In the MAGA
aesthetic, cruelty appears in multiple registers, most
visibly in the “Mar-a-Lago face”: plastic
smiles, exaggerated cosmetic enhancement, and beauty-pageant
nostalgia staged against prisons, detention centers,
and armed authority.
The doctrine
from which the concentration camps were born was very
simple, and for that very reason very dangerous: every
foreigner is an enemy, and every enemy must be eliminated;
and a foreigner is anyone who is perceived as different,
because of their language, religion, appearance, customs,
and ideas.
Cruelty
has always been a political weapon, but in the current
historical moment it has acquired a distinctive aesthetic
form. By MAGA aesthetics, I mean a visual and affective
regime in which domination is staged as spectacle,
violence is rendered stylish, and exclusion is
performed as common sense. It is an aesthetic that does
not persuade through argument or policy. It educates
through images, bodies, gestures, and scenes of humiliation,
training people to feel obedience before they are asked
to think critically at all.
This aesthetic
did not emerge from nowhere. The aesthetics of cruelty
haunt the darkest chapters of modern history, from the
genocidal destruction of Indigenous peoples in North
America and the enslavement of Africans, to the industrialized
torture and extermination carried out by Nazi Germany.
In each case, cruelty was not only enacted; it was ritualized,
justified, and made culturally legible. Violence became
thinkable because it was made visible in ways that erased
the humanity of targeted groups.
What is
chilling today is how close this logic has moved to
home. The march of neo-Nazi groups through Gore Park
and downtown Hamilton was not an isolated eruption of
extremism. It was a public performance of hate, a rehearsal
staged in civic space, designed to intimidate, provoke,
and normalize a white nationalist presence. Such spectacles
belong to a broader transnational culture in which cruelty
is increasingly displayed rather than hidden, and in
which reactionary movements borrow freely from U.S.
authoritarian aesthetics.
These displays
are not disconnected from the legalized terror inflicted
elsewhere. In the United States, immigration enforcement
agencies such as ICE routinely stage violence against
immigrants and people of color as bureaucratic necessity,
transforming raids, detentions, and deportations into
media-friendly spectacles. Cruelty here is administrative,
racialized, and increasingly theatrical. What travels
north is not ideology alone but style: the normalization
of intimidation, the glorification of force, and the
conversion of suffering into political theater. Yet
something more is at work than the acceleration of state
violence. There is a visible pleasure in cruelty, an
enjoyment taken in the suffering of designated enemies,
coupled with an ugly aesthetic that turns domination
into entertainment. Violence is not only justified;
it is consumed.
In the MAGA
aesthetic, cruelty appears in multiple registers, most
visibly in the “Mar-a-Lago face”: plastic
smiles, exaggerated cosmetic enhancement, and beauty-pageant
nostalgia staged against prisons, detention centers,
and armed authority. Taken as a whole it signals a politics
that treats the body as a surface to be engineered,
disciplined, and branded, a mask of dominance and emotional
vacancy masquerading as strength.
Among MAGA
men, a fever dream of authoritarian masculinity proliferates
across TikTok, YouTube, X, and other platforms. They
stage themselves as strongmen-in-training: squared jaws
clenched in hostility, hyper-muscular bodies forged
in gym rituals that double as moral theater, and rigid,
armored postures where repression hardens into aggression
and vulnerability is converted into cruelty. Digital
culture intensifies this pedagogy, turning aggression
into identity and domination into performance. These
are not harmless displays but embodied lessons, teaching
that power resides in hardness, compassion is weakness,
and democracy itself is a feminized liability.
Canada is
not immune to these lessons. When neo-Nazi symbols appear
in our parks, bodies draped in white sheets and faces
concealed, echoing the Ku Klux Klan and the ICE shock
troops occupying U.S. cities, the MAGA aesthetic is
no longer imported but enacted. When migrants are cast
as threats rather than neighbors, and cruelty is excused
as realism or security, the aesthetic logic of MAGA
politics has already crossed the border. The danger
lies not only in borrowed slogans or flags, but in the
slow acclimation to spectacle, fear, and exclusion as
ordinary features of public life.
Fascism
has always understood that culture is its first battlefield.
Long before rights are revoked or institutions dismantled,
people are trained to desire authority, admire domination,
and mistake cruelty for strength. Aesthetics functions
here as pedagogy, shaping affect, memory, and consent.
To confront
the cruelty of MAGA aesthetics in Canada is therefore
not a matter of taste or decorum. It is a democratic
necessity. Making these aesthetics visible disrupts
their power, exposing how violence is staged, how hatred
is normalized, and how fear is cultivated. Culture can
educate for cruelty, but it can also educate for resistance.
The choice is neither abstract nor distant. It is already
being rehearsed in our streets.
