Short Sleeves, Ties, and the Soul of American Greatness

From Apollo’s glory to Retro Americana’s retreat, how the Right lost touch with the aerospace soul of a confident nation

This is a guest post by Dr. Benjamin Mabry.

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Aaron Renn’s recent article in Compact entitled “The Cultural Contradictions of Conservatism” points at a major aesthetic fissure in the broader Right between several factions of potential-elites and the Republican base in America. It is a topic that he’s also discussed in the past on his own Substack. These articles illustrate the way that the attitudes, preferences, and lifestyles of the Republican Party base are fundamentally disconnected from those of the various groups who claim to speak for the “Right” as a whole, from Establishment Conservatives to the New Right.

The Four American Conservative Aesthetic Styles

Meanwhile on X, @realmikeglynn posted this tweet in response to a fashion comment. “No. The short sleeved shirt and tie put a man on the moon and is found in most every airliner cockpit. America is an aerospace republic – and here we respect the short sleeve shirt and tie.”

This post made me think about Renn’s four categories and realize that there’s something of a gap in his account of cultures. Where are the astronauts? I don’t mean the science-fiction depictions of sparkling rockets, but the gritty 20^th Century test pilots and Air Force officers. In which aesthetic vision can you find John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin? Into which category do you put Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff? What kind of elite aesthetic is represented by Vannevar Bush or General Hoyt Vandenberg? Retro Americana doesn’t seem to possess continuity with the America of the Arms and Space Races, yet Techno-Futurism doesn’t acknowledge the continuity it does have with America’s aerospace past. Something has happened in modern American culture that prematurely severed a line of imagery and aspiration defined by these kinds of ideals.

I’ll admit to growing up in a cultural backwater. Despite being 3 years old when the Challenger exploded, killing America’s romantic attachment to space travel, I grew up with astronauts for heroes, dreaming of growing up to get an engineering degree and work for NASA. My childhood heroes, when they weren’t wearing Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo spacesuits, wore the short-sleeved shirt and tie that Mike Glynn refers to in his post. Despite having two parents with Masters degrees, a grandparent with a Ph.D., and a great-grandparent with a Div.D., I grew up in a family and community where the Industrial aesthetic of the mid-20^th Century lived on. I still have [parts of] the original LEGO Space Shuttle set from the late 1980’s. When the USAF unveiled the F-117 in the early 1990s, my father bought me a model of the newly unclassified stealth fighter. Most importantly to me, my father was one of those GS pay scale men in a short-sleeved shirt and tie who built and maintained the great works of a nation built out of concrete, steel, gears, pipes, and pumps. The people today who praise and revere Ronald Reagan in the pages of elite Conservative magazines fail to remember that Reagan was the president of the Strategic Defense Initiative, Ohio-Class Nuclear submarines, and the heyday of Tom Clancy novels. If I didn’t grow up to work for NASA, I remember telling myself, being Jack Ryan would be a good second choice.

However, the rest of the country was moving on. Beginning with the Challenger disaster, compounded by the blossoming deficits caused by an out-of-control welfare state, the descent of major American cities into drug-and-crime fueled suicide, and then cementing itself with the end of the Cold War and 1990’s culture of consumerism, the Aerospace Republic aesthetic began to fade. There were brief moments of revival during the First Gulf War, when Patriot missiles and Stealth fighters caught the imaginations of American youth, but by the time that George W. Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration, later known for the Orion rocket, there was little to no public interest. The malfeasance of the Bush Administration turned the U.S. military from heroes on the cutting edge of the defense of the Free World into, at best, dupes being used to make unprecedented profits for multinational corporations and spread far left propaganda throughout the Third World.

By the 2010’s, Obama’s NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, giving an unpublished speech to the UAW workers at NASA’s Michoud Space Center, commented that he was ashamed of his work as an astronaut because of how wasteful the Space Shuttle program was. That money could have been put to better use relieving poverty or fighting global climate change, he argued, which is why NASA’s new mission was moving away from manned spaceflight and towards atmospheric and climate research. John Glenn might have been a Democrat in the 80’s, but he was certainly not the Charles Bolden type of Democrat. The Left has just as much severed themselves from this tradition as the Right, to the point that astronauts like Glenn and Aldrin, indeed spaceflight itself, are associated with right-wing politics. For some inexplicable reason, however, none of the major right-wing factions embraces this rich field of cultural symbols, with the exception, perhaps, of MAGA.

Renn’s discussion of the Four Conservative Aesthetics in America emphasizes the gap between the present-day elite aesthetic visions and the MAGA aesthetic. That gap results from the premature death of a preceding culture in which rockets, jets, high-tech military vehicles, space ships, and the men who made these things possible were considered high-status. In America’s Cold War culture, horsepower was not gauche, big was indeed better, and the National Review could boast about the latest in American military technology being deployed in Kosovo just a couple of pages before their latest poetry reviews. The MAGA culture of guns, boats, trucks, horsepower, and muscle retains some continuity with the Cold War America of the recent past. It certainly commoditizes these things far more than we did in the 20^th Century, and disconnects them from the key themes of national mission, greatness, and the beckoning horizon of the frontier. However, a Ford F-150 or Ram Heavy Duty flying over a rock escarpment while a screaming bald eagle fires an AR-15 possesses one thing in common with the Cold War Aesthetic that the Retro America aesthetic cannot claim, despite its explicit claim to represent the “old” America: MAGA aesthetics preserve the cultural confidence of 20^th Century America.

What Renn calls Retro Americana is the aesthetics of a culture in defeat. From the Challenger explosion, to the intractability of our decadent welfare state, to the key cultural defeats of the Iraq War and Great Awokening, Retro Americana is a retreat into the past because it has accepted these defeats as fundamental to America’s character.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s parody, Team America: World Police, portrays the Cold War culture of America as fundamentally absurd, highlighting the abominable Bush administration’s abuse of American patriotism after 9/11. Rather than acknowledge that the disaster of the Iraq conflict was the fault of a particular set of men, from Bush to Rumsfeld, and from Boot to Frum, they put the blame on American culture itself, distancing themselves from the symbols and signifiers of a nation in its ascent. The cultural and aesthetic similarities of the elite right and left are not accidental but a result of intelligent and sensible people looking at the disaster of the Bush Administration and giving in to despair.

Renn is correct to see a deep, underlying problem in Retro Americana aesthetics. Between the collapse of America’s cities in the 1970’s and the crisis of identity that began with the Fall of the Soviet Union, many American right-wing elites have essentially given up on America’s future and retreated into a fabricated vision of the past. The right-wing elites’ retreat to small-town America isn’t Mayberry nostalgia, which is a phenomenon of the lower-middle-class’s regret at the loss of high-functioning, high-trust working class communities. Counter-elites wouldn’t be caught dead in a town like Mayberry where the most important question is where your great-grandpappy was buried and where highly mobile educated workers are politely yet firmly shunned. Retro Americana aesthetics on the New Right are a compensation for the fact that they’ve lost the traditional home of America’s right-wing elite: the regional urban hub. Retro Americana is the aesthetic of a people in exile, singing by the banks of the Euphrates about the temples of their fathers. When our cities imploded, those with wealth fled to the blue enclaves which could price out social dysfunction, while the rest of Red America transitioned to what we recognize today as the exurban model.

On the other side, the harbingers of Techno-Futurism are explicitly globalist in orientation, rejecting the links between their present projects and the nationalist heritage of the Space Race and the Cold War. The fact of the matter is that SpaceX could not have succeeded in any other nation of the world, specifically due to America’s aerospace culture, and yet SpaceX portrays itself as a trans-national entity, striving towards trans-planetary status.

Whereas Renn focuses on the atheistic and materialist elements of techno-futurist aesthetics, its distinct West Coast brand of post-nationalism is an explicit flight from its dependency on the American national project and the vast hinterland that provides the material needs of the West Coast. Mars and the Asteroid Belt are, for now, psychological projections of resentment at the technocrats’ reliance on steel, power, water, food, manpower, and security from the Heartland, manifesting out of a stymied desire to discard the political obligations that emerge out of that dependency. We already see the European Union licking its chops at the hope of draining the life-blood out of America’s tech industry, but they aren’t being restrained by clever AI algorithms or successful rocket experiments. Those Barbary Pirates of the cyber waves are only restrained by the same type of men who dealt with the first group of lawless thieves who felt entitled to prey on the international lanes of commerce. Of the four aesthetic cultures identified by Renn, Techno-Futurism is the most fragile, shunning its natural ally in American Nationalism and aesthetically catering to the globalists who would destroy its project out of spite, ideological resentment, and greed.

Working class people are not against farm-fresh food or artisanal products. Renn’s remarks on that topic might betray a lack of familiarity with rural life; In Middlesboro, Kentucky and Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, we have plenty of farmers markets, kitschy used clothes stores, local butchers, and weekend street fairs, despite being two of the poorest counties in America. There’s also nothing inherently incompatible between elite right-wing culture, industrial society, and rural life. However much they deny it, few elite right-wing men that I’ve met can deny the power of a V-8 all-American muscle car or the allure of owning 25 acres of pristine hardwood bottomland with a convenient boat launch and plentiful whitetail. The differences in consumption patterns may not be altogether due to preferences but also to environment. It’s easier to be a motor junkie in the exurbs, just like it’s easier to sustain kitschy businesses in a denser town. The elite men of Cold War America show us examples of men who were conservative, fashionable, educated, and enamored with the symbols and goods of industrial modernity. They could aspire to great feats of human technological achievement yet were not ashamed of their nation, nor aspired to escape it. Only a great nation can build the wonders that techno-utopians dream about, and only the greatness of a future-oriented mission can consummate the nationalism of Retro-Americana.

What can we take away from this? Aesthetics are intertwined deeply with lifestyle, and any convergence on the Right toward a single mode of cultural expression will involve a willingness to shift away from the lifestyles to which these groups have become accustomed. So long as they are convinced of their own defeat, retro-Conservative elites will not stray out from their Blue America enclaves. So long as techno-Cons continue to ignore the fragility of their existence and the political razors-edge they walk, they will feel no need to build deeper roots in the American project. So long as higher-density communities are trapped in the liveable yet unaffordable or affordable yet unliveable dichotomy, the bulk of Red Americans will continue to prefer exurban life. The absolute refusal of our political elites to let people protect themselves from the 1-2% of the people who make life impossible for everyone else will perpetuate our system where either money, the police state, or distance are necessary to preserve a decent life for decent people.

To borrow from Charles Murray, neither Belmont nor Fishtown are healthy places to live and neither will generate a humane culture. Restoring a truly American community for American people, elite and popular, must come first before we can generate a unified American culture and aesthetic.

Bridging this gap, however, is going to require effort by those who have the resources and agency to do the work. Right-wing politics needs to re-center on the core mission of civilization: providing a decent life to decent Americans, and bringing down the hammer on the monsters in our midst who deny others the right to live peaceably and honorably, be they violent criminals or parasitical globalist corporations. Working-class Americans can’t learn to appreciate the goods of small-town life, goods in which their ancestors all partook, if working class towns are cesspits of drugs, crime, and failing public services. They’re not going to move to communities filled by foreigners who refuse to abide by the basic norms and decencies of our society. Likewise, intellectuals and elites who sneer down their nose at the very symbols which defined America during the Cold War need to get over themselves, place the crisis of the 21^st Century into its proper context, and stop posing at sophistication in order to “pwn the poors.”

I get it, I’m naturally at home in these circles. I’m a college professor. My ideal birthday present is a book; I bought three by Tom Wolfe, Robert Nisbet, and Lee Kuan Yew last week. I have copies of neoclassical paintings by Jacques-Louis David and Juan Ribera y Fernandez in my house. I bring a non-English language Bible to church on Sunday. Nonetheless, America is an aerospace society. We’re a technological society. We’re a modern society. Rockets, muscle cars, Starships, stealth bombers, and fricken bald eagles shooting AR-15’s out the window of a Dodge are as American as apple pie. Those who aspire to elite status are doomed to fail if they cannot come to terms with the reality that our national identity and our aerospace frontier are inseparable. America rests on the shoulders of a great colossus, and that colossus wears a short-sleeved shirt with a tie. If you’ve got a problem with that, as 20^th Century right-wing aesthetes of defeat Albert Jay Nock and Allen Tate did, Europe is that-a-way.