One of the executive orders signed by President Trump on his first day in office directs those overseeing the designs of civic buildings in Washington, D.C. to attend to beauty and coherence with the styles already predominant in the region. For Washington, that means a strong preference for classical architecture harking back to democratic Athens and republican Rome. In particular, it means a rejection of modernist and brutalist architecture, which disdain the natural human sense of beauty and the meaning of place and tradition. Such architecture is the work, we might say, of cliques congratulating each other over the heads of the little people, who cannot possibly grasp their brilliance.
<...>
There are modernists in education who disdain the power of memory and prefer the awkward to the clear, the barbarous to the grammatical. There are modernists in the army, though they may not see themselves as such, for whom men are interchangeable with women, and who bristle at the old-fashioned notion that military science is about winning battles rather than about gauzy ideals of equity and changing the world. There are modernists in the theater who love to hate Shakespeare and who are delighted to turn that greatest of poets inside out, making Lear into a woman, or Bottom into a salacious monster, or Portia into a Nazi, or Malcolm into a Machiavellian who would prove to be just as horrible as Macbeth was.

The modernist is the snob of snobs. Let him not dare to say in my presence that all we have here is the old conflict between the learned (himself) and the unlettered, or between people of educated tastes and the groundlings.
<...>
Perhaps, before I leave this world, people will begin to reject all the oval, square, and lumpy wheels they have been instructed to accept and to pretend to admire. Pitch Nature out the door, and she returns through the window—even if it is plexiglass and has no shape any normal human being would recognize.