Reflections About American Politics on the Eve of the Presidential Election

The remarkable attention to this year’s election is not, however, wholly a tribute to Trump’s undeniable capacity to rile up both supporters and opponents. It is also a reflection of the sudden and dramatic disappearance of virtually any other form of entertainment. As the lockdown has proceeded, however unevenly across the country, Americans have been deprived of virtually all live theatre, movies, musical concerts, opera performances, and perhaps most importantly, professional and college sports. In a country not noted for its soccer hooliganism, the United States nonetheless has very robust sports and entertainment industries: the U.S. media and entertainment industry and sports market are the largest in the world. Taken together, they amount to almost $800 billion, about a third of the total industry market globally. The business implications of the lockdown are apparent: apart from broadcast and social media outlets, this is a sector that has been hit very hard by the pandemic.

But the political implications of the disappearance of conventional entertainment are also significant. Trump, ever sensitive to the entertainment value of his position, provided a performance in the first presidential debate more reminiscent of a WWE Smackdown, the popular televised professional wrestling program in which performers portray prizefighters vying in scripted wrestling matches with predetermined outcomes. Trump, who actually was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013, was not actually debating with Biden, but portraying a sparring pugilist. Like the smackdown performers he emulated, he was well aware that "the most important thing to know about the rules of professional wrestling is that they can be changed, disregarded, made up on the spot or broken at any time." It was, as professional wrestling is to the uninitiated, an embarrassing performance—but it was entertainment. Professional wrestling fans are known as "smarks," those who know the matches are contrived but still enjoy watching them anyway; many of Trump’s followers are the smarks of American politics.

For ordinary sports fans, however, the absence of live sports has been more difficult. One fan of American football said he missed the opportunity to boo and jeer his team’s opponents "more than you can understand… because I have no way to release my venom." Shouting at the television during rare broadcast games does not provide the same "weird satisfaction" he said he gets from condemning the opposing team in person and in public. For this fan and many of his fellow enthusiasts, particularly men, political contests may serve as a substitute. As Eitan Hersh, a Tufts political scientist, argued, "men consume more political news [than women], but for a lot of them, especially younger men, it’s like a hobby and a sport." Erstwhile "sabermetricians"—analysts of baseball statistics—now follow Nate Silver "like he’s some kind of god." Perhaps not coincidentally, Silver, founder of the influential political polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight, first gained public attention forecasting the performance of professional baseball players. 

Of course, in this case, the "other team"—Democrats, Black Lives Matter supporters, teachers, nurses, doctors, grocery store clerks, bus drivers and other essential workers—have not been amused by the slurs and abuse, the theatrical coughing by unmasked and disorderly crowds. And as early voting started across the country, voters came out in droves, overwhelmingly Democrats, for their own performance. Lined up to vote for hours at a time, as to get tickets for a rock concert or the Super Bowl, and arriving at the polling places hours before they open, as if for a Black Friday sale, they behaved—albeit far more decorously—as if they too missed the public performance of competition. 

As a result, it looks like Trump will see the enormous numbers he has always craved. Although they may not produce the outcome he wants, it appears that voter turnout will be higher than it has been in a century. 

Indeed, long before he contracted and recovered from Covid-19, David Axelrod, advisor to former president Barack Obama described Trump as "like a vampire!... You’ve got to drive a stake right through his heart. He’s going to keep coming. There’s nothing he won’t do."

In the absence of movie theatres showing the Rocky Horror Show at midnight, with Halloween trick-or-treating banned in towns and cities across the country, Americans conjure their own witches and zombies, and wonder whether there really may be half-monkey, half-fish mermaids in the South Pacific. But the confusion of entertaining diversion with deadly serious responsibility may be one of most damaging legacies of the Trump era. As a Democratic Senator said in response to a question about whether the Democrats would resume Senatorial courtesy on home-state appointments, "No. The rules have changed. Do I look stupid to you?". In a context in which politics is made to stand in for so much of the community life we have been deprived of by the pandemic, and in which we are led by a showman and hustler who cannot distinguish between approval ratings and election results, too many politicians have become professional wrestlers, too many voters have become smarks, and too many people seem to want to do little more than run up the score. Fortunately, even in professional wrestling, matches have a time limit. Let us hope this one does as well. 

Copyright: MANDEL NGAN / AFP