Mussolini’s fascination with Roman architecture, culture, and artwork was no coincidence. The idealism in human body and society conveyed by Roman works of art were used incessantly to support the perfection of Mussolini’s prospective government; if the eternal Roman empire and its only existing materiality - its art and architecture - validated the current government, then it could not be denied. Nazi Germany quickly followed this method of incorporating art into politics, specifically those similar to Roman artistic efforts. Classical sculptures of perfectly muscular soldiers, paintings reflecting eternal triumph, strength, and youth were placed in propaganda posters and exhibitions to inspire everlasting submissiveness to the fascist regime.
This was the aestheticization of politics, the conclusion of sui generis art and its detachment from political concepts.
Kant’s aesthetics appealed to a universal signifier of higher consciousness through art, and fascism later responded by capturing this essense and replicating it with state-based media. 
The euphoria delineated in artistic works can be viewed as society’s final destination while simultaneously preserving class relations and allegiance to the state through a non-stop war. Politics demands progression, while its aestheticization demands homeostasis in its self-justifying perfection. 
Genius also offers an ultimatum in its unconditional acceptance. Genius’ selectivity in who creates arts regarded as ‘beautiful’ defends it from democratization, instead situating its perception in the hands of whoever holds power. The idea of eternal genius is anathema to Benjamin and other Marxist critiques, being another irrefutable signifier of dominance by a select group. Courting the technological advancements of the day, Nazi Germany employed film to combine aesthetic dominance with encapsulating futuristic editing.
Fascism’s incorporation of genius into its playbook re-enforces its infallibility, postulating its enlightened faculties as central to creation of beautiful objects. 
Fascism’s aestheticization of political life and glorification of genius pervert Kant’s original intent. Nonetheless, two central pieces of his theory remain central to authoritarian governments and ruthlessly critiqued by Marxists. The distortion of Kant’s hopeful theory into a tool for authoritarianism contradicts his want for unity; regardless, it demands prevention and reconciliation. To prevent erasure of the individual and submission to state-sponsored enlightenment, Kant’s theory must be democratized in the same way which Walter Benjamin sought art to be politicized -- left to individual interpretation, and free from conceptual justifications that rely on its own objectivity. Sui generis art must be defined by its relation to higher cognition, not to the state or other pieces of art similar to it. This higher cognition in return should be informed by the political reality facing its constituents, instead of serving the forged ideology. Despite Kant’s apolitical wish for his conception of the beautiful, it may serve necessary to not fully separate the reality of political life from aesthetic experience for the sake of avoiding life’s aestheticization. Using this ‘pure’ cognition to get in touch with political reality reinforms the a priori principles endowed to humans as rational beings, and allows for their application in politics.
Kant’s aesthetic theory remains a genuine human experience in its treatment of essential features regarding experience. The intended aesthetic experience felt when perceiving beauty unanimously connects through its primordial quality -- not through manipulation or teachings. Despite its incorporation into fascism’s playbook, aesthetics has also informed constitutionalism, social contract theory, and ‘morally good’ institutions that instead of abstracting themselves into oblivion of social constructs, base their validity on human experience. Immersion into the aesthetic realm under Kant requires consideration of what defines humanity at all -- and instead of rending the bonds between schools of thoughts, posits there to just be one: that which exists shared within all.
