Why Republicans dress like supervillains
Our theater department staged a modernized version of The Drunkard when I was an undergrad. The temperance play has been around since the mid-19th century. We brought in a specialist from New York to choreograph every over-the-top gesture. Every movement of every character. Each had an entrance theme played on a tinny piano off-stage. The audience is invited to cheer the heroes and boo the villain. We sold bags of peanuts to either eat or throw at the bad guy. The whole point of the melodrama these days is high camp.
Amanda Marcotte argues this morning (my take) that what we may be missing is that the right is staging a version of the show every single day. “Why do so many Republicans now dress like cartoon supervillains?” Salon’s headline asks.
When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) arrived for the State of the Union Address garbed in a white fur coat and wore it through the speech, she got “compared to a Stephen King monster, a gangster’s wife in a mob movie, and, of course, a campy Disney villain:”
But for the “wealthy heiress who spent her pre-political life as a woman of leisure,” drawing that kind of attention and ridicule is the point, Marcotte argues. It got Greene attention. It got her photo plastered across print and electronic coverage:
Drawing scorn from people like [Seth] Meyers, which she can then repackage as “proof” that she’s a victim of the “coastal elite,” defined not by money, which she has plenty of, but the fact that they know the difference between the Nazi police and cold tomato soup. Above all else, she wanted to look the part of the villain. Far from being people who are unaware they’re the baddies, the MAGA movement is about glorying in their own self-image as political scoundrels.
In The Drunkard, there are heroes, but the audience favorite is the cackling, Snidely Whiplash-style villain. It’s what many on the right aspire to, Marcotte believes.
Greene is far from the only one. Despite their hatred of actual drag queens, the modern GOP has a robust interest in using costumes to create fantasy versions of themselves — and almost always, that fantasy is of someone who is a proud scalawag. The current trend of Republicans dressing like Batman villains can be traced back to dirty trickster and shameless Nixon fan Roger Stone. For instance, he dressed like the antagonist of a Charles Dickens novel for Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Charlotte Richardson, my high school journalism instructor, observed that journalism takes many forms, including “True Detective” and supermarket tabloids. It may be lousy journalism, she said, but at least they’re reading. One might say the same of professional wrestling. It’s not Shakespeare, but at least it’s theater. That’s the sort the Greenes and the Stones are staging for the MAGA crowd. They are heel wrestlers, the colorful villains of professional wrestling.
Then there are the Bond villains like Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk.
Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) has adopted the pose of the “malevolent prep school student in an 80s movie.” Are his glasses even prescription?
After successfully evading an FBI investigation for sex trafficking of minors, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida’s hair only seemed to grow taller, turning him into a dead ringer for Cesar Romero’s version of The Joker. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, whose fabricated background is drawing Santos comparisons, favors dramatic makeup paired with shiny menswear that looks very much like a cheap knockoff of Annie Lennox’s dominatrix stylings in the “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” video.
False humility is out. It doesn’t draw eyeballs and sell tickets any more than a wrestler who fights “fair,” whatever that is. The point is that MAGA is about the GOP base working out its “darkest desires.”
It’s about dispensing entirely with pretensions of morality and giving themselves permission to be proud villains. Trump, of course, started things by bragging about how good he is at getting away with crime, from sexual assault to tax fraud. He was backed by an online army of trolls with Pepe-the-frog avatars, who relished their newfound freedom to use politics as cover to harass and abuse people.
Kyle Rittenhouse and Alex Jones are MAGA heroes.
Marcotte writes, “To a certain degree, I get it. Playing the part of the villain can be thrilling. I’ve long been a fan of goth and punk fashion, both of which get their glamour through transgression.” Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan made the anti-hero cool. Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber was cooler still. But Savile Row is not what MAGA pols are shooting for.
The problem with Republicans, of course, is they aren’t actually playing. Their goals are straight evil, from forced childbirth to turning away political refugees to slashing the retirement benefits of seniors to decimating health care. What’s shifted in the past few years is a willingness of GOP leaders to wink knowingly about the immorality of their own views. Sure, there’s still plenty of effort put into pretending that they want to do heinous things for good reasons. So we still have to sit through disingenuous conservatives feigning “pro-life” reasons for abortion bans, for instance. But, led by shameless criminals like Trump, there’s just a lot more trollish approach on the right, one that treats evil like it’s just an impish good time. Once “triggering the liberals” became the main political goal, gleeful wickedness became inevitable. Of course, many of them want the costuming to match their self-congratulatory attitude about being the worst.
Attending professional wrestling is fun once or twice. (Once, decades ago, was enough for me.) The political heels have made it a lifestyle to sell to their base. They’ve made a mockery of democracy while sneering at the audience.