GOP channels trashiness of reality TV
WASHINGTON At her 224th — and last — briefing as White House press secretary just over a week ago, Jen Psaki had some farewell messages.
“People always ask me — and I’m sure you guys get asked this too — about whether Washington is rotten; you know, whether everybody is corrupt here,” she said. “And I, having done this job, believe the absolute opposite is true.”
She thanked the members of the media for the job they did, too. “Thank you for making me better. And, most importantly, thank you for the work every day you do to make this country stronger.”
Those comments — and the entire briefing in which she spent more than an hour talking through detailed policy items, took dozens of questions, gently bantered with reporters, appealed to higher principles, cracked wise, and almost teared up — was typical of Psaki’s performance of her job, which early in the Biden administration drew frequent comparison’s to C.J. Cregg of “The West Wing.” The comparison wasn’t just due to her red-tinted hair — often her mannerisms and banter seemed to come in a style cribbed from the show. Maybe not completely by chance: at one point Psaki said that she’d bingewatched the Aaron Sorkin drama before deciding to take the administration job.
And whether influence or coincidence, you could often see parallels to the show’s approach in how the Biden administration tackles big issues: On “The West Wing” fictional President Bartlet would most often win the day by making a big speech to shame his opponents through appeals to shared national values and the better angels of American nature. Biden, faced with tough congressional votes on voting rights or his budget’s help for the poor, has also made high-profile speeches appealing for national unity and calling on American values. In his speech this week in Buffalo he delivered a reprimand of racism he said came from “our nation’s soul.”
Often these speeches are good. When he channelled righteous indignation on the anniversary of Jan. 6 to outline the “battle for the soul of America,” Susan Glasser of the New Yorker said we’d seen “Biden at his best.”
But in these situations his best hasn’t been good enough. Voting reforms didn’t pass. Build Back Better died. Donald Trump remains a towering figure in U.S. politics, the legacy of Jan. 6 remains disputed, the battle for America’s soul rages on.
For one thing, Biden is no Jed Bartlet as a speaker.
For another thing, unlike in a TV drama, a single good speech full of high-minded appeals to principle seldom accomplishes an end to a raging partisan debate, shaming opponents into retreat.
In this world, the president’s opponents will not be shamed. They embrace shamelessness, wallow in it. Celebrate it.
U.S. Republicans aren’t emulating the fast-talking liberals of “The West Wing.” They seem to be channelling an entirely different genre: the unapologetic trashiness of reality TV.
The comparison may seem too obvious, since the man who ushered in the current brand of Republican politics, Donald Trump, was once a reality TV star. But the parallel infuses so many of the party’s other characters and antics, in their personal presentation and in how they propagate sideshow storylines and ramp up conflict and emphasize spectacle.
Consider another exit message delivered this week — on the polar opposite end of the political and tonal spectrum from Psaki’s. Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, Trump-approved young star of the party, after going down in flames in a primary, said “The time for genteel politics as usual has come to an end,” and that “it’s time for Dark MAGA to truly take command.”
Dark MAGA. Forget better angels — Cawthorn suggests that when they go high, we drag them further into the muck.
Or consider Cawthorn’s entire career leading up to this point: his inspirational-seeming biographical background marred by allegations and inconsistencies, his telling (tall?) tales of congressional orgies and cocaine binges, his citations for driving infractions and carrying weaponry into airports. Consider the video that circulated of him on social media with his bare butt humping near the face of a friend, frat-boy antics made public, more the stuff of “Jersey Shore” than CSPAN.
It isn’t just him. Rep. Lauren
Boebert owns a restaurant where the waitresses are armed and has tried to insist on carrying her gun into the Capitol, where she once heckled the president just as he invoked the memory of his dead son. On Boebert’s first date with her future husband, he was arrested for exposing himself to two young women in a bowling alley.
Rep. Matt Gaetz is under investigation for sex trafficking, and at one point amid ethics scandals and rhetorical flame-throwing he suddenly revealed that he had an adopted son. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene likes ramping up the rhetoric about conspiracies and space lasers and came to fame with videos of her stalking progressive events and offices looking for confrontations.
The list could go on and on. And on. And on. No personal behaviour, no matter how scandalous, is actually a scandal in today’s Republican Party. If it gets you on TV, it makes you famous, and in reality TV fame is the ultimate prize.
Trump himself is sometimes transparent about this. His rationale for endorsing actual TV doctor Mehmet Oz as a Pennsylvania Senate candidate was that he was known and liked from television. Reportedly, he endorsed Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance because the candidate “has the look.”
But it’s not just the personal qualities and antics that read like bigreveal-a-minute reality TV plot lines. It’s the party’s approach to policy issues. Democrats have been appealing to the West Wing-esque notion of unity since well before Barack Obama’s “not red states or blue states but the United States” rise. At one time Republicans did too, at least rhetorically: Reagan’s “shining city on the hill,” the first Bush’s “thousand points of light,” the second Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” These were rhetorical tactics worthy of inspirational TV drama.
But on reality TV, producers famously hunt for points of conflict and manufacture outrageous storylines. They’re not interested in unity; division makes for good ratings.
Republican politics is like that now: the whole critical race theory panic was consciously engineered by a right-wing figure to exploit resentment about over-sensitive progressive scolds; the sudden obsession of Republicans in Florida and Texas with wildly accusing anyone who opposes them of being pedophilic “groomers” is a ridiculously calculated ploy; the fight between Florida’s governor and Disney, while being a shocking authoritarian use of government to punish political dissent, is also just another storyline manufactured as an election-year fixation for the base.
A lot of these — like so many Trump-ed up dramas of recent years from panic about “migrant caravans” to the Big Lie that led to Jan. 6 — have the quality of being entirely transparent in their madeup or exaggerated character. As if those pushing the storylines know they are obviously manufactured, and suspect much of their audience knows it too, but never admit it. It’s a quality the world of professional wrestling refers to as “kayfabe” — a word quite a few commentators applied to Trump’s presidency (and one Trump might know from his brief and improbable time as a professional wrestler).
Professional wrestling is called “sports entertainment” for its often absurd fictionalizing of athletic rivalries to emphasize conflict and create spectacle. You could call Reality TV “documentary entertainment,” engineering storylines and rivalries out of mundane footage to emphasize conflict to create spectacle. Current right-wing politics in the U.S. is “political entertainment,” manufacturing storylines and ramping up conflict to create a spectacle.
The conflict that spectacle creates has real-world consequences: trans kids in Texas who face being removed from their parents’ care because they received medical treatment; teachers fired and books banned for daring to discuss difficult issues; restaurant employees confronted by a gun-toting avenger hyped up on conspiracy theories; an attempted overthrow of the U.S. government in a riot at the Capitol building. Just for starters.
It’s far from over. This week a proponent of the Big Lie won the Republican primary for Pennsylvania governor — a job that appoints the person who will oversee the next election there, and in which he’s promising to overhaul all the election procedures and equipment.
These plot lines that have roiled Americans to unprecedented degrees of division are being carried over for another season, and it isn’t clear how they can be resolved and the kind of unity Biden talks of restored. On an idealistic TV drama, a few more big speeches would be in order. But here, the people they’d be intended to appeal to aren’t interested in hearing them.
They are watching an entirely different kind of TV show.