“While art has long maintained a symbiotic relationship with bourgeois state power, there’s still something deeply unsettling about our supposedly ‘radical’ artists manufacturing consent on behalf of one of our two entrenched capitalist parties,” wrote artist and self-described “culturally agnostic Marxist” Adam Lehrer in Caesura last month. By way of example, he cites an image circulated by visual artist Marilyn Minter in advance of this month’s US election, labeled, “How are you voting in 2020?” with the two choices labeled “Democrat” and “Fascist.” Lehrer argues that “Trump isn’t a fascist. He’s a symbol of the transformation of American empire and global capitalism.” And so “what Minter is doing is fusing conceptualist aesthetics with neoliberal politics and talking points. In doing so, she’s not just propagandizing on behalf of one faction of the elite, but also neutralizing art of its critical role.”

More broadly, Lehrer argues,

The cultural hegemony has shifted in the last 30 years as artists, intellectually trapped in the banal culture wars of the ‘90s and attracted to the intersectional aesthetics of [a] liberal elite (the [Democratic Party] and its backers in the surveillance state, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street), [that] willfully overlook[s] or latently support[s] the neoliberal and imperial politics of the elite. This is rank conformism. Artists, often precarious actors in a competitive marketplace, regurgitate these ‘left’ liberal reductive narratives simply because there is reward in doing so, or because they have unconsciously capitulated to social pressure, leading to a domino effect. As a result, the role of the artist has been reduced to that of the propagandist. This phenomenon is vampirically exsanguinating creativity itself: the freedom to challenge the orthodoxies of our culture, politics, and society.

Lehrer’s choice of words—“bourgeois state power,” “manufacturing consent,” “imperial politics of the elite”—marks him very much as a man of the Left (or what used to be the Left, at any rate). And his overarching thesis, that Democrats and Republicans are simply different factions of the same elitist “neoliberals,” is well in keeping with the revolutionary Marxist claim that mainstream electoral politics is a performative fraud that exists to perpetuate the status quo. But even those who find themselves put off by Lehrer’s radical political postures (a group that I’m guessing includes many Quillette readers) might want to give his essay a read, as it illustrates the extent to which progressive doctrines of social justice not only grate against classical liberalism, but also against the hallowed dogmas of socialism.