“#DaddyWillSaveUs,” a pro-Donald Trump exhibit billed as “the first conservative art show” in America, was like a parody of bad art. PHOTOGRAPH BY KIMBERLY FLORES GUZMÁN

In the fall of 2008, as the election of Barack Obama started to seem inevitable, many Republicans began wondering about their party’s future. Obama had won in part by harnessing the enthusiasm of young people. How would the right respond? How could conservatism be made into something swaggering and cool?

One answer was the Hip-Hop Republicans, a group of young, stylish African-Americans who loved both rap music and conservative values. The Hip-Hop Republicans weren’t an actual organization but a loose community that revolved around a blog of the same name. “It’s just refreshing to know that there is this spectrum of opinion out there that exists,” Michael Steele, a high-profile black Republican and fan of the blog, told the Times in 2008. After Obama’s election, Steele was elected chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The Hip-Hop Republicans didn’t catch on in the ways some people hoped. The original blog, started, in 2004, by Richard Ivory, still exists, but it’s not updated much. A despairing post published on September 1st begins, “How much will the Republican Party change after the Trumpocalypse? Zero. Nada. None at all.” The only thing a young, urbane conservative of color can do, it seems, is wait out Donald Trump and hope that the Democrats, down the line, self-destruct.

In the meantime, a very different group of young-ish people is attempting to make Trump’s brand of Republicanism cool. Over the weekend, a conservative activist named Lucian Wintrich staged “#DaddyWillSaveUs,” which he billed as “the first conservative art show” in America. The show featured pieces from a range of Trump-supporting (or, at the very least, Hillary Clinton-hating) artists. The biggest names were Milo Yiannopoulos, the “free-speech fundamentalist” whose provocations got him banned from Twitter, and Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical executive who has parlayed his notoriety into a strange form of Internet celebrity. In the days leading up to the show, Wintrich claimed that it had been willfully ignored by the “progressive puritans” in the left-leaning art press. He also alleged that the show’s initial venue had backed out at the last minute, caving to the forces of political correctness. He eventually found a venue willing to take on his show, he said, so long as the exhibit didn’t use the gallery’s name.

Plenty of movies, TV shows, and pop songs are animated by conservative values. But the right has largely left the more esoteric realms of culture alone, except as a ready-made scapegoat for America’s declining values. Wintrich, who is gay, first gained a little notoriety, a few months ago, with “Twinks4Trump,” a photo series that featured slim, attractive men wearing not very much except for the “Make America Great Again” caps that Trump has made famous. The series came off more as a satire of early-aughts American Apparel ads than liberal political values, but, when it’s more about the splash than what compelled you to leap, who really cares? Wintrich understands that spectacle alone can sometimes be enough to distinguish a ho-hum gallery opening from the rest. So, like a hornets’ nest bedecked with a pleading “kick me” sign, “#DaddyWillSaveUs” opened at around 8 P.M. on Saturday night. I watched the live stream on Breitbart. Wintrich decried the “progressive fascists” who are trying to prevent conservatives from participating in the arts. “We need to invade the art world,” he explained to a reporter. Or at least troll the art world. “Every participating artist is a Trump supporter,” he said. “We’re setting art history tonight.”

There was an interesting prank buried somewhere, about the limits of the freedom espoused by art spaces, about pushing the boundaries of taste and manners in a world where such things are meant to be contingent and flexible, and then pointing a finger at the hypocritical prudes who protest that someone has finally gone too far. But that assumes work interesting enough to press such questions. In practice, the show was like a parody of bad art. Walls were hung with Wintrich’s photographs, agitprop posters, an Apple logo with Trump’s silhouette in place of the familiar bite. Around nine, Yiannopoulos addressed the crowd. “There’s a problem in popular culture,” he said. “People are not allowed to say things that are true or real.” The piece he was about to perform was meant to draw attention to something that is rarely discussed by the media, he explained. He warned of the “globalist” politics—lax immigration policies, religious tolerance, and so on—that had changed Europe forever. The United States already treated its minorities well enough, he said, by inviting them to share in its core values: capitalism, property rights, and freedom. “Yeah, bitch!” someone yelled. “The dissident element in culture—punk, mischief, irreverence—is now better represented in politics by a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat than by anything on the left.”

It’s not hard to understand the gut-level appeal of Yiannopoulos’s right-wing shtick, the appeal of rallying around an identity others find “deplorable,” especially as ideologies loosen from their intellectual and historical roots. Instead of debating the size of government, it comes down to a much fuzzier, adolescent-size question of whether you are for or against “the establishment.” “This is the new punk—Republican is the new cool,” Yiannopoulos finished, before disappearing into a dressing room. He returned naked save for a white Make America Great Again hat, sunglasses, and briefs. He gingerly lowered himself into the bathtub full of cow’s blood. Someone lit a cigarette for him. On the wall behind him were pictures of Americans who had been killed by undocumented immigrants. After writhing around in the tub for a bit, posing seductively for anyone who wanted to take a picture, he began flinging blood at the walls, tearing pictures down and staring into them.

It was gross. But I couldn’t imagine who might feel scandalized by the performance. Wintrich and Yiannopoulos had likened the controversy surrounding “#DaddyWillSaveUs” to Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” a 1987 photograph depicting a plastic crucifix submerged in urine. You could say that “Piss Christ” was heavy-handed in its blasphemy; then again, this was just a guy who loves attention sitting in a bathtub of blood, making faces.

Part of what makes the so-called regressive left—the sort of progressives who are concerned with minority voices and identity politics—so hokey is an instinct toward inclusion and community, an openness to seeing art as a space where we can imagine the possibilities of restorative justice or complex representations. Those who feel left out by the existing categories are free to invent their own; there’s less of a political litmus test than a hope that all who enter do so in good faith. What “#DaddyWillSaveUs” offered, instead, was a vision of society whittled down to individual self-obsession: a belief in the total sanctity of individual rights and freedoms, taken to the greatest possible extreme. It was about the right to say anything, not because anyone’s life will be bettered by hearing it but because that’s what freedom should guarantee.

The controversy around “#DaddyWillSaveUs” was largely manufactured, and, on the live stream, at least, it didn’t appear to be a particularly well-attended event. But moments like these, transparent in their desire to push a different set of buttons, offer a glimpse into the unfolding trajectory of the culture wars. This wasn’t about making America great again in the Trumpian sense—no version of that nostalgic, whitewashed past would have included people like Wintrich or Yiannopoulos, who often refers to himself as a “dangerous faggot.” This was about all the other Trump stuff: chaos and danger, the childish excitement of saying exactly the wrong thing, the weird thrill of total negation. For some, it has clearly been a blast. As I was watching the live stream, Shkreli kept walking back and forth through the gallery. He had contributed a piece titled “Pill,” which appeared to be a pill mounted in a frame with his name signed beneath it. At one point, he was stopped by an admirer. “When everyone was calling you an asshole and a douche bag,” the woman explained to him, shouting over the music, “I was thinking, There’s something really hot about this guy.”