A really remarkable piece on the popularity of some of the imagery being adopted by progressives in the West and what it speaks to.
A striking feature of ideologies and political worldviews is the subterranean visual elements which form the background to the surface ideas. Often these are nostalgic, primeval and mythological. Roman conservatives regularly drew on the rough, harsh farming existence of their ancestors to buttress their ideals of ascetic virtue. Anarcho-primitivists drink from the waters of an idyllic hunter-gatherer life, full of leisure, community, singing and hunting. High Tories are often found with oil paintings of rustic Old England, and Nazis meshed together visions of dense woodland and salt-of-the-earth peasants resisting the corruption of Jewish colonised cities. These, and more alike, share the ingredients of a Golden Age nostalgia, something which has been with us as long as our stories have been recorded. The Greek city states, forged from the bronze age collapse, looked back to an era of heroes and monsters in their epic poetry. A sense of loss accompanies such…
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