretensions of the bulk of German employees,” as Kracauer puts it. Films during this period presented the immiserated as one promotion away from redemption and riches. Movies like Die Verrufenen (Slums of Berlin, 1925) evaded “the social problem by giving one particular worker … a lucky break,” thereby framing the new economic order as provisional. Films of the period were full of laborers who married the boss’s daughter and lavatory attendants who received life-changing tips from improbably generous millionaires. The anonymous multitude hooked on evangelical kitsch must have a similar composition, at least if its filmic fantasies are any indication. Ours, too, is a nation of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Even as corporate consolidation continues apace, the evangelical film industry depicts small businesses flourishing in pristine rural communities, as if Amazon and Walmart never existed. Unlike Nazi films, which were made in a centralized industry over which the government exercised a high degree of control, proto-Trumpian evangelical cinema is the work of independent studios and production companies like Angel Studios and Affirm Films. Nonetheless, it is beginning to enjoy some measure of official support: Last year, a documentary produced by the Christian Broadcast Network premiered at the Kennedy Center, and interim President Richard Grenell has ominously promised that the fabled venue will soon offer more programming focused on “faith” and “family.” Already, the milieu of evangelical movies is as insular and tightknit as that of any state propaganda outfit. The studios trade the same small stable of actors back and forth: Kevin Sorbo, who starred as Hercules in the television show of the same name in the late ’90s, specializes in portraying grouchy atheists on the cusp of quavering conversions; Stephen Baldwin, Alec Baldwin’s devout brother, plays folksy heroes’ corporate antagonists; Ashley Bratcher, who has only ever acted in Christian movies, simpers and smiles as innumerable romantic leads. Evangelicals have not only their own actors, but their own Oscars, the Crown Awards, and their own Netflix, Great American Pure Flix. They have their own review sites, like dove.org, which assigns movies numerical “faith” and “integrity” scores and warns pious viewers away from movies that rank above 1 on the “drugs” and “nudity” scales. They also have their own cinematic style—technically competent and flatly pleasant, so full of concessions to convention that the films resemble advertisements or screensavers, with characters perennially dressed in the distressed skinny jeans that were fashionable in 2006. Most importantly, they have their own special spate of narrative archetypes. Rentschler observes that Nazi films are full of “living beings giv[ing] way to abstract patterns,” characters compressed into symbols by the very rigidity of the stories they inhabit. Perhaps the Nazis’ penchant for genre films stemmed from not only an urge to distract but also an affinity for formulas that compressed agency into obedience. Such films were governed by iron laws: A German who emigrates will come to regret it; an upstanding Nazi youth will suffer torment at the hands of communist gangs. Evangelical films are similarly rigid. They, too, adhere devoutly to the tropes the industry has invented for them. Their endings are happy, unless someone dies of cancer, in which case their endings are bittersweet, given that cancer patients are especially assured of a spot in heaven. Their resident antagonists—atheists, journalists, college professors, abortionists, ill-defined corporate tycoons, and, in particular, the ACLU—are either one-dimensionally villainous or secretly yearning for Jesus. The plots on offer are simple and immutable, conforming to one of a handful of schemas. First, there are the debate films, in which evangelicals beat flustered liberal opponents in fiery contests of ideas. In God’s Not Dead (2014), a Christian college student challenges an atheistic philosophy professor (naturally, an initially scornful but ultimately repentant Kevin Sorbo) to a debate about evolution. “I hate God!” the professor erupts when he finds he is losing. The college student senses an opening. He slowly intones, “How can you hate someone who doesn’t exist?” Later entries in the series never quite live up to this burst of rhetorical glory, but each installment features a debate sequence of its own. In the fourth, God’s Not Dead: We the People (2021), homeschooling parents triumph after delivering rousing testimony during a congressional hearing; in the fifth, God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust (2024), a pastor running for office wins a debate against a godless candidate on an openly Christian nationalist platform. A Matter of Faith (2014) reprises the central conceit of the original God’s Not Dead—but this time, the student afloat at a godless liberal college is female, so her father stands in for her during the ensuing smackdown with her malevolent professor. Then there are the marital trouble films, in which husbands act out and wives demurely pray for them, declining to hold them accountable. Sometimes the women stand up for themselves and spend the rest of the film atoning for it. In War Room (2015), one of the highest-grossing Christian films of all time (and one of only a handful of evangelical movies with Black protagonists), a wife is justifiably dissatisfied with her neglectful, philandering husband. “It’s hard to submit to a man like that,” she explains to her friends. But it’s only when she stops nagging and starts praying that her husband comes around. “It’s your job to love him, to respect him, and to pray for the man,” her spiritual mentor scolds. In Redeemed, released a year earlier, a woman quietly watches as her husband prepares to cheat on her, praying all the while that he won’t succumb. Of course, God intervenes in the nick of time, and the movie concludes with a joyous renewal of vows (a trope also seen in the 2008 film Fireproof, among others). All evangelical films have an embattled quality, an embittered sense of their own marginality in the broader culture. But a special subgroup displays such pronounced paranoia that grievance is its primary topic and virtually its only theme. Like Hitler Youth Quex (1933), Storm Trooper Brand (1933), and Hans Westmar (1933)—three popular films about Nazi devotees who are murdered by violent communist rabble—Last Ounce of Courage (2012)and God’s Not Dead 2 (2016) are veritable fantasies of persecution. In the former, an ACLU lawyer—the ultimate enemy, a Black man with a Jewish last name—descends on a lily-white town to harangue the mayor for erecting a Christmas tree on public property; in the latter, a public-school teacher is dragged into court for mentioning Jesus in class. These films can be sorted by their plots, but they could just as easily be sorted by the enemies against whom they define themselves: the liberal universities (God’s Not Dead), feminism (Redeemed, War Room), the nebulous representatives of the elite establishment who make it their business to harass the salt of the earth (Last Ounce of Courage, God’s Not Dead 2). And lurking in the background of all of them—and in the foreground of perhaps the most prominent evangelical subgenre—is the ur-enemy: cosmopolitanism and indeed, modernity itself. The rootless cosmopolitan movie—as typified most popularly in Hallmark made-for-TV fare and as reiterated even more emphatically in innumerable evangelical films—is our own völkische art, the purest instantiation of American blutblo. The plot—there is only one—is simple: A young person (almost always a woman at high risk of degenerating into girlbossery) moves to the city to take a soulless corporate job. Perhaps she has a harried, noncommittal boyfriend who is dragging his feet about proposing; perhaps she is too busy to waste time on love. The woman puts on a brave face as she hurries off to meetings, but sadness eats away at her core. At night, she exits onto a street teeming with jostling crowds. No one recognizes or greets her; the landscape she moves in lacks human scale. Then, something drags her to a small town, usually (though not always) the town of her birth, usually (though not always) at Christmas. She purports to resist; she feigns irritation. But we know—and she knows—that she is secretly pleased. In the country, the light changes. The city was cold and gray, but Main Street is bathed in warm yellow tones. The town where the woman finds herself is picturesque, and it’s obvious that she belongs there. At first, she is horrified by the poor cell phone service and the dearth of conveniences, but in due course she is charmed by the intimacy of community life. Soon enough, she cannot help but notice—generally as she eats pancakes at the local diner—that she is more fulfilled than she ever was at the office. By the end, she has fallen in love with a plainspoken man in plaid, a stalwart who rescues her from the meaningless sheen of careerism by enfolding her in a virtuous marriage. In at least two of these movies, a virile American man demonstrates his folksy authenticity by having no idea how to consume the sushi that his cosmopolitan love interest tries to impose on him. Of course, there are minor variations. In Finding Normal (2013), a big-city doctor is waylaid in a small town because she gets a traffic ticket; in Christian Mingle (2014), a recovering girlboss retreats to a Mexican town where she works as a missionary; in What If (2010) and A Walk with Grace (2019), the urbanite in want of rustication is incongruously male. But in all of them, the essentials are basically the same: A lost soul finds meaning by returning home, a conceit straight out of Luke 15. THE ROOTLESS COSMOPOLITAN MOVIE was anticipated to some extent by the despairing German films of the early 1900s, many of which lamented the rough-and-tumble quality of urban nightlife. In Die Straße (The Street, 1923), a man’s nocturnal misadventures in the city go so terribly awry that he returns, chastened, to his wife, who greets him with a vat of homemade soup and a gesture of forgiveness. In Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morning to Midnight, 1920), a clerk sleeps with a prostitute and ends up moldering in prison. In these films, the danger is the city, and the solution lies in retreating to the bourgeois home. The Nazis expanded on this basic premise. The enemy was no longer just the metropolis, and the respectable wife in the drawing room was no longer an adequate defense. Now the sickness consisted in universalism and urbanity writ large, and the only antidote was fervent devotion to the particular, the local, the homeland. As Germans emigrated in record numbers, a compensatory stock plot emerged: A German leaves his native country in search of the cheap frissons of the interchangeable international metropolis, only to realize that it lacks the idiosyncratic charm of his hometown. In the end, he realizes the error of his ways and returns in tears. In The Prodigal Son (1934), a Tyrolean peasant from a scenic alpine village yields to the pernicious allure of cosmopolitanism and emigrates to New York, where he finds himself destitute and unrecognized. In the end, he returns to the town of his birth and receives a warm welcome from his neighbors. La Habanera (1937) regurgitates this plot, swapping in a female protagonist. A Swedish native impulsively marries a local on a trip to Puerto Rico, where she remains in a state of acute homesickness for years—until, at last, her husband dies, freeing her to make her way back to the country she loves. These films make obligatory reference to the beauty of the fatherland, but they are far more concerned with showcasing the horrors of emigration. Their focus is revealing: The Nazis did not aim to tempt treacherous émigrés back so much as they tried to induce the existing population to stay, both by making it increasingly difficult for German citizens to secure exit permits and by promoting cautionary tales that yanked at their viewers’ heartstrings. You may think you crave the excitement of international travel, they warned, but in fact global adventurism will leave you empty and alienated; only your birthplace can satisfy you. Contemporary rootless cosmopolitan films have the same message and the same structure, but an inverted emphasis: These movies focus less on the terrors of the city than on the consolations of the home. Maybe they hope to coax the record numbers of Americans who fled rural regions between 2010 and 2020 back into the fold, at least in fantasy, perhaps in an effort to sustain the fiction that rural America remains inviolate. If the Nazis were obsessed with the notion of repatriation and took drastic measures to bring ethnic Germans and art that they deemed (often dubiously) “Germanic” back inside the nation’s borders, rootless cosmopolitan movies dream of repatriation within the country, from the ersatz America to the real one. The cities, where people eat sushi, are so international and so interchangeable that they scarcely qualify as “America” at all. Just as Weimar and Nazi films pandered to white-collar workers who refused to confront a new economic reality, evangelical films pander to a rural class that clings to an outmoded notion of small-town affluence—and thereby to a bygone socio-economic order. They present the rural as a refuge from modernity, a realm that economic history has happily bypassed. To escape deindustrialization and suburbanization, one must simply drive beyond the outer boroughs, beyond the billboards and the strip malls, and straight back into the mythic past. Rentschler remarks that Nazi cinema evinced “a romantic anticapitalism fueled by a discontent with contemporary civilization. One turned to an evocative past of simple peasants, open countrysides, and idyllic communities …” The spatial isolation of these locales guaranteed their temporal isolation; they were remote from the city and thereby from the present and the future. Indeed, the intertitle of the first film that Leni Riefenstahl directed, Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932), reads “We, the people of the Dolomites, far from the strife and turmoil of the outside world, dwell primarily in the rugged wilderness and magnificence of the Italian Tyrol.” The movie features almost nothing that dates it; many of the scenes it captures could have occurred at any time, save for the fact that they are recorded on a camera. The towns in evangelical movies are likewise “far from the strife and turmoil of the outside world,” though they don’t declare their atemporality quite so explicitly (dated skinny jeans notwithstanding). They never explain the miracle of their immaculateness; they simply take it for granted. How is it that they are untouched by deindustrialization, unaffected by the opioid epidemic, with nary a fast-food restaurant or a Walmart in sight? They seem to have achieved their purity almost by magic. Thus, the urban landscape, with its anonymous exchanges and its multinational residents, becomes a symbol for the theory of history that these movies reject—one in which impersonal, global forces underlie epochal change. Instead, they propose a personalist account, one in which personal choices can simply arrest time. The promise is that there is still a place untouched by technological, cultural, or socioeconomic change, one where cell phones stop working (Finding Normal) and cars break down (What If), freeing characters from modern life. Evangelical film fetishizes this local and personal domain: There, family businesses do not fail because of corporate consolidation; sons and daughters do not leave because they can only find jobs in the city, or because the towns where they grew up have been decimated, but because they are spiritually misled. Once the wayward offspring returns to her hometown and assumes her rightful place at the family cherry orchard (A Cherry Pie Christmas, 2025) or the family factory (A Walk with Grace, 2019), all is well. In the world of evangelical film, the failure of a small business is no economic matter but a form of almost providential punishment that ensues when a family member breaks rank or, worse, when a woman destined for motherhood and cozy domesticity opts to squander her fertility and ascend the corporate ladder. The hokey simplicity of these movies is cheesy; it is also very funny. Yet even in this farce of a farce, there is a trace of tragedy. For all the corny films idealizing small towns, for all of Trump’s vilification of big cities as cesspools of crime and iniquity, for all of J.D. Vance’s protestations that, in their heart of hearts, women prefer childrearing to corporate employment, for all the desperation for the old prosperity, for all the nostalgia and hope, the truth is still this: The woman on her way home for Christmas turns the corner into her old stomping grounds. She sees the Dollar General and the Walmart that now constitute the place’s downtown, and she turns around and hightails it back to the city.