What is the relationship between politics and aesthetics? Sartwell has an unexpected answer:
"Not all art is political, but all politics is aesthetic; at their heart political ideologies, systems, and constitutions are aesthetic systems, multimedia artistic environments. The political “content” of an ideology can be understood in large measure actually to be—to be identical with—its formal and stylistic aspects. It’s not that a political ideology or movement gets tricked out in a manipulative set of symbols or design tropes; it’s that an ideology is an aesthetic system, and this is what moves or fails to move people, attracts their loyalty or repugnance, moves them to act or to apathy".
A text published in 2014, but still very useful today to understand socio-political dynamics and especially the rejection of ideas that contradict our beliefs:
"How politics makes us stupid" by Ezra Klein
"Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: "As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: "What we believe about the facts," he writes, "tells us who we are." And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are, and our relationships with the people we trust and love".