Why The Left Hates Beauty

A War Against Distinction

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[AUDIO] Why the Left Hates Beauty

A common current feature of “discourse” on X (Twitter) is for various interested parties to claim that the old categories of right and left are dead and that some new understanding of politics is needed.¹ Invariably, the point is a tiresome one made because the interested party making it wants the reader to pay attention to their niche, generally buffoonish, project.

The thing is, while “conservatism” is a largely dead ideology for the reasons explained by the Presbyterian theologian and Chief of Staff to Gen. Stonewall Jackson, Robert Lewis Dabney², neither right nor left are dead. The right has long been in retreat, and leftism is very much ascendant, but both are still alive and are useful lenses through which one can view the world.

That is because the left-right distinction is not about progressivism, tax rates, or environmental regulations. It is not about school choice or gun control, tariffs or socialized healthcare. It is, rather, about hierarchy and equality.

For what was the original left, after all? It was the side of “liberté, égalité, fraternité” (which, entertainingly enough, remains the national motto of Haiti). It is the side of demolishing all that used to exist—particularly hierarchy, tradition, and social order—in the name of unremitting social war against those who dare excel and stand above their fellows. As Pope Pius XII described this trend in the context of democracy, “Equality degenerates to a mechanical leveling, a colorless uniformity; the sense of true honor, of personal activity, of respect for tradition and dignity—in a word all that gives life its worth—gradually fades away and disappears.”³

Such an attitude has not died. Birthed as an ideology in the bloody streets of Revolutionary France, the demon named égalité has been present for all the nasty victories of equality over natural hierarchy. It laughed as the Parliament Bill wrecked Britain, cackled with glee as atheistic Bolshevism triumphed in the land of the Orthodox Tsars, and rubbed its hands with delight as the Civil Rights Act inflicted crime after crime upon the American people. Mugabe grasped the scaly hand of égalité as he destroyed—with the help of the Americans, British, and Communist Chinese—the flourishing outpost of civilization that was Rhodesia, and it is égalité that sits with a grin in the dank and dark corners of South Africa as Afrikaner civilization is gleefully tossed into the cannibal’s pot.

That is not to say the left never changes: Leninism has transformed into Bioleninism,⁴ after all, and has gotten all the nastier in the process.

Such is the spirit we now see on display regularly: the left still exists, it is nastier in spirit than ever, and it absolutely despises any showing of beauty.

Hence why a scantily clad, obese woman feels the need to have herself photographed while directing a vulgar gesture at a billboard of Sydney Sweeney…a display of beauty reminds égalité of its shortcomings, and so it feels the need to deride the beautiful for the crime of existing rather than destroying itself in the name of equality.

This has been seen before.

When the Bolsheviks won the Russian Revolution, they not only murdered the Romanov family but tortured the former Guards officers to death by peeling off the skin of their hands, using that agonizing form of torture to mock the distinguished white gloves they were once famous for wearing. The Bolsheviks also tried to genocide an entire breed of dogs, the Borzoi, because that breed was associated with the aristocracy. Spiritual beauty was attacked as well: nuns were raped and murdered en masse, churches were first turned into brothels and then destroyed, and the sanctity of marriage was destroyed by no-fault divorce laws.

Similarly, when the socialists took over Britain during and after the Second World War, they declared war upon what remained of the old, landed society’s beautiful country houses: most were appropriated during the war, and destroyed by troops who were given free rein to destroy them, with the government refusing to pay for repairs.⁵ Those that survived such ordeals then faced not only immense taxation, but outright confiscation and expropriation without compensation. Some were simply stolen by village councils in the name of the people. Others were wrecked as the assets around them were stolen. For example, the great Wentworth Woodhouse, owned by the locally beloved Fitzwilliam family,⁶ had its foundation and surrounding landscape destroyed as the government confiscated the coal lands around it and strip mined them out of spite, extracting valueless coal (over the objections of the miners) just to destroy the family’s beloved house and park.⁷ The government refused to pay for repairs.

And, of course, there is the total uglification of public art and architecture: newly made statues, art, and public buildings are created ugly, and even those beautiful remnants of the past that still exist often have horrifyingly ugly appendages added to them like cancerous outgrowths stemming from infection via a cosmic horror.

Meanwhile, of course, any attempt at restoring public beauty—whether Trump requiring the government to build beautiful buildings rather than modernist and brutalist horrors⁸ or Hungary gradually suppressing subversive “art”⁹—leads to leftist perturbation and cries of “fascism”.

Why? Why does the left hate beauty?