Tapping the American id
A second look at Abraham Josephine Riesman’s Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, this time by John Hendrickson in The Atlantic, contemplates how watching a “good guy” wrestler like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson deliver “‘the people’s elbow’ to a bullying foe” is cathartic for professional wrestling fans. They pay good money for it. WWE’s McMahon “tapped into the American id,” made a fortune by it, and drew Donald Trump a roadmap to the White House.
A technology and science fiction writer I know online commented Saturday night on how Generative AI “will turn civilization upside down” in ways hard to predict. For better or worse, Pandora’s Box is open and will never be closed, she wrote. That’s how technology works.
Similarly, who could have predicted that professional wrestling and McMahon “could have such a profound influence on American culture and politics,” Hendrickson writes.
McMahon’s pal Donald has changed American political culture and the party he leads by dint of throwing elbows at people his fans love to jeer. (That’s you, Dear Reader.) The threats and injuries are more than theatrical. The “incentives and current architecture of politics” make it unlikely they will go away either, writes E.J. Dionne:
Two studies this month highlighted why. Let’s start with an analysis of all 435 congressional districts conducted by the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California in conjunction with the Atlantic. It found that 142 of the House’s 222 Republicans represent districts with low levels of racial diversity and that are dominated by White voters without college degrees.
As a result, wrote the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein, “the energy in the party over recent years has shifted from the small-government arguments that drove the GOP in the Reagan era toward the unremitting culture-war focus pursued by Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.”
Like the propagandists at Fox — like McMahon too — Trump knows his marks and markets to them. The rest of his party does the same.
Another study released last week, by Alan I. Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, traced the dramatic change in the makeup of the American electorate over the past 40 years. The study, published by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, found that “racial and cultural issues, rather than economic ones,” have driven the enormous gains Republicans have made with noncollege Whites.
With Republicans losing ground among White college-educated voters, the cultural right and Trump’s base is more than ever the GOP’s. Old party hands dare not criticize Trump for fear of alienating them.
Republican pollster Whit Ayres tells Dionne that today’s GOP is about 10 percent “Never Trump,” 30 percent “Always Trump,” and the rest “Maybe Trump.”
The Maybe Trumpers are open to alternatives, he said, but having voted for Trump twice, “you will never, ever get these folks admitting they made a mistake,” meaning they do not take kindly to criticisms of the former president. This is why Trump’s rivals for the nomination have been so reluctant to take him on directly. The Republican Party’s swing voters are in a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil mood.
Until the incentive structures change, Dionne writes, or “until party leaders defy them” (or perhaps until Trump leaves the scene to pale imitators), “we’re stuck in the world that Trump’s neuroses create for us.”
Like McMahon, Trump taps the id. The party’s shrinking White base loathes the idea of sharing the country with neighbors of whatever complexion it considers less than equals. That part of the Declaration they treat as insincere showmanship, as they do professional wrestling. Trump knows and exploits it. The GOP base knows it is headed for shared minority status and no amount of voter suppression or abortion restriction may change that. Not that Republicans won’t persist in desperate attempts.
Trumpism’s Pandora’s Box will not close again. That’s how political technology works.