Democracy Needs Art

Where the Attention Wars Can Be Won

Photo by Thomas Schweighofer on Unsplash

Democracy is dying of aesthetic starvation while drowning in algorithmic content. We’ve spent years analyzing the mechanics of democratic collapse—the institutional capture, the epistemic breakdown, the attention fragmentation that makes collective reasoning impossible. But we’ve missed something fundamental that our opponents understand perfectly: democracy doesn’t just need better arguments or stronger institutions. It needs art that can hold human attention long enough for moral recognition to occur.

This isn’t a new insight. Tolkien understood it when he created mythologies that make moral reality aesthetically undeniable—the Ring of Power doesn’t symbolize corruption, it creates an aesthetic experience of how corruption actually feels. Even Jordan Peterson, for all his problems, grasps what most liberal intellectuals don’t: that humans are mythological creatures who require narrative frameworks to organize consciousness. The sophisticated neoreactionaries understand it best of all, which is why they flood the culture with dark enlightenment mythologies, bronze age vitalism, and aesthetic frameworks that make authoritarianism beautiful.

Meanwhile, liberals bring fact-checking to a mythology fight. We critique the stories dominating human consciousness rather than telling better ones. We’ve abandoned the aesthetic battlefield precisely when control of it determines everything else.

The Aesthetic Emergency

Consider what happens when someone with genuine civic intentions tries to understand any complex political issue today. They encounter a fragmented hellscape of hot takes, viral clips, and synthetic outrage—all optimized to trigger immediate emotional response rather than sustained reflection. Traditional democratic communication—policy papers, investigative journalism, rational debate—assumes cognitive capacities that no longer exist at scale.

But this isn’t just information chaos. It’s an aesthetic war where every faction that understands the rules is competing to colonize human imagination. The neoreactionaries craft “dark elf” mythologies and Matrix metaphors. QAnon gamified conspiracy into an aesthetic experience of revelation. The accelerationists create techno-futurist visions that make human obsolescence seem beautiful. Even authoritarians understand that whoever controls aesthetic experience controls consciousness itself.

It’s why Putin doesn’t just jail opposition politicians—he imprisons Pussy Riot for forty seconds of punk protest that created more sustained moral attention than years of political organizing. It’s why Xi Jinping eliminates entire aesthetic categories, banning time travel stories because they suggest history could be different. They understand that art does something arguments cannot: it holds attention naturally while making moral reality undeniable through aesthetic experience.

Why Art Succeeds Where Arguments Fail

A song doesn’t fight for your attention—it rewards it with pleasure. A story doesn’t demand focus—it creates the desire to know what happens next. A mythology doesn’t need to argue for its relevance—it becomes the lens through which reality makes sense.

When Tolkien has Gandalf refuse the Ring, saying “through me it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine,” he’s not making an argument about power—he’s creating an aesthetic experience that makes you feel why even benevolent authoritarianism becomes monstrous. No political treatise could accomplish what that simple scene achieves in terms of sustained moral attention.

This is what the Ancient Greeks understood when they invented democracy alongside theater. Tragedy wasn’t entertainment—it was training in moral complexity, teaching citizens to feel how individual choices create collective consequences. Every successful democratic movement has known this. The civil rights movement didn’t succeed through policy papers but through songs that held attention while transforming consciousness. The labor movement didn’t organize through statistical analyses but through stories that made solidarity more beautiful than isolation.

The Oligarchic Assault on Aesthetic Possibility

Today’s oligarchs have developed a more sophisticated strategy than old-fashioned censorship: they’re drowning authentic art in an ocean of synthetic content that triggers the same neural responses without the moral payload. Why ban the song that makes people feel collective power when you can bury it under ten thousand AI-generated alternatives?

The flood of algorithmic content occupies the aesthetic bandwidth where genuine art would otherwise create sustained moral attention. Every AI companion telling synthetic stories, every playlist of generated music, every feed of viral micro-content serves the same function: providing aesthetic stimulation without the transformative power that makes art dangerous to authoritarian control.

But they can’t create genuine art that transforms consciousness. They can generate content but not meaning. They can simulate styles but not achieve the integration of form and truth that makes art morally powerful. Real art emerges from exactly what algorithmic optimization eliminates: the integration of intelligence with love, individual expression with collective meaning, aesthetic beauty with moral complexity.

The Liberal Abdication

The failure of liberal democracy to compete aesthetically represents a catastrophic strategic blindness. While the right builds mythologies, the left deconstructs them. While authoritarians create aesthetic experiences of meaning, liberals provide critical analyses of why those meanings are “problematic.” While our opponents offer beauty (however twisted), we offer critique.

The liberal response to figures like Peterson has been tellingly inadequate: fact-checking his lobster science while he provides narrative frameworks that organize consciousness for millions. We critique the neoreactionaries’ dark enlightenment mythology instead of creating more compelling counter-mythologies. We’re bringing sociology papers to an aesthetic arms race.

Every faction that understands the game is producing mythology except liberals. The neoreactionaries have their dark enlightenment aesthetic, the traditionalists have Peterson’s maps of meaning, the accelerationists have their techno-futurist visions, the fascists have their bronze age vitalism. Even QAnon understood this, creating participatory mythology that made believers feel like heroes uncovering cosmic truth. Meanwhile, liberals have fact-checking websites and institutional critique, wondering why no one finds our PowerPoints as compelling as their mythologies.

Where the Attention Wars Can Be Won

The attention wars can’t be won through better arguments alone. They’ll be won through aesthetic experiences that make democratic life more beautiful than authoritarian surrender. We need artists who understand they’re engaged in cognitive warfare—not creating propaganda but building the aesthetic infrastructure that makes democratic consciousness possible.

We need songs that make democratic solidarity more emotionally powerful than digital isolation, stories showing what human flourishing looks like beyond oligarchic extraction, images that make moral reality visible through beauty rather than argument. We need mythologies as compelling as the ones currently colonizing human imagination, but grounded in democratic rather than authoritarian values.

The oligarchs have money, technology, and power. But they can’t create the genuine human culture that emerges when conscious beings use beauty to communicate truth. Every authentic song is a victory in the attention wars. Every genuine story is a rescue operation for consciousness. Every real artistic experience is resistance against the systematic fragmentation of moral attention.

The Revolution of Recognition

The revolution isn’t recognizing that stories matter—everyone serious already knows that. Tolkien knew it, Peterson knows it, the neoreactionaries know it, the authoritarians know it. The revolution is liberals finally abandoning our aesthetic incompetence and actually competing in the war for human imagination.

This means telling better stories, creating more compelling myths, making democratic life more aesthetically powerful than its alternatives. Not through propaganda or manipulation, but through genuine art that holds attention long enough for democratic values to become not just understood but felt, not just accepted but loved.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And if we don’t start creating aesthetic experiences that compete with the mythologies currently colonizing human consciousness, we’ll lose not through being wrong but through being boring.

The center holds when holding it becomes beautiful. The wire stays steady when walking becomes dancing. The circus needs better performances, not better reviews of the performances currently dominating the tent.

Democracy needs art. Not tomorrow. Not eventually. Now, while there’s still attention left to win and consciousness left to transform. The aesthetic war is already being fought. The only question is whether we’ll finally join it.