Pro Politics is Fake, Y'Know
The Hulkster, the Donald, and the New American Order of Political Wrestling
It's interesting to look back on how I've changed politically over the last eight years. In 2015, I was extremely engaged and heavily anti-Trump because I believed he was a progressive in disguise who would be as bad or worse than Hillary Clinton as president. I did my internship as part of a conservative political organization which was explicitly pro-Trump but accepting of my Never Trump views as long as I used my writing skills to help them spread their message rather than my own. During primary season, I posted regular rankings of the candidates on Facebook according to my preferences.
Now, I view the upcoming election as mostly unimportant. I view politics like professional wrestling -- a fake competition designed to entertain and distract. I don't believe that putting Trump, DeSantis, or Biden in office will change much of anything permanently. At best, it will be a lull in what is already happening anyway, because the democratic process doesn't actually perform the function it's advertised to. It's kayfabe. Like pro wrestling, it claims to be a competition when it's just a show. I am not the first to identify this. For a more in depth comparison, see “Politics and the Death of Kayfabe” by Neema “Academic Agent” Parvini.
In pro wrestling, there is a famous storyline (and that's all it was -- a storyline) in which one of the major pro wrestling companies, World Championship Wrestling (WCW), portrayed their champion, Hulk Hogan, as turning his back on the fans due to frustration with their fickleness. Hogan became the villain (in wrestling lingo, a "heel") "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan and started his own "company," called the New World Order of Professional Wrestling (NWO), which used Hogan's possession of the WCW belt as leverage to force WCW to have matches with them. Of course, the NWO was not a real company, and Hulk Hogan was still a loyal employee of WCW. For most of the 90s, WCW used their story of the NWO "taking over" WCW to great success, making a lot of money for both "sides."
Similarly, politics in the last decade has taken a similar path. Before riding the escalator, "The Donald" was a celebrity and an aspirational hero who helped make a lot of politicians, lobbyists, and businessmen immensely wealthy, and had friends on both sides, including Hillary Clinton and the Bushes. But then, in 2015, the Donald, like the Hulkster, "turned heel." Hollywood Drumpf Hogan was suddenly cast as a villain. People who had loved him now called him a racist nazi. He and Hillary became archnemeses. And he proclaimed his intent to take over politics with his own faction of MAGA.
Now, I don’t mean to say that Trump had no intent to actually change anything, or that he was just a puppet of his supposed enemies. The analogy is not that strict. But even Hollywood Hogan, while on WCW’s payroll, used his influence to force WCW to do what he wanted. If Hogan didn’t want to lose to someone, he usually didn’t, and WCW couldn’t make him because of contractual obligations. Likewise, Trump could and did frequently rebel against the “bookers” (another wrestling term referring to the people who decide the storylines and wins and losses). But they tolerated him anyway, like Hogan, because doing so was better for the show. And when Trump did push too far, they did punish him by sending prosecutors on fishing trips and throwing the book at his supporters. Likewise, there did eventually come a day when Hulk Hogan and WCW could no longer cooperate with each other, and Hulk Hogan was sent home to sit out his remaining contract (though it should be noted that this, too, may have been just a part of the show).
But ultimately, Trump really could not change anything. He was not a booker. He was, for a time, the World Heavyweight Champion, but nearly everything he did was undone just as quickly. His few lasting successes, such as the selection of SCOTUS justices, have only occurred with the aid of the smarts like Mitch McConnell or Mike Pompeo. Any issue on which the bookers were not on board, such as foreign de-escalation or election fraud, was stymied in the bureaucracy. Trump was never going to be permitted to win a match he wasn’t booked to win.
Another aspect of wrestling that carries over to politics are the three classes of non-performers: the marks, the smart, and the smart mark (more commonly called a "smark"). These are all, save the smark, explained by Parvini in the blog post I mentioned before. The oxymoronic “smart mark” is the category that almost all wrestling fans fall into today: they understand the competition is fake, but they react as if they don’t. Parvini describes the mark as feeling betrayed when “Mitch McConnell – literally for no reason at all – starts capitulating on the issue of gun rights,” while “smart fans understand that this is just Mitch McConnell’s job.” But “smart marks” are different. The smart mark both understands that it is Mitch McConnell’s job, and also feels betrayed anyway. It is no different from when a wrestling smark writes angry tirades online about how a hated heel mistreated a fan-favorite wrestler, even though the smark knows it’s just pretend.
My problem is that, against my better judgment, I am naturally a political smark. I listen to too many political podcasts. I read too much political news. Every month I attend my county GOP meeting as my precinct’s committeeman, even though I am unable to actually do anything important, and every vote seems like a formality, unless it is a vote on some meaningless platitude that one of the marks in the room wrote to ensure that the “good guys” receive the county party’s praise and the “bad guys” (who, to be fair, usually are bad) receive condemnation. In my smarter moments, I remember that I am a subject of the Lord’s eternal kingdom, which deserves my full focus, and that most of my ancestors lived under English or Irish monarchy with little to no kayfabe democratic showmanship to distract them. Furthermore, the people around me tend to care far, far too much about politics, so that, even if I wasn’t inclined to, I would still be engulfed in the show.
Toward the end of the NWO’s run, the story had become rather directionless. Over the course of almost five years, the NWO incessantly dominated WCW, both in story and out, to the point that the show became stale. NWO splintered into many other factions, each one smaller and more ineffectual than the last. If I had to guess, I’d say we are currently in the “NWO Hollywood vs. NWO Wolfpac” stage, in which Donald Trump is facing a rebellion by his former teammate Ron DeSantis, just as Hogan fought against a revolt by his former teammates and their new club. Notably, that story ended in a ridiculous fizzle when Hogan poked his rival, Kevin Nash, in the chest, and Nash flopped over to let Hogan win the belt and reunify the two sides, which I suspect will be a fitting allegory for the upcoming Republican convention in Milwaukee. And that’s also why I don’t think any of this matters. It didn’t really matter if Hogan or Nash won that match. It doesn’t really matter if Trump or DeSantis wins this primary. It never really mattered whether WCW or NWO held the championship belt, and it doesn’t really matter whether the Democratic Party or the Republican Party hold the White House, in the long term.
The NWO never took over WCW, and there never was a final NWO vs. WCW blowoff. Instead, WCW consistently lost viewers and money as they entered the new millennium, and when their parent company Time Warner merged with AOL, the newly merged company couldn’t sell off WCW fast enough. In the end, it was WCW’s actual rival, the World Wrestling Federation (which later famously included Donald Trump himself in a storyline) who defeated WCW. It doesn’t take much analogizing to realize how it would probably be bad for that situation to be enacted on our own politics, kayfabe bread and circus or not.
The only way for “fans” to truly change the game is disengagement, or at least dispassionate engagement. In disengaging, we can at very least refocus ourselves on things above. Go ahead and vote if you want. At the very least, an increase in rebellious votes may cause the bookers to rethink their strategy. I will be voting too. But I will no longer put my faith in princes. Like with wrestling, politics can be a fun show to watch from time to time. But don’t be a mark, smart or otherwise. The next world champion of political wrestling may be Biden, Trump, or DeSantis, but I won’t let it distract me from God, church, family, or anything else that actually matters.