Performance Art Politics In The Age Of The Kayfabe King

-by Patrick Toomey

There’s little to add to Howie’s recent summary of the latest Schumer Switcheroo on the CR. This pre-vote commentary from TPM does provide some critical context:

There was a steady drumbeat throughout the day of senators coming out publicly or telling their constituents they not only opposed the House-produced continuing resolution (CR) but would move to block it on the cloture vote. There was an afternoon caucus meeting that was apparently heated and raucous. Sen. Gillibrand led the charge to allow the CR to go through. A shutdown was worse, she insisted. But behind all this Chuck Schumer was really the driver.

24 hours earlier, Schumer went to floor and announced that Republicans didn’t have the votes for cloture. On first glance it appeared his caucus had decided to defy the President and his congressional party. But it was a ploy. He was playing his voters for fools. It soon emerged that Schumer’s plan was to engineer what amounted to a performative stand-down, a choreographed interlude of opposition followed by the passage of the GOP bill. It would go like this: Democrats refused to allow a vote on the GOP bill. They then force a compromise: Dems vote for cloture in exchange for allowing Dems to offer amendments to the House bill. But that was a farce: giving up the Democrats’ one true point of leverage in exchange for votes that were literally certain to fail. (Democrats are in the minority. On a majority vote they lose.) But over the next day Schumer lost control of the situation. Too many people figured out how Schumer’s switcheroo maneuver worked. And too many Senate Democrats didn’t have the stomach for the public opposition to what was happening. That made the initial gambit impossible. So his only choice was to drop the charade and force the matter. Late in the afternoon he went to the Senate floor, not yet 24 hours later, and announced he would vote to give the Republicans their bill

Schumer’s willingness to fight the GOP on the CR was roughly comparable to French general staff’s willingness to fight the Wehrmacht in 1940. He was merely looking to negotiate terms of surrender all along. His goal was to con the Dem base into thinking that he was actually fighting on their behalf. 

It's a tried and true method of donkey duplicity. Obama was a master of it. He effectively bargained away the public option in the summer of 2009:

"Several hospital lobbyists involved in the White House deals said it was understood as a condition of their support that the final legislation would not include a government-run health plan paying-Medicare rates...or controlled by the secretary of health and human services.'We have an agreement with the White House that I'm very confident will be seen all the way through conference', one of the industry lobbyists, Chip Kahn, director of the Federation of American Hospitals, told a Capitol Hill newsletter...Industry lobbyists say they are not worried [about a public option.] 'We trust the White House," Mr. Kahn said.

Fools like me assumed that the quietly abandoned PO was still in play in 2009-2010.  We called our senators’ offices, attended rallies, and honestly believed that we could influence the process.  We did so because we believed in a president who had promised us:

To achieve health care reform, "I'm going to have all the negotiations around a big table. We'll have doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. Insurance companies, drug companies— they'll get a seat at the table, they just won't be able to buy every chair. But what we will do is, we'll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are mak ing arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies. And so, that approach, I think is what is going to allow people to stay involved in this process."

It was no different this past week. Schumer was going to do everything he could to get at least 8 Democratic votes for cloture on the CR. All of the public pressure and all of the public conflict and all of the public hand-wringing were largely irrelevant to a process whose ultimate outcome was essentially pre-ordained. That’s what the Dems do— they string us along and pretend to listen and then do what they planned all along.  As per Adam Serwer:

American politics makes a lot more sense when you realize that the GOP is afraid of pissing off the GOP base, and the Dems are afraid of pissing off the GOP base, but neither party is afraid of pissing off the Dem base.

One of the many problems that the Dem Kabuki Commandos have run into in recent years is that they are facing the greatest practitioner of performance politics in memory. Donald Trump is good at little else, but he is the King of Kayfabe— “the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc., are genuine.”

Trump is a proud member of the WWE Hall of Fame. The former CEO of WWE is in his cabinet. His most noteworthy position prior to getting elected president was playing a “business executive” who fired people on national TV. 

In his actual business career, Trump had 6 different hotels/casinos file for bankruptcy. Trump’s “business acumen” was best described in this epic Lewis Black routine. No Dem campaign has ever better punctured the myth of that alleged acumen.

In the realm of performance politics, Dems are now like weekend golfers trying to compete with Jack Nicklaus or Tiger Woods in their primes. Trump plays in that realm at an entirely different level. Trump 2.0 routinely discusses annexing Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. No one (probably not even his nominal Secretary of State) really knows whether he’s actually serious on any of those proposals. They appear to resonate with his base, however.

No one knows whether Trump’s and J.D. Vance’s attempted smackdown of Vladimir Zelensky was planned in advance or whether it was a confrontation that got out of control. The lines between policy and performance were clearly blurred. In hindsight, perhaps Zelensky was fortunate that Vance didn’t follow true Kayfabe style and try to smack Zelensky with a folding chair as he exited the Oval Office.

The central point is that the Dems are hopelessly overmatched in their signature style of performance politics. Veteran actor Ronald Reagan (against whom the Dems were overmatched) was a pro at it, but Trump has raised it to another level. Any hopes that the Dems have of surviving a tidal wave that is making them increasingly irrelevant with each passing day is to ditch performance politics and start leveling with their base.