Elections as Kayfabe, or Why I Hate Politics

A few years ago I went to my first (and only) professional wrestling bout. Not my usual thing, but a friend scored a bunch of free tickets to the World Wrestling Enterprises Smackdown! show in a neighboring town. There was a nearby pizza place with a world-class beer list, so it looked like a good night out with friends. Afterwards, I wrote these notes about it. About the wrestling, not the pizza & beer, which were great.

For a show featuring half-naked men and women grappling, an elaborate laser show, enormous fire pots, gigantic LED screens, and numerous concussion fireworks, it was boring. Really, deeply boring. We stayed for two hours before we had had enough. I would say that out of that two hours at most 1/3 of it involved actual wrestling. The rest was a bunch of trash-talking among the performers, showing film clips of other recent wrestling matches on the screens, and the acting out of some skits involving plot lines we could not follow. The whole thing is mainly an elaborate live soap opera punctuated by sporadic wrestling. 

I was trying to figure out why it was so tedious. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the soap opera characters or the previous plots. And it wasn’t because I objected to the concept. I mean, I like going to live theater. I think it was because everything about it was so childish, in the literal sense of “this is the kind of storyline a child would write for friends to act out on the playground.” Followed by wrestling. Kind of like if 10-year-olds were given a massive amount of money, and they just decked out their normal activities with a bunch of lasers and explosions. 

The athletes themselves were impressive—strong, acrobatic, and clearly taking some physical punishment (although about 5% of what they pretended to take). The choreographed fights were… bad. Plainly, obviously fake. There were some good flips and moves but overall the pulled punches were transparently pulled, almost to the point of parody. The audience demographic was about what one would expect, but the hilarious part was how absolutely committed to kayfabe they were, screaming for one wrestler to pound another, or complaining about the referee only going to a two-count. While I’m glad I went to see what it is all about, I cannot believe people actually spend money on tickets to see this.

I’ve been thinking about the WWE more in the wake of recent American politics. Democrats haven’t forgotten how Bill Clinton was pilloried and impeached for lying about having completely consensual sex with a grown woman. Fast forward a quarter of a century and Donald Trump is elected to office in the full knowledge that he has numerous felony convictions related to his playing hush money to a porn star, has been found liable for sexual assault on another woman, and is under indictment for serious crimes in a variety of jurisdictions. His supporters don’t care. This was very puzzling to me. I live in central Pennsylvania, which is solid red Trump country. I’ve seen many people wearing t-shirts with Trump’s mugshot and the caption “I’m voting for the convicted felon.” At first, I thought it was some kind of performative irony. Maybe Democrats were wearing these shirts? But no. They were worn in sincerity. 

It’s not just that Trump’s supporters don’t care about his criminality, but they view it as a positive trait. It’s then that I realized that contemporary politics is just professional wrestling. Trump is a heel. 

Many wrestling plotlines revolve around faces vs. heels, heroes vs. villains. In that context, it’s perfectly reasonable to cheer for a heel. Root for The Iron Sheik, Macho Man Randy Savage, or The Undertaker instead of The Rock, John Cena, or Stone Cold Steve Austin if you think they are more fun. Even in other contexts, that’s understandable. You want to root for The Joker instead of Batman? Honestly, Batman is pretty dour for a buff billionaire with a cool car and a mancave full of toys. At least The Joker always has a smile on his face. It’s all make-believe anyway, so who really cares?

The January 6 insurrection was outside the bounds of accepted behavior, in the sense of “nothing like this has happened in 250 years and it violated fundamental democratic norms.” But seen from the wrestling perspective, you expect the heel to violate the rules, grab a chair from ringside, and smash his opponent with it. According to the prowrestling.fandom wiki, “common heel behaviour includes cheating to win (e.g., using the ropes for leverage while pinning or attacking with foreign objects such as folding chairs while the referee is looking away), attacking other wrestlers backstage, interfering with other wrestlers' matches, and acting in a haughty or superior manner.” Faces can’t get away with that behavior precisely because they are faces. With heels, it’s just another day at the office. In the end, this is why Trump will never be held accountable for anything: his bad behavior is both expected and cheered.

There are people who spend decades parsing the most minute points of scholarship. For example, suppose you’re driving through the countryside, one that unknown to you is filled with fake barn fronts erected for an upcoming movie. They look exactly like real barns. Then you see a genuine barn. Do you know that it is a barn? After all, you would have easily been fooled by one of the fake barns, had you seen one. That’s the setup. Now, can virtue epistemology (roughly the idea that knowledge consists in successfully getting the truth through skilled effort) adequately deal with barn-type cases? I know people who have labored on this exact question for years and years. I deeply admire them. 

Gaining knowledge about anything remotely complicated is tremendously difficult, something that all scholars know, at least when they are gardening their own tiny patch of ground. I think often of William James’s remark that, “when one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness…” That image, of the mighty cathedral of knowledge, with the ceaseless labor of thousands of minor scholars wrought into its foundations, well, my heart swells with pride. This, this is what we can do. Maybe with a lifetime’s effort I could add a small stone to the edifice.

That image is the exact opposite of politics. When Trump says, “I’ll build the wall!” his supporters cheer and all pretend that he’s actually going to build the wall. If he builds five miles along a 2000 mile border, it’s a good faith effort and any failure can be blamed on the liberals. This is kayfabe. It is no different from “I’ll whoop everybody’s ass! He don’t belong in the ring with me!” followed by a 5% strength blow and lot of posturing. But everyone screams and yells just the same. Even faces rely on kayfabe. When Kamala Harris claimed she would reduce taxes for 100 million middle class Americans, that wasn’t literally true. Presidents don’t have that kind of unilateral power, given the deficit and national debt it was probably a bad idea, and it was unlikely to approved by Congress. “I’ll cut your taxes!” is a kind of fist-pumping performative speech her fans all pretended to believe. Whether it was actually true is beside the point.

After the election the Democrats are all busy hand-wringing and blaming themselves for not being left-wing enough, not being centrist enough, not making the right policy proposals. This is wildly, comically, wrong. You don’t back The Undertaker because you like his policies more than The Rock’s. It literally has nothing whatsoever to do with policies. If you think my Trump-voting neighbors care about Biden’s Gaza policy, you’re high on your own supply. Someone wearing an “I’m voting for the convicted felon” shirt is not carefully reviewing detailed white-paper proposals and dispassionately examining the evidence. You want to know what the Democrats should do? Get a charismatic face and write a compelling soap-opera script. 

That’s why I found the WWE Smackdown! performance boring. Genuine competition is ultimately about truth: who is truly better on that day, who really is the faster runner, the better tennis player, the stronger football team. It’s interesting to find out that truth. Scripted pro wrestling, with its childish storylines and over-the-top spectacle has nothing to do with the truth. When politics becomes wrestling, it doesn’t either. Even more, it is embarrassing when members of my own tribe, who really should know better, confidently assert that something is the obvious solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or how to handle Russia, address trans issues, fix poverty, solve the opioid crisis, deal with immigration, or any other deeply complex political problem. I want to say, “housing crisis? Jeez, let me get a research team together, study this topic for a couple of years, write a few papers, maybe edit a book, and get back to you.”

That’s why I hate politics. It’s turned into faces vs. heels, with predictable scripts and all-in kayfabe. Get back to me when it’s about truth. Until then, I’m out.