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Two NYTimes columns, taken together, explain MAGA -- performative kayfabe [1]

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Date: 2023-02-27

Sometimes there is surprising synergy between articles. The New York Times has a column by David French, Why Fox News Lied to the Viewers It ‘Respects’, describing how Fox News has become the “cornerstone” of right-wing America. It not only comes from the right-wing community but has come to represent it, rather than reporting honestly.

It’s no mere source of news. It’s the place where Red America goes to feel seen and heard. If there’s an important good news story in Red America, the first call is to Fox…. Representation can have its place. Fox’s deep connection with its conservative audience means that it can be ahead of the rest of the media on stories that affect red states and red culture. But there is a difference between coming from a community and speaking for a community. In journalism, the former can be valuable, but the latter can be corrupt. It can result in audience capture (writing to please your audience, not challenge it) and in fear and timidity in reporting facts that contradict popular narratives. And in extreme instances — such as what we witnessed from Fox News after the 2020 presidential election — it can result in almost cartoonish villainy.

But then A.J. Riesman’s Guest Essay The Best Way to Explain the G.O.P. Is Found in the W.W.E. nails it from the opposite direction. It’s not just that the Fox news/entertainment juggernaut has become one with its party in a world where truth has to give way to the audience’s desired narrative, but that the whole MAGA thing is really based on the fictitious narratives of professional “wrestling” and the W.W.E. in particular. The key concept of that show, not quite a true sport, is kayfabe:

Kayfabe refers to pro wrestling’s central conceit: that everything the audience is seeing is real. As an adjective, it simply described something that was fake — for example, if two unrelated men were billed as brothers, that would make them kayfabe brothers. As an imperative verb, it meant staying in character: If you wrestled as a noble Native American character, you couldn’t let the press find out you were actually a womanizing Swede, and so forth. As a noun, it referred to the entire system of manipulations that upheld the industry.

As Riesman explains, Vince McMahon, who owns the W.W.E., killed it when, in order to avoid regulation applicable to actual sports, he admitted in court that the show was really fake and thus not as dangerous as it looked. This confession hurt the industry. McMahon, though, overcame that with neokayfabe, where a little bit of reality blends with the kayfabe and the audience is left wondering where the line is drawn.

In the mid-1990s, wrestlers and promoters started juicing the audience by tossing them little teases of once-taboo reality. A grappler trying to “get over” (industry lingo for winning the audience’s attention) as a villain might reference a fellow wrestler’s real-life personal problems in a cruel in-ring monologue, just to make the audience hate him more. An owner might direct a wrestler to pretend he’s going rogue against the company in an outrageous monologue, then tell gullible journalists that he’s in big trouble with his employer, all to juice interest in what might happen next on the show. You knew wrestling was usually fake, but maybe this thing you were seeing, right now, was, in some way, real. Suddenly, the fun of the match had everything to do with decoding it.

And that leads to how Trump (a close friend of the McMahons and a sometimes W.W.E. participant) and Republicans turned such dishonesty into their key strategy, where “the consumers of neokayfabe tend to lose the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t”.

G.W.Bush’s people referred to Democrats as the “Reality Based Community”, and meant it as an insult. To them, faith trumped reality. So the whole business of not believing your lying eyes is not new; it’s key to fundamentalist religion. Kayfabe, though, is secular.

And the younger fans of Trump, the 4chan crowd and the like, are often fans of professional wrestling. They live in a world of dishonest. Old-school kayfabe was clearly an act; you knew where reality ended. Neokayfabe blurs the line. Whether in the rink or on Fox News.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/27/2155289/-Two-NYTimes-columns-taken-together-explain-MAGA-performative-kayfabe

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