Yes, but what's his china policy?

Tuesday, cigarette #2

I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china. Oscar Wilde

Ross Douthat has put up a temperate post calling aesthetic politics "ultimately pernicious."

I know that quoting Homer and Burke in one day is so undergraduate, but sometimes I just can't help myself:

Other revolutions have been conducted by persons who, whilst they attempted or affected changes in the commonwealth, sanctified their ambition by advancing the dignity of the people whose peace they troubled. They had long views. They aimed at the rule, not at the destruction, of their country. They were men of great civil and great military talents, and if the terror, the ornament of their age... These disturbers were not so much like men usurping power as asserting their natural place in society. Their rising was to illuminate and beautify the world. Their conquest over their competitors was by outshining them. The hand that, like a destroying angel, smote the country communicated to it the force and energy under which it suffered. I do not say (God forbid), I do not say that the virtues of such men were to be taken as a balance to their crimes; but they were some corrective to their effects...

In other words, "Cromwell: Evil goals, but what a stylish bad-ass!" Heroism (authentic and not-so-authentic) offers something to look up to — an aesthetic phenomenon with moral consequences. Politics-as-aesthetics isn't just for fops anymore...