Every new government has, you could say, not only a set of policies but a vibe. It has a brand: a set of cultural and artistic or design signifiers that come to stand for the era whose zeitgeist the administration is surfing.
The Thatcher era in its pomp had its shoulder-pads, its magnums of Bollinger, its City-boy striped lapels. Harold Wilson’s photocall with the Beatles came to define the Sixties turn into modernity.
And with the expansion of the mass media, these branding exercises have become less retrospective and accidental. Politics being more and more a branch of the marketing industry (they don’t call it ‘retail politics’ for nothing), these cultural signifiers are ever more conscious in their associations.
The Blair government’s great success in the late Nineties was its association with Britpop – a metonym for the hopefulness of its ‘new dawn’ being something like an electric guitar painted with the Union flag.
The meme regime
So what’s the cultural vibe for the incoming Trump/Musk administration in the US? Well, that’s an odd one. Musk, rather than Trump, is the virtuoso of mass communication; indeed, he owns and wholly controls the platform on which much of that mass communication is taking place.
And you don’t need to look, as you once did, at the photographs on the front pages of newspapers or even at pop videos. You need to look at memes.
Musk, whatever his other virtues and shortcomings, knows memes. In some ways, I find it useful to think of him – with his sniggering references to 420 and 69, his adolescent cool (X) or jokey (The Boring Company) names for his corporations, his general prankishness – as an unreformed 4Chan shitposter who just happens to be the richest and most influential man in the world.
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Musk has been meming the hell out of the new administration ahead of its launch. But the messages are intriguingly mixed. On the one hand, there’s the ancient Roman stuff.
Many have seen the images posted on X of AI-generated, slimmer-and-handsomer-than-real-life Elon giving his man-of-destiny gaze into the middle distance dressed as a Roman centurion. Beside him, the logo reads: ‘SPQR: Senatus Populusque Romanus.’
This has a long American history. The founding fathers took their cues very explicitly from the Roman republic and in their correspondence gave themselves Latin pen names.
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It’s not an accident that Washington DC is positively thick with classical columns. In our own age, those classical associations are more tainted by their association with Italian and German fascism – the fasces being a Roman symbol. SPQR has been adopted by white supremacist groups.
The principle of charity asks us to see Mr Musk as seeking to reclaim the slogan rather than endorse the neo-Nazi version of it. (‘Deus Vult’, incidentally, the biceps tattoo of Donald Trump’s go-ahead pick for secretary of defence Pete Hegseth, is not a classical tag but a medieval Latin one associated with the Crusades.)
But with similar levels of enthusiasm, he’s also posting – as you might expect from a man whose ambition is to take our species to Mars – huge numbers of images directed not at the ancient past but the far future. Here are any number of images of AI Elon – again, square-jawed and handsome – in a spacesuit somewhere in low earth orbit, sun blazing on his visor, giving that man-of-destiny gaze towards an interplanetary future.
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This is even before we get onto the soupy images of Trump having a cuddle with Jesus, or of the Shiba Inu dog from the memecoin (Dogecoin) which now gives its name to the Department of Government Efficiency.
The mixed message of mythic past and imagined future seems a symptom of the age. We live, thanks to the digital world, in a flat, postmodern culture where visual styles mix and fuse, our playlists are decade-agnostic and streamed entertainment offers us everything from every era in an all-you-can-eat buffet.
And here it is as the endpoint of political image-making. Ancient Rome and outer space lose their historical specificity – bound, stylistically, by the unmistakable invariant sheen of AI art. The word that covers it, I think, would be ‘kitsch’.
This feature first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 94. Click here to subscribe
