<p>Recent appeals to the aesthetic-affective realm, specifically to sublimity, tend to concentrate on how it can work to disrupt political power. But another, older, tradition of interpretation looks to sublimity not as a generator of dissensus, but rather as a feeling that can bind people together to enact democratic power. Its roots are in eighteenth-century figures as diverse as Kant, Robespierre, and John Adams. But there is a perennial problem with this tradition: The enthusiastic exaltation associated with being motivated by the sublimity of popular democratic movements is difficult to differentiate from a similar motivation evident in fascist ones. I engage this difficulty in two ways. First, I trace how it troubles William E. Connolly’s attempt to link the aesthetic-affective dimension in politics with the myth of a general strike as a way of motivating future collective democratic action. But my engagement with Connolly is not just critical. It also, secondly, draws positive value from his thinking about how mortality needs to be folded into our political sensorium. That insight is crucial if we are to conceive and cultivate a sense of sublimity that is associated not just with enthusiasm, but also with a certain kind of sobriety about our finitude, our human limits. The embrace of a two-fold sense of sublimity, encompassing both “enthusing” as well as “sobering” dimensions, can help constitute a democratic sensibility that deflates proto fascistic tendencies to see ourselves as embodying an unlimited will to power when we participate in collective insurgency.</p>