The Conservative Aesthetic

Theodore Roosevelt often gets reduced to a caricature. Not all scholars heed Walt Whitman’s adage that we contain multitudes, and Stephen Mexal falls into this trap. The Conservative Aesthetic explores the ways in which Roosevelt and contemporaries like Owen Wister and Frederic Remington conceived of the American West and laid the foundation for modern conservative political thought. In pursuit of the aesthetic, he ignores nuance, divorcing these men from their complexities and contradictions. Worse, he draws a historical line from Roosevelt’s Rough Riders to Ronald Reagan in a cowboy hat. The idea of individualism, for example, emerges as a core component of the conservative aesthetic. Mexal calls Roosevelt’s “cold-eyed individualism” an ideology that sifted the weak from the strong and contributed to a view of society in which the distinctly stouter men would rule the weedier ones (p. 263). Accordingly, Roosevelt created a “vision of conservatism that could fulfill the old Jeffersonian dream” (p. 3).

American literature · Art · Art history · Conservatism · Culture of the United States · Dream · Ideology · Individualism · Jeffersonian democracy · Literature · New Deal · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Vision · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · American History and Culture · Anthropology · History · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Psychology