The snobbish part of me – the part that wants at all times to tell people what they like is actually bad – desperately wants to disparage all things WWE.
I want to call it lowbrow and idiotic, a children’s spectacle for people (men, mostly) who have never grown up. Once upon a time on Elon’s site, I would post insults about “pro wrestling” and its fans, who, naturally, were not nearly as culturally enlightened as me, a pro football fan. I would make these posts while wearing a tuxedo and a monocle, as one does.
On Saturday night I watched Wrestlemania for the first time in my 40 years. Alongside my nephews and my son, we watched helplessly as the overwhelming spectacle sucked us in – the most ridiculous costumes and makeup and hair and music and aesthetic enthralling an audience of millions, including, yes, me. That the wrestlers weren’t even coming close to making contact with each other in what was a hilariously-scripted “fight” didn’t matter one iota. I had been overcome by the spectacle: It had me and it would not let go for hours.
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And because I can’t simply experience anything and enjoy it for what it is, I immediately analyzed the Wrestlemania spectacle through a political lens because – as Bad Faith Times readers know – I am enthralled with the idea of manipulating people to do the right thing politically since we long ago determined that good-faith politics does not work, and never has.
I watched the Wrestlemania crowd and wondered how these folks could possibly be nudged away from the fascism so prevalent in today’s culture and toward left-wing policy ideas. I’m hardly breaking news that Donald Trump – a literal WWE star – has mastered the art of harnessing Wrestlemania’s spectacle into a mesmerizing political appeal. Better than any politician in American history, Trump understands the nation’s id. And so he uses the language of a pro wrestler to tear down his opponents and puts on a show that has proven irresistible to tens of millions of Americans and every major cable network on earth. Trump is the natural evolution of Ronald Reagan, a Hollywood actor who played the part of president so well that he now has an airport named after him.
Barack Obama is the only Democrat in my lifetimes to toy with the idea of Wrestlemania politics. Obama in 2008 went all in on the visual spectacle of a WWE candidate: His massive rallies were awe-inspiring in size, his stage was always set high above the teeming crowds, and his no-tie, rolled-up-sleeves approach to stump speeches showed a Hard Working Man, not a soft-bellied politician seeking a cushy job in the Oval Office.
I attended an Obama rally in October 2010, as congressional Democrats pushed for an overhaul of the health-care sector that would be derisively called Obamacare (and happens to be extremely popular today). It was at the University of Maryland’s College Park campus, and after winding my way through right-wing protesters dressed as Grim Reapers who so desperately wanted to keep a health-care system in which 45 million Americans had no access to care, I reached a packed stadium. When I say the atmosphere was electric, I don’t mean it was exciting. People were buzzing all around me, shoulder to shoulder, and when Obama took the stage, the deafening roar sent shivers down my spine that made me think I was having a medical emergency. Maybe I was. I consider myself as pretty even-keeled guy, but on that day, in that stadium, I lost it completely.
Our favorite wrestler had entered the ring. This was thrilling shit.
I’m certainly not the first one to write about the natural political implications of WWE. Google the topic and you’ll find a range of articles about American politics as Wrestlemania, dating to before the Trump era. Jacobin’s Alex Bartiromo wrote in September 2016 – just before Trump’s upset of Hillary Clinton, who obviously (and painfully) did not understand WWE-style politics – that our “politics is refracted through ideological spectacle and simulation. Both the WWE and the two major US political parties conjure storylines that recreate reality on their terms, obscuring the power relations underlying their institutions.”
The WWE theory of politics, as Bartiromo points out, is based on humans as purely emotional creatures who can be tricked and manipulated by sufficiently emotional messaging. I’ve argued that in American politics, there is no You, and that everything must be in service to Me and my happiness, for there is no community in a consumerist culture that equates contentment with buying stupid shit. In such an environment, appeals to the Greater Good are going to be shrugged off or outright dismissed by vast majorities of the voting populace. The reasons for this widespread dismissal of the Greater Good are up to you: It includes immigrants, it includes the ultra-wealthy, it includes people of color, it includes LGBTQ folks, it includes white supremacists. Making a collectivist argument may have held some promise 50 or 100 years ago; today it holds none. The left has to abandon the idea of appealing to a Greater Good. It cannot win the day.
So that leaves us with fiction. Obama did a wondrous job of crafting believable fictions that appealed so intensely to younger voters who had lived through the sheer, unending horror of the George W. Bush presidency. Obama, more than any other modern politician, took our dreams and sold them back to us. And brother, we were buying (there’s a reason Obama was named by Advertising Age as 2008’s marketer of the year).
It’s that easy.
The goal of WWE, Bartiromo wrote, is to make fans “feel like it’s real,” which of course requires a total detachment from reality. Like the Wrestlemania superstar pretending to smash his opponent’s skull into a table, the successful politician must make us believe in the spectacle presented to us. This politician knows we will pay to believe.
Fiction and falsehood are distinct concepts. A lie, revealed for the deception that it is, leads to a rejection of the principles upon which it was based. A fiction, by contrast, is not broken by the discovery that it is not real. It can still act as the bearer of the hopes and fantasies of those who believe in it. … To some extent, all political organizations must build fictions — weave stories of the good life to lend unity and vision to the various short-term political goals they pursue. This includes those on the far left — what other role does “the revolution” play but that of the horizon of the political imaginary? Their power to cohere scattered efforts or expose the gap between our aspirations and reality can be useful.
Give Bernie Sanders a rippling, baby oiled eight pack, a barrel chest, and a bikini bottom wrestling uniform and he could win 450 electoral votes. That is my sincere belief, one I’ve held since 2015, when I had frequent arguments with my wife about the Democratic primaries and the future of the American left. The Democratic Party must purge itself of its technocratic tendencies and embrace a purely emotional approach to politics. The party has to stop pretending the voting public is something they aren’t. They are, to a person, Wrestlemania fans who want nothing more than a good fiction to overwhelm their senses.
Give Americans a proper spectacle and an epic storyline to latch onto and maybe you can create a little class consciousness and transform politics in the nightmare that is late capitalism. You can turn millions of normie voters into unwitting left-wing advocates, but only if you engage in the fiction they crave.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads and X at @CDCarter13.
