> the actual point of contention: whether modern art styles are ugly vs classical styles
This is not the point. The point it (from TFA):
> this executive order would place restrictions on the architectural design of federal buildings
Which is, at a minimum, weird. Why would anybody want to do that (by decree, no less) is beyond me.
I'm not sure how anyone could manage to spin promoting classical architecture as some sort of unpleasant scheme, but I'm sure someone is going to try. The stuff is beautiful. At some point there has to be some admission that Trump isn't wrong about literally everything.
That's not the equivalent of saying 'classical architecture is beautiful', that's the equivalent of saying 'no architecture except classical architecture is beautiful'.
Is St. Peter's Basilica ugly because it is Baroque? Is Notre-Dame ugly because it is Gothic?
Come on, far from me to espouse the "neoclassical bad" twitter-tier nonsense take, but the claim that only neoclassical should be allowed is... weird, Trump or no Trump.
If the Trump administration’s approach was just to build a lot of neoclassical buildings nobody would have cared.
Identitarian politicians have done it for ages. It’s about shaping a population’s view of themselves based on an idealised past.
This is what governments and rulers have done since Mankind started building stuff. You're fixating in the legal tecnicalities like a law or executive order, but it has always been like that. Governments and rulers always set the style of public buildings.
The reason for that, is left as an exercise for the reader.