Politics Transforms into Aesthetic Categories

Helena Likus ’26 

Contributing Writer

I need to start this piece by saying that I am yet to hear any Trinity student discuss the upcoming elections. To make sure that this is not just my experience, I asked multiple people about it, and unfortunately the answers were uniform: Trinity students don’t talk about elections. One would think that people who are the citizens of “the greatest nation in the world” would have more to say, but I guess I’m wrong. It is surprising since so many of them were so eager to express their negative opinions about protests happening on campus, yet not a single time have I heard people talking about such a significant political event in their own country. 

That’s because they have nothing to say. Most of them appear to be completely disinterested with the state of politics. But I don’t want to talk about cynicism here. Don’t get me wrong, I often also feel this existential dread of everything being futile. I just think we need to acknowledge that being cynical and defeated doesn’t make us smarter. 

That being said, there is something else that baffles me when it comes to political discourse in the U.S, and maybe it is particularly evident to me as I am not from the U.S. Some time ago it occurred to me that discussing presidential candidates can be reduced to talk about symbols and imagery. Politics appear to no longer be about issues, policies, solutions but instead about an aesthetic category one subscribes to. The same way people rarely talk about art anymore, they rarely talk about politics, unless it comes to reposting a “Kamala is brat” meme.  

And that itself, along with the “Make America Great Again” merch, reveals that our understanding of politics has been reduced to mere images. 

Whenever I ask people I know about the presidential candidates, and adults are particularly guilty of that, they have nothing positive to say about the candidate they will vote for, instead they immediately start painting a negative picture of the opposing candidate. The word “picture” is a key here. They never talk about policies but instead about the apocalyptic scenes that will occur if this candidate will be elected. 

Politics were always a question of representation, but I think nowadays when we talk about politics we talk about representation of an image of what one believes in, instead of representing the person itself. It’s no longer about giving voice to the people; it’s about talking about virtues and turning those virtues into aesthetic categories. People appear to choose who they vote for based on what the other candidate represents, what images of future (or rather of doom) do they bring. And since politics no longer give voice to the people, just images, it’s hard to have a conversation about anything political. 

This became very evident during the presidential debate. The question of voting and policies was reduced to catastrophic images. Trump created an image of babies being executed, while Harris painted a picture of a woman having a miscarriage, bleeding out in the car in the parking lot of an emergency room, because she was denied medical care. One of those images is more valid than the other, and as a person that comes from a country in which abortion is fully illegal, I need to say that tragedies, like the one described by Harris, are happening on a daily basis. However, despite the realness of it, it remains an example of how both parties reduce politics to images. 

This use of images is, however, much more problematic than it originally appears, and that’s because it is framed as a question of morality. Most of the imagery is there to dehumanize and to ascribe moral perversion to the other. It is not about being factual, but about popularizing the scenes that would suggest everyone who isn’t like us and doesn’t share our point of view is morally inferior. Just like people who are pro-choice execute children and like immigrants eat pets. Political discourse is driven by images not facts. 

Another aesthetic dimension of politics is the abuse of religious imagery. The symbols of salvation and damnation often appear in the narratives of presidential candidates, and it makes people subscribe to those images like they are a prophecy – an absolute truth. Politics becomes a matter of beliefs and as we know, beliefs are much harder to debate. This has a dangerous consequence; one no longer needs to have any idea about politics to have a strong opinion. In fact, everyone is allowed to not have their ideas challenged because it’s the matter of beliefs. 

Aesthetics enable a particular political reality, and we need to be wary of it.