Robert S. C. Gordon at Public Books:
It was Fascism that set image, stage, and performance at the core of an ideology of the state, that merged culture and politics until one was all but indistinguishable from the other, as Walter Benjamin intuited in his much-cited formulation of Fascism as the aestheticization of politics. And as we look on today at the grim return of totalitarian impulses across the globe, we might reflect on how this has been made possible in part by the latent and unresolved question of the relation of politics to culture (and identity) in the modern state.
Among all its other aggressive structural interventions—its militarization, corporatization, and regimentation of an entire state and society—Fascism also created a cultural behemoth.
more here.