Original Article
Action in culture: Act I of the
presidential primary campaign
in the U.S., April to December, 2015
Jason L. Masta
Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, Millburn House,
Coventry CV4 7HS, UK.
E-mail: j.l.mast@warwick.ac.uk
Abstract This article offers a thick description of the United States during the first
nine months of the 2016 presidential election competition. It argues that this competition
is organized in a theatrical way, and that this period, from April to December
2015, represents act one of the drama. It argues that performances in act one contribute
to setting the cultural and interpretive conditions in which citizens will enter
and act back on the drama in its subsequent acts, in state primaries and caucuses, and
in the general election in November 2016. Building on the works of Roland Barthes and
Clifford Geertz, the article gives a structural, or semiotic, interpretation of the dominant
symbols and discourses operating in the dramatic field, and using Alexander’s cultural
pragmatics, it identifies and analyzes key performances given by candidates Clinton and
Trump, which crystalized particular meaning formations and lent the proceedings a
sense of dynamism and flow. The article demonstrates how analyzing performances in a
manner consistent with cultural pragmatic theory contributes to research on electoral
politics, political authority, and legitimation processes.
American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2016) 4, 241–288.
doi:10.1057/s41290-016-0009-3; published online 27 September 2016
Keywords: cultural pragmatics; structural hermeneutics; performance; charisma;
politics; elections; action in culture
Introduction
A US presidential election cycle is a social drama composed of hundreds of
short, discrete performances, and thousands of performatives. Candidates
assemble teams of strategists, pursue resources, and build ground organizations.
Yet a campaign apparatus’s foremost practice is crafting interpretations
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www.palgrave.com/journals
and discursive constructions and having its lead, the candidate, perform these
meanings before citizen-publics and television cameras in effort to, quite literally,
perform themselves into the office of presidency.
A candidate is the visible medium through which the campaign apparatus’s
interpretive and constitutive work is channeled. Candidates perform these
meaning constructions emphatically and relentlessly before citizen-publics. The
meaning constructions are often simple declarative formulations; they are
performatives delivered in effort to build understandings and imaginings of
certain subjects in the minds of one’s audiences. Candidates’ performative
subjects include themselves and their opposition; the nation, as an historical
agent; the public, as the embodiment of this historical legacy, and in terms of the
public institutions and services it currently deserves; and finally, both the forces
that endanger the nation and public as well as the principles and policies that
will not only circumvent these threats but vanquish them.
An election cycle in a representative democracy comprises multiple candidates
simultaneously engaging in this interpretive and performative work. A chorus
arises from the repetition of it all, particularly in the contest’s early stages, as
candidates talk to Americans about how they are American, about what it
means to be an American, and about how together, the candidate and the
people, will lead America into its future in a way that ensures that the best of
what it means to be America, and the best of what it means to be an American,
will be born yet again.
Adopting a distanced stance, such that the particularities of each candidate’s
version of this story recede, the din that the performances create sounds much
like the one produced four year’s prior, and to those prior to that, stretching
back for decades. Every four years, through the candidates’ performances, and
the audience’s interventions – from initial declarations of candidacy, through
the narrowing of the field of contestants through debates and primaries and still
more debates, to the conventions and the naming of the party nominees,
through October surprises, and to the final act in November – the nation
undertakes a process that recalls what Clifford Geertz (1973a) observed of the
cockfight in Balinese society: through the election cycle Americans do a tableread
of scripts of American experience, and perform to themselves about
themselves. They perform about making America great again! (Donald Trump),
reigniting the promise of America (Ted Cruz), starting a new American century
(Marco Rubio), moving America to higher ground (Mike Huckabee), and about
rebuilding, restoring, and unleashing the American dream (Martin O’Malley,
Rick Santorum, Rand Paul, respectively).
If we distance ourselves even further from the drama, and adopt the vantage
point of an alien watching from space, one whose minute is a human decade, we
would begin to see that these eruptions occur at regular intervals, and that each
one repeats a pattern such that they appear to be rule governed. We would note
that they are expressive of a symbolic character; that during them ideas and
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beliefs about the nation are given extra discursive space and attention, and that
emblems and symbols of group affiliations and identities are made visible and
ubiquitous. In and through being distinctively ceremonial, these events stand
out against the flow of mundane life. And as they culminate in the community
elevating one person to stand in for and lead the many, and to represent the
whole, the events increasingly look like an institutionalized technique for
recreating the sacred (Durkheim, 1912[1995]; Shils and Young, 1953). Is this
collective engagement in dramatic practice, in itself, the creation of their higher
ground, the alien might wonder.
Yet if we want to focus not on the reproduction of a collective order, but on
questions of how political power and legitimacy are won, inhabited, projected,
and lost, then we need to return to a position closer to the action. We need to
retain the centrality of symbolic codes and boundaries, but we need to introduce
a more precise conceptual apparatus, one that specifies elements in the
performances that are particularly influential in lending the entire process its
form, but also capable of illuminating the hows and whys of its outcome.
Cultural pragmatics (Alexander, 2004) provides this apparatus.
Interpreting the political process as social performance means seeing aspirants
and holders of political office as actors continually engaging in interpretive and
constitutive performances. It requires identifying audiences, specifying their
bases of solidarity, and attending to their formations as well as their potential
movements toward fragmentation. Interpreting politics as social performance
also involves noting when and how powerful background collective representations
are activated, and decoding the meanings lurking in the materiality of
political staging. Likewise, it involves detecting the social dramatic process’s
submerged mechanisms of power, or the resources, material, and symbolic, that
enable particular people to perform louder and longer while precluding others.
Actors, audiences, symbols, settings and staging, varieties of power: treating
politics as social performance involves separating these concepts analytically,
and then investigating how they work in conjunction with one another during
moments of actual performance, in which the things these concepts specify
appear fused together before attending audiences and camera lenses (Alexander
2004, 2010; Alexander and Jaworsky, 2014; Mast, 2013). It is in these moments
that the political process is most powerfully channeled, expressed, and made
visible: in these actors’ performances before the public, during which they claim
to represent and speak for the nation.
My contention is that power is the capacity to interpret and constitute, and
that successfully inhabiting and exercising power means having one’s interpretations
and constitutive narrations be widely accepted as accurate, reasonable,
and desirable. Put another way, power is performative: accruing power and
projecting it well means having an acumen for issuing characterizations and
prognostications that activate within audience members sentiments of recognition
and identification. To win positions of leadership, ones that confer
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institutional power, candidates must cultivate and deploy performative power
(Alexander, 2010; Mast, 2013; Reed, 2013). Creating and inscribing meanings
that will stir multiple audiences requires an anthropologist’s interpretive skills
and a playwright’s acumen for interweaving structure with event. Communicating
them effectively requires a different set of skills, ones that lead us to the
realm of performance.
This conceptualization of power tells us much about how those who aspire to
office orient to their challenge, yet in privileging political actors, it has the
capacity to displace citizen-publics in the cultural pragmatic framework and to
render them, metaphorically speaking, passive audience members sitting quietly
in the back seats of a darkened theater. This article seeks to examine and
reformulate the relationship between actors and audiences, and thereby
contribute to cultural pragmatics, by linking performative power conceptually
with a post-Weberian conceptualization of legitimacy (Alexander, 2013), one
that privileges meaning-making but allows that audience interpretations may
vary widely from the meanings performers intend to cultivate.
That to accrue and wield performative power a candidate must by accident or
design anchor one’s scripts in the community’s collective representations
demonstrates that we have traveled far from Weber’s definition of power, which
foregrounded material, military, and organizational means for achieving one’s
own interests over and against the wills of others. Weber was keenly aware that
relations between the powerful and subjects are built of far more than brute
force and coercion. He introduced the concept legitimacy to open up to
investigation the conditions and means by which the ruled may comply or
contribute to the preservation of power relations by, for instance, believing in
their rightness. Power interpreted as properly won, borne, and deployed Webertermed
authority. By introducing authority and legitimacy, Weber lent the
contributions of the ruled conceptual space and explanatory weight on the
epistemological ledger of power relationships. And by emphasizing belief,
Weber’s formulation encourages a research program into the cultural elements
that constitute legitimacy, and the processes by which it accrues in or recedes
from particular persons, positions, institutions, and practices. Such a program,
however, has yet to be undertaken in any sustained way.
In this paper, I build from the works of Geertz and Barthes’s an interpretive
perspective, which I then train on the spectrum of meanings produced between
political performers and citizen-audiences during the first act of the 2016
presidential election. I conceive of these events as legitimation processes in
which actors and audiences negotiate meaning developments, and through
which select candidates transform from representing minor celebrities of the
political and entertainment spheres into elevated, privileged, quasi-heroic, and
venerable personages. Comprising only the initial steps in the election sequence,
and with many of the candidates entering the competition having established
public identities, it should be noted that legitimation processes in act one are
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significant and energetic but necessarily partial in relation to the overall
election.
I do not begin my investigation of legitimation processes by presupposing
power/knowledge fusion, or by searching for cultural practices of control or
correlate manifestations of subversion or resistance. Nor do I begin with the
assumption that I am searching for evidence of culture shaping practices that I
can then associate with repertoires or cognitive schemas. In a counter-intuitive
way, however, the latter approach does represent the seedbed for my leap into
interpretivism.
I begin my analysis of act one not with the intent of investigating culture in
action, but from the premise that action occurs in culture. This stands in sharp
contrast to the pragmatist tradition in sociology and its currents in cultural
sociology that begin by presupposing the ontological primacy and analytic
autonomy of action.1
The social act exists, it is assumed, and the charge of the
sociologist is to discern the forces that shaped said act. Epistemological
machinery is then set in motion to address the questions: If culture, then how
did it shape the doing, and how did it do its shaping?
This point of departure conceals and elides questions such as what are the
boundaries of an action’s life, or its beginning, middle, and end? How do we
know its constitutive features; which features are ancillary, or vestigial? Where
does one act end and another begin, and could one act, in fact, be two? Is an
action that never occurred still an action? A proletariat revolution in a western
industrialized nation is one of the most famous actions in sociological literature,
and yet for an action that never took place, sociologists certainly knew a lot
about what one would have and what one would not have looked like. Upon
what did sociologists draw to make these determinations?
My point is not that actions do not exist in real or in narrative form. My point
is that the making of these determinations represent interpretive moments, and
that actions are, in fundamental ways, attributions of interpretation. Action in
doing and action in representation are inextricably linked. And they are both
inextricably linked to meaning and interpretation. In this article, I train a robust
interpretivism on the 2016 presidential election to exemplify an action in culture
perspective. Political actors and citizen-audiences construct and contest
1
Anne Kane (1991) argues that understanding culture’s relation to the social requires attributing to it
two kinds of autonomy, analytic, and concrete. Analytic autonomy represents culture’s structure,
content, and form, as organized and ordered by endogenous forces that are irreducible to social
structural or cognitive and psychological factors. Concrete autonomy refers to culture’s interconnection
with social life in any particular historical moment. I borrow this term from Kane to argue
that pragmatist formulations, in practice, presuppose that action exists and unfolds in a pure and
unadulterated form and that it is sociology’s job to determine which forces, institutions, and motives
then lend it additional shape and direction. My argument is that specifying an action and delimiting
it represent interpretive processes of construction and classification, which necessarily renders the
real, nude, unadulterated, autonomous act a product of the cultural forces of narration, semiosis, and
emplotment in discourse.
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legitimation processes in a symbolic universe they neither created nor control,
and they do so in both deeply familiar and in highly creative ways.
Theory, Method, Data
There is a lot of scholarship on presidential elections. Within this universe, the
question that exerts the most gravitational force is how to explain electoral
outcomes. The question looms in the background even in studies that do not
explicitly set out to explain how or why particular candidates triumphed over
their competitors. We can map this universe of election studies, if partially, by
identifying vibrant clusters within it, and organizing them in terms of two
features: how they frame their explanatory aims, and how centrally cultural
dimensions feature in their explanations (see online Appendix). Mechanistic and
economistic assumptions permeate much of this work.
With this article I contribute a strong cultural approach, or one in which
symbolic content, form, and process play pivotal roles in my explanation. My
aim is not to explain the election’s outcome, however; at the time of this writing
the two major parties have yet to formally name their nominees. Nor is my aim
to predict the election winner. The parties’ nominees and the election’s outcome
remain contingent. The cultural conditions in which the remaining candidates
will craft their performances, and under which voters will interpret their
messages and craft their voting decisions, however, do not. My aim is to give a
structural hermeneutic analysis (Alexander and Smith, 2003; Smith, 2005: Ch.
2) of these conditions. I also aim to give a cultural pragmatic (Alexander, 2004)
interpretation of two key performances in act one, with the intention of
demonstrating how performances fit into and contribute to structural
hermeneutic investigations.
In my investigation I lean heavily on the semiotic and hermeneutic analyses of
Roland Barthes and Clifford Geertz. These figures excelled at identifying
durable cultural codes and powerful symbols that shape expectations and
motives, actions, and institutions, and in their theoretical and methodological
tracts, they demonstrated that the exercise of specifying symbolic patterns
produces findings and insights unobtainable by alternative methods.
My analysis is guided by Geertz’s two prominent concepts of culture: a
structural or semiotic one, in which he portrays culture as a symbolic context
organized by public, socially available codes that can be thickly described
(1973b); and a second one in which he conceives of culture as an assemblage of
texts amenable to hermeneutic methods of analysis (1973a). Geertz uses these
tools to render phenomena such as a murderous sheep raid and cockfights as
points of intersection, or nexuses, at which apparent antinomies shift and
dissolve. As cockfights vary from shallow to deep play, for instance, betting
shifts from metrics of utility to those of ‘‘esteem, honour, dignity, respect’’
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(1973a, p. 433). A critical point for Geertz, however, is that money continues to
‘‘matter and matter very much’’ (ibid. 434). It is meaning, Geertz demonstrates,
that explains the coexistence of, and shifts in register between, utility and
disutility, rationality and irrationality, and the cognitive and the visceral.
Focusing on meaning allays pressures and impulses toward one-dimensional
explanations; it has the capacity to account for competing epistemological
positions, ones that might pit ideal against material interests, or instrumental to
value rational motives, for instance, without reducing one to the other, or
forsaking one for the other.
What does Geertz’s interpretive approach uncover? A hermeneutic analysis of
the cockfight illuminates its central feature, Geertz argues: ‘‘its use of emotion
for cognitive ends.’’ It is of the emotions generated by cockfights that ‘‘society is
built and individuals are put together,’’ Geertz maintains. He explains:
Attending cockfights and participating in them is, for the Balinese, a kind
of sentimental education. What he learns there is what his culture’s ethos
and his private sensibility (or, anyway, certain aspects of them) look like
when spelled out externally in the symbolics of a single such text; and – the
disquieting part – that the text in which this revelation is accomplished
consists of a chicken hacking another mindlessly to bits (ibid. 449).
I analyze key events in act one of the 2016 presidential campaign drama in this
spirit. Events such as the Iowa State Fair, the first Republican debate, and
Hillary Clinton’s testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi,
demonstrate in concentrated form this culture’s ethos, or to put it another way,
the most powerful discourses currently dueling to constitute the community’s
sense of identity and trajectory. Building on Geertz, I argue that audiences
experience these events, and the myriad of occurrences between them, through a
kind of hermeneutic negotiation between private sensibility and publicly
performed national culture.
While these performances, too, represent the use of emotion for cognitive
ends, they are also more than that. These fighting cocks, so to speak, are not
hacking one another mindlessly to bits. Rather, the candidates’ performances
represent a particularly interesting intersection of cultural ethos and private
sensibility precisely because they are scripted, rehearsed, and delivered so
intently. They are interesting because they are designed meticulously, and
because part of the intention behind their design is precisely to hit emotional
and cognitive registers in their audience members. The fighting cocks, the real
ones, neither craft representations nor fret over the aesthetics of their efforts.
Presidential candidates and their teams of strategists, on the other hand, do a
kind of lay structural hermeneutics of the cultural moment in effort to craft
scripts that will resonate more powerfully and with more people than the scripts
of their competitors. They strive to represent the ethos singularly; through script
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and performance, they seek to transform themselves into representations of the
ethos cast in embodied, material form.
My argument’s cultural sensibility is also motivated by Barthes’s distinction
between the denotative and connotative dimensions of photographs and images.
In ‘‘The Photographic Message,’’ Barthes (1977a) explains that the photograph
pretends to communicate its message simply, innocently, and without distortion
or interference. The photo seems to be a message without a code: ‘‘What does
the photograph transmit? By definition, the scene itself, the literal reality’’ (ibid,
16–7). The viewer needs no instructions or training in order to arrive at its
meaning, it seems. Barthes calls this the denotative message. He then
demonstrates that photographs communicate connotatively as well, or that
their meanings are produced through sign relations in two ways. Meaning is
produced through relations between the objects that are visibly presented on the
image’s surface, and meaning is produced through relations the visible objects
have with others objects not presented in the picture, as well (Jakobson,
1990[1956]; Barthes, 1990[1967]). The key to decoding Barthes’s point (i.e.,
decidedly not a message without a code) is ‘‘the arbitrary nature of the sign’’: we
must accept that the objects are semiotic signs, or visible signifiers whose
meanings, or signifieds, are not reflections of their visible surfaces, but the
product of their relations of similarity and difference to other signs in the sign
system.
Far too many election studies treat variables such as the economy, peace,
policy, demographic identity, and the candidates and their campaign platforms
themselves denotatively, or as if they were like photographs whose meanings
were simple reflections of visible and easily understood objects. These studies
stop at denotation. My intervention is designed to move political analysis
toward connotation. My argument is that these phenomena are not only sites
composed of dense layers of signs, or complex sign formations, but that they are
particularly popular sites at which narration and performances are aimed.
Neither the means by which they generate and project meaning; nor their
meanings themselves, or what is called their contents; nor even their forms, or
the boundaries demarcating what is included in the variables or phenomena and
what is excluded; none of these are simple, singular, or inert. And yet, to
paraphrase Barthes (1977b: 45), in much election research, the denoted variable
naturalizes the symbolic message, it innocents the semantic artifice of
connotation, which is extremely dense, especially in politics.
In ‘‘Photography and Electoral Appeal,’’ Barthes (1999[1957]) examines the
photographs with which mid-century candidates for Parliament had begun to
adorn their electoral prospectuses, or documents on which they presented their
qualifications and plans for serving in office. Barthes decodes the poses, and
argues that what ‘‘is transmitted through the photograph of the candidate are
not his plans, but his deep motives, his family, mental, even erotic circumstances,
all this style of life of which he is at once the product, the example and
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the bait’’ (ibid. 91). The photographs project a candidate’s image, but they also
serve as a mirror, one that ‘‘offers to the voter his own likeness, but clarified,
exalted, superbly elevated into a type’’ (ibid). The photos and the prospectuses
communicate ‘‘a ‘manner of being,’ a socio-moral status,’’ and demonstrate the
‘‘irrational’’ underpinnings of representative politics. For Barthes, cultural codes
and symbols are highly effective, yet their effect is rooted in not just in registers
of the cognitive but in those of the moral as well. My argument builds upon this
understanding.
Barthes’s essay, ‘‘Photography and Electoral Appeal,’’ contributes twice, as it
were. In addition to offering a theory of how signification shapes the political
landscape by pervading relations between power-seekers and voters, it also
presents a brief interpretation of the rise in postwar France of the populist
insurgent, Pierre Poujade. Barthes argues that Poujade ascended the national
stage by sacrificing the politics of pragmatic problem solving on the altar of
public performance: ‘‘It is well known that this antithesis,’’ wherein image
overtakes and displaces substance, ‘‘is one of the major myths of Poujadism
(Poujade on television saying: ‘Look at me: I am like you’’’) (ibid. 91, italics in
original). Performing from a script about the common man and his everyday
woes, Poujade presented himself as representative of the shopkeeper, a
figure who was being made to suffer by the indifference and ineptitude of the
political elite. Barthes quotes Poujade as saying:
France is stricken with an overproduction of men with diplomas,
polytechnicians, economists, philosophers, and other dreamers who have
lost all contact with the real world, (Barthes, 1997[1979]: 52).
A precipitous tipping of the scales of style and substance, and an indictment of
experts and intellectuals; the conditions and discourse approximate those that
have animated and fueled Trumpist populism.
Barthes uses the case of Poujade to illustrate theory and method. He finds that
Poujade’s discourse replicates the logic of the accountant’s general ledger:
balance is its animating ethos, the production and restoration of equilibrium its
raison d’etre. All is presumed to be quantifiable, and the rules of calculation are
the principles from which the terms of critique and judgment are derived. The
discourse encourages flat, horizontal thinking that, trapped in a closed system of
binarism, is blind to avenues of transformation and transcendence. Guided by a
‘‘morality of the retort’’ (ibid. 51), in this langue or discursive structure, any
parole or talk that ‘‘risks substituting an explanation for a retort’’ is deemed
illegitimate or ‘‘null and void’’ (ibid. 53). Barthes concludes that the ultimate
consequence of this interpretive structure is the ‘‘refusal of alterity, the negation
of the different, the euphoria of identity, and the exaltation of ‘kind,’’’ and in it
he saw the ‘‘specific symptom of all fascisms’’ (ibid. 53).
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We can begin to see affinities between Poujadist discourse and that which
informed Trump’s talk in act one: e.g., Trump exchanges the accountant for a
dealmaker, and conceives of order as the product of negotiations predicated on
unpredictability and impulse; he eliminates and reduces pathways of action by
asserting that ‘‘we have no choice, we have no choice,’’ such as when he
announced that the US must ban all Muslims from entering the country (Dec 7,
2015)2
; and his dominant and most frequently remarked upon rhetorical
strategy is the retort, which is typically delivered via the 140 character tweets.
The technique fuses with his character, particularly when he constitutes himself
in terms such as, ‘‘I am counter-puncher.’’ I use Barthes’s analysis of Poujadism
to develop a discourse analysis of the language and talk in act one, and to
indicate how these structures and practices open particular paths of interpretation
while foreclosing others.
My method involves identifying and interpreting signs, symbols, codes,
narratives, and performances via the semiotic and hermeneutic tools articulated
by figures like Geertz, Barthes, and Alexander and Smith, and my data are
online media. The term ‘‘online media’’ represents a phenomenon that is in
constant flux. I use the term here to mean that I accessed all of my data with a
computer. The data were content that contained talk, text, or performance
about or by the presidential candidates, political commentators, or everyday
people engaging in some form of political activity. My data sources were videos
of candidates’ campaign events and press conferences, materials from network
and cable news programs, AM talk radio, newspapers, websites principally
dedicated to covering politics, and lay persons’ statements and commentary,
which was available in most online platforms’ comments sections, as well as in
video and radio content from platforms that encourage audiences to call-in and
voice their opinions.
I started the project by following campaign news and commentary in the New
York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal; watching the
PBS NewsHour on youtube, and paying particular attention to the Friday
political commentary segments featuring columnists Mark Shields and David
Brooks; watching campaign rallies and events on C-SPAN.org; watching
C-SPAN’s morning show, Washington Journal, which surveys newspaper
articles that discuss topics the show will address that episode, and which
features guests and experts as well as viewer call-in segments.
C-SPAN.org is an indispensable resource for performance analysis. The site
streams live video of a tremendous number of campaign events and news
conferences, and it makes the content available in archival form for future and
repeat viewings. The organization produces enough video of each of the
candidates to enable one to discern how the candidates matured or failed to
2
See http://www.c-span.org/video/?401762-1/presidential-candidate-donald-trump-rally-mount-pleasant-
south-carolina.
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mature in their performances over time. In its mission statement, C-SPAN
claims that it aims to ‘‘employ production values that accurately convey the
business of government rather than distract from it.’’3
When this ethos is applied
to filming campaign events, it results in content captured by a single camera
maintaining a static shot. It also translates into breaking the standard time
boundaries of the staged event, by capturing random anonymous people milling
about the event space prior to the show, for instance, and by allowing the
camera to linger on the attendees after the main event has ended.
From these initial resources I turned to aggregate sites such realclearpolitics.com,
which was also a resource for polling results and trends, and
drudgereport.com; news and analysis sites such as Politico.com; discussion
forums like reddit.com and its subreddits such as/r/the_donald, /r/sandersforpresident,
and/r/hillaryclinton as well as/r/AnybodyButHillary; video of all of
the debates, Sunday morning interviews and roundtable discussions, and clips
from cable television news programs made available via youtube.com and
realclearpolitics.com’s video webpage. I watched the parties’ debates on
youtube.com.
While I began with these resources, part of the methodological journey of
writing this article involved exploring the greater online media universe, striving
to identify its form, and searching for its outer limits. This exploration was
spurred foremost by signs of fracturing within the GOP, a splintering dynamic
that appeared first between its intellectual elite and its more populist and
popular representatives on cable television and AM radio, and second, between
its party elite and its voter base. To identify voices of opposition within the
party, or the ones that were not making it to television or mainstream
newspapers, I searched for conservative online forums and blogs. In these
spaces, I began to detect unanticipated references and to note repetitions of
phrases and symbols, all of which began to illuminate this media universe’s
referential and citational character as well as its tribalism (features which are
certainly not exclusive to conservative online forums).
I began to query participants in online forums – on the subreddit/r/
the_donald, for instance – about where they were turning for news and
opinion. Ultimately, however, this pulled me away from my research goal,
which was to represent not the periphery but the centers around and through
which the US was organizing – or, had been organizing, at least – its drama of
democracy. I analyze and represent the splintering, but I do so by hermeneutically
reconstructing it from the perspective of the commentators who have had
the most interpretive and constitutive power to date. As a consequence, most of
the data presented here are from fairly mainstream figures, or from people who
3
See https://www.c-span.org/about/mission/.
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have name recognition, and what I will call performative recognition, to the vast
majority of players involved in narrating these events.4
Analysis
Act one’s structural and performative features
Every four years the US holds a presidential election on the Tuesday following
the first Monday of November. Election Day is the dramatic focal point of the
competition for office, the day on which citizen-audiences enter the action and
resolve the plot by determining its outcome and naming a winner. The election
drama opens when aspirants begin formally announcing their candidacies,
which, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, means as early as the
spring and early summer months of the year preceding the election.
Senator Ted Cruz declared his candidacy in March 2015 and Senator Marco
Rubio announced in mid-April, while former Governor of Florida Jeb Bush, and
real estate mogul and reality television personality Donald Trump, waited until
June to enter the race for the Republican nomination. Hillary Clinton
announced her bid for the Democratic nomination in mid-April. Senator Bernie
Sanders of Vermont stepped into the media spotlight to challenge the former
Secretary of State at the end of the month, shortly after the symbol ‘‘TPP,’’ or the
abbreviation for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, entered political
news discourse. The New York Times web feature, ‘‘First Draft,’’ reported that,
‘‘Hillary Clinton [is] expected to treat Bernie Sanders Gingerly’’ (Haberman,
2015). While the posture seemed commonsensical in spring, its shrewdness
would come under scrutiny as the Clinton team entered the summer months,
when they would anxiously sweat through reports of Sanders’s meteoric rise
and his impressive, crowd-pleasing performances.
This timing, from spring 2015 to November 2016, gives this particular
presidential election drama a minimum of a twenty month run in the theater of
4
Many of these resources, from established institutions like the New York Times, to newer, web-only
blog sites like RedState.com and Breitbart.com, offer newsletter subscriptions, which consist of daily
emails containing titles and brief descriptions of the site’s articles and commentary, and links to other
content available at the site. I created a gmail account and subscribed to receive newsletters from the
sites listed here as well as a few others. These emails combined to create in my inbox an archive of the
campaign contest’s news coverage. The archive facilitated a structural hermeneutic analysis in
unexpected ways. For instance, browsing it swiftly and repeatedly produced an effect like that of a
flip book, in which players in the drama appeared as stick figures entering, moving about, and
exiting the stage. Browsing the archive like this cultivated recognition of the drama’s syntagmatic
development and flow, or of how signs were developing and shifting meaning as the events unfolded.
Being a series of emails filled with hyperlinks to texts, videos, audio podcasts, and user comments,
the archive allowed for pausing the ‘‘flipping’’ of the flip book pages in order to focus in on a
particular episode or event. As such, the emails contained links to materials that facilitated building a
paradigmatic or cross-sectional analysis.
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national news. The cycle’s extended duration has become part of the narrative
of presidential elections, part of the national consciousness, and like money’s
outsized role in politics, this feature is typically bemoaned by media critics and
citizens alike.5
This lengthy run has a twofold impact on the process as drama.
On the one hand, it makes the production’s general themes and central
characters broadly familiar to all but those who most diligently avoid media. On
the other, it cultivates a sense that the proceedings have a momentum of their
own, which in turn lends the production outsized autonomy from the audience,
and feeds the representation of an exclusive ‘‘establishment.’’
The players, narrators, and critics in and around the competition work
ceaselessly to establish a relationship with the drama’s intended audience, and
they insist that this relationship, and this drama, is of utmost importance. In its
entirety, this dramatic production comprises hundreds of performances, and the
spaces between are filled with reviews, rundowns of the latest opinion polls, and
projections. Running for almost two years, and populated by the nation’s
political elite and the stars of its news outlets, it is a production akin to having
an ardent high school student council produce the Oscars: it is bound to
alienate, jade, or simply bore, if only intermittently, all but the most invested
and the most ironic.
The election cycle’s first act runs from early spring, through the summer, and
into early fall, a period during which candidates filter onto stage and begin to
emplot (Ricoeur, 1988) themselves in the drama. Media professionals and
opinion-makers contribute mightily to this construction of characters and to
assembling an architecture of the dramatic field. Throughout the summer, the
networks’ Sunday morning news programs perform both functions within each
episode: conducting one-on-one interviews with the candidates, and following
these interviews with ‘round table’ discussions in which members of the
opinion-maker class diagnose the candidates’ strengths and weaknesses vis-a`-vis
one another and the electorate’s mood. During this period, candidates situate
themselves in relation to one another in terms of their biographical,
professional, and ideological similarities and differences. They also begin to
construct, in the broadest terms possible, plotlines that they believe will lend
them an advantage in the competition. Bernie Sanders’s entry into the race, and
his use of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement to define himself in
relation to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party base, illuminates the
performative tensions involved in character and plot development processes.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership entered political news discourse in March
2015, when treaty negotiations between the Obama administration and eleven
countries were coming to a close. The Obama administration and supporters of
5
For a sampling of articles and commentary complaining about the extended length of the US election
cycle, see MacGillis (2015), Parlapiano (2015), Colagrande (2015), Kurtzleben (2015), and Rikeus
(2016).
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the accord were seeking to ‘‘fast track’’ the bill, which would enhance the
President’s control over the treaty and reduce Congress’s role to an up or down
vote. Sanders began appearing on cable news channels such as CNN in midApril,
calling the TPP a ‘‘Trojan horse’’ piece of legislation that threatened US
workers. While he only announced with certainty that he was running to
become the Democratic presidential nominee on April 30, he began jockeying
for position weeks prior, making statements designed to force Hillary Clinton to
narrow the terms by which she could proclaim herself a Democrat; e.g., ‘‘This is
one you can’t waffle. You’re either for the T.P.P or against it,’’ Sanders insisted
throughout April (Chozick, 2015).
As mentioned, while act one is predominantly devoted to character
development, candidates also engage in plot construction, but only in the
broadest of terms. Their goal is to cultivate solidarity, and to build in voters a
sense of identification with oneself and one’s mission. Initially, solidarity is best
won through abstract statements, through simple declarations of belonging and
fellow-feeling. These consist of simple performatives about identity: ‘‘we are
alike, together we make a team, and I will lead this team.’’ This basis of
solidarity is tenuous as, by design, it contains few specified ingredients that
sustain the social stickiness. Yet this discursive mode is tremendously powerful
and strategically advantageous, as it draws the boundaries of one’s solidarity
sphere as widely as possible; it includes many while excluding few. Through
abstract performatives candidates construct sinews of meaning that build
identification. By keeping them general in content, the candidate preserves a
wide universe of maneuverability, and retains a position from which she can
narrow the boundaries of her inclusion by specifying with whom she agrees and
from whom she insists on difference, should she see advantage in specifying and
narrowing at a later date.
Abstract performatives also derive their power through their relative
impermeability to challenge and contradiction. It is difficult for a competitor
to assert that a candidate has contradicted herself when she makes such
statements as, ‘‘I am an American and I am a Democrat, and I will lead the
Democratic Party to victory in November.’’ It is far easier to press one’s
opposition into a dramatic bind when she issues a more specific, detailed
performative statement, such as ‘‘This TPP sets the gold standard in trade
agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade’’ (Carroll, 2015), as then
Secretary of State Clinton made in Australia in 2012.
Competition for popular support precipitates stronger avowals of solidarity
along narrower boundaries and increasingly exclusionary criteria. Sanders used
Clinton’s statement to force the candidate to narrow her solidarity appeals:
‘‘She’s going to have to be clear. It’s not a question of watching this. You’re
going to have determine which side are you on? Are you on the side of working
people who would suffer as a result of this disastrous trade agreement, and
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seeing their jobs go to China or Mexico, or are you on the side of corporate
America? It’s not a very difficult choice’’ (Acosta, 2015).
Sanders’s tactic simplified the symbolic logic such that Clinton could either
present herself as a pro-trade Democrat or as a staunch supporter and protector
of domestic labor, and effectively eliminated her ability to present herself as
representative of both. It forced Clinton to confront a question of how to
strategize maximizing solidarity boundaries. On the one hand, she could
reassert her support for TPP, and thereby narrow her identity boundaries and
shrink her pool of potential supporters, some of whom would likely pledge their
solidarity to Sanders as a result. On the other, she could announce that she is no
longer in favor of the TPP and that she would reject it if she were elected
president.
One consequence remains, however, in so doing she would narrow her
identity boundary by moving from ‘‘Democrat’’ to ‘‘Democrat who does not
favor free trade’’ of the TPP variety. This choice may enable to the candidate to
retain some potential Sanders supporters. However, should she win the party
nomination, this choice may cause her to lose the ability to cultivate solidarity
with some centrists and undecideds when the drama moves into the general
election. Plus, this choice would introduce into the drama additional threats to
her character: The costs of appearing to contradict oneself can be high, as these
instances erode one’s aura of authenticity, and can stir into the air sign
associations of waffling, flip-flopping, trimming, or of ‘‘being for something
before you were against it,’’ which is the pathway Clinton chose.
Audiences and collective mood
Act one contains an air of the carnivalesque (Bakhtin, 1968) and the antistructural
(Turner, 1995[1965]). Candidates enter the stage at uneven times.
People join the contest for reasons other than trying to win the presidency, such
as to raise awareness of particular social issues or to try to move party agendas
in particular directions. Yet, while the stage in act one becomes increasingly
crowded and chaotic, its action receives less media coverage and commands less
attention than the drama’s subsequent acts. Television viewership ratings
typically decline during the summer months; kids are out of their school
routines and into their summer ones, the days are longer, and people take
vacations, including politicians and media professionals. News that commands
national attention during this time tends to be event- or oddity-driven, like
2001s ‘‘summer of shark attacks.’’ The effect is akin to public access television;
it contains acts of varying degrees of preparedness and skill, there are some
familiar faces as well as some new ones, and hardly anyone is tuning in anyway.
Act one tends not to be nationalized. While the election drama establishes a
spot in the nightly national news, those who pay the closest attention to these
stories are the same citizens who are the subject of the media attention; they are
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older, whiter, and they more strongly identify with a party than general election
voters. Iowa and New Hampshire feature prominently in the first act.
Candidates need not win either, let alone both, the New Hampshire primary
and the Iowa caucus, but they must place in the top two or three in order to
retain the interpretive framework of representing true contenders for their
party’s nomination. Thus, in act one candidates orient primarily to these states’
voters. They devote considerable resources to cultivating an identity in each,
and to building relationships with their voters. Being physically present in the
state, meeting with people face to face, is valued highly. It facilitates the
legitimization process and the production of authenticity. The net effect of these
factors is that, in effort to build solidarity with these voters and to become their
ideal representation of the party, candidates are pulled toward avowing more
particularistic identities and making narrower, more specific policy claims than
will serve them well should they survive to face the broader, more diverse
general electorate in the following November.
On television, national political events typically show well-groomed candidates,
wearing well-tailored suits, standing behind lecterns on a set that is
predominantly painted, lit, or digitally rendered a shade of the national flag’s
Old Glory Blue, a shade that should be called electric-political blue. Splashes of
red and white adorn the set, the candidates’ lapels, and the digital layer added
between the liveness on stage and the home viewer’s eyes.
Act one, to the contrary, features scenes from the sun-washed fairgrounds of
Iowa, and the white pine-encircled lawns of New Hampshire, the very
juxtaposition of which punctures the sterility of the archetypical national
political event and accentuates local textures and peculiarities from which the
national is assembled and abstracted. The candidates are surrounded not by the
antiseptic, rationalized spaces of the professional political playing field, but by
fleshy Americans. Skin is visible. Candidates and citizens touch one another;
they shake hands and huddle together for selfies.
Scenes from New Hampshire are built of candidates speaking to small
gatherings of people in sparsely but patriotically festooned wooden barns, for
instance. Candidates may cultivate a sense of identification between their
audience members and themselves by substituting a sweater or flannel shirt into
their rotation of suits, or signal their approachability by wearing a blazer
without a tie. They wear the costume of New Hampshire Yankee reserve. On
the other hand, Iowa lends act one an air of the carnivalesque by literally
putting on a carnival. The Iowa State Fair levels the typical material and
symbolic boundaries that separate the powerful from the people. The future
president of the United States confronts the choice of having one’s meat-on-astick
bacon-wrapped or battered and deep fried. They may be shown navigating
around animal dung, or photographed next to a golden calf carved out of 600 lb
of butter.
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Act one in 2015 made inroads toward becoming nationalized, in terms of
increased media coverage and broader public attention, due in no small part to
scenes such as the following:
Hillary Rodham Clinton was strolling [the Iowa fairgrounds] on Saturday…
when the whirring sound of helicopter blades approached, then
grew louder, then louder still.
‘‘Look up in the sky!’’ Greta Tarbell, 63, cried out. ‘‘There’s Trump! He’s
got his own helicopter. Have at it, baby!’’
The black chopper with bold white letters spelling T-R-U-M-P circled the
fairgrounds once. Then twice. Then a third time. The Donald had arrived
(Rucker and Johnson 2015).
Summer 2015 had found its shark. Commentators named the electorate’s mood,
anti-establishment.
Enter Donald Trump
The first Republican primary debate
One of the earliest indications that the drama was being nationalized, if only
fractionally, occurred a week prior to Hillary and Donald’s outings to the state
fair. On August 6, Fox News Channel staged act one’s first televised primary
debate featuring the Republican Party’s ten highest polling candidates. The
event was conducted in the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, the same
performance space where Republicans would hold their national convention
eleven months later, in July 2016, at which the party would name its official
nominee to contend for the presidency in the general election.
The debate smashed television viewership records. Approximately 24 million
people tuned in, making it the most-watched presidential primary debate ever,
and the most viewed non-sports event in cable television history (Steinberg,
2015).6
Fox News hosts Megyn Kelly, Bret Baier, and Chris Wallace played the
moderators. The audience was rowdy and boisterous from the outset. Kelly
introduced the candidates. ‘‘Positioned on the stage by how they stand in the
polls,’’ she beamed, ‘‘in the center of the stage tonight, business man, Donald
Trump.’’ The camera framed Trump straight on. He waved hello with his right
hand, the crowd erupted, and the candidate mouthed a semi-audible ‘‘thank
6
To put into context the level of interest the event generated: the first Republican debate in 2011 drew
3.2 million viewers, and cable television’s most-watched series, Monday Night Football on ESPN,
averages 13.4 million viewers per game (Koblin, 2015). Compared to other television events that
blend the conventions of political analysis and entertainment, the debate far eclipsed Jon Stewart’s
farewell episode of The Daily Show, which aired the same night, hit the airwaves as the debate was
drawing to a close, and garnered the attention of 3.5 million viewers (Steinberg and Kissell, 2015).
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you, thank you.’’ Broadcasting audio from off-screen, a chuckle from Chris
Wallace could be heard accenting the audience’s hoots and applause.
Following the remaining introductions, Bret Baier segued the production into
its question and answer sequence by first posing a question to the entire group.
Were there any candidates unwilling to sign a pledge to support the Party’s
ultimate choice for the Republican nomination, and if so, Baier requested,
please raise your hand. The issue implicated the candidates’ loyalty and
obedience to the party, forced them to clarify their political identities, and to
reveal their degrees of solidarity with the clan. And it elevated the legitimation
process into deep play (Geertz, 1973a).
This opening choreography generated degrees of emotional intensity and onstage
energy that far exceed levels typical of presidential debates. It also
reiterated the centrality of Donald Trump. It established, even more clearly than
before, that this was Trump’s stage, that he was the lead, and that the drama
that followed would be the story of Trump.
As Baier initiated his question his voice was accompanied by a rising wave of
cacophony from the audience. The camera shifted from Baier to a shot of the
entire stage taken from stage right, giving the television audience a view of all
ten candidates fanned across the screen. Nine stood motionless. At center,
Trump leaned forward, and in a comedic gesture glanced down the row of
candidates to his right, as if checking to see if any hands had been raised.
Everyone in the arena knew that Trump was the only candidate refusing to sign
the pledge. It was a moment designed for the antics of a showman and a jester.
As Baier neared the end of his question, noise from the audience receded into
silence. Trump raised his right hand. The audience howled and booed, to which
Trump responded by adding his left hand, so that he stood before them with
both arms out, hands extended and palms up. With the one hand, Trump had
identified himself as the rebel, the individual, the autonomous agent onstage.
With the second hand, Trump had gestured, so be it, this is me, take me as I am.
As the audience continued its challenge, Trump performed again his two armed,
palms-up pose, simultaneously declaring his self-satisfaction and his demand
that the audience love him just as he is (Figure 1).
In the seconds that followed, Trump briefly revealed a capacity for
vulnerability. Baier began speaking again, and the television production
returned to a direct shot of Trump, revealing that his typical expression,
whereby his mouth rests between frown and scowl, had morphed into an
assertive smirk. He started to mouth a word, but failed to deliver even a full
syllable. It was a brief, singular glimpse of the candidate discombobulated.
Trump snapped back to composure quickly, and before Baier had finished
summarizing the implications of the candidate’s raised hand, Trump was
speaking over him in a measured, even tone, saying ‘‘I fully understand,’’ and
pausing, ‘‘I fully understand.’’
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The reply Trump delivered next may have been scripted, but it showed no trace
of it. He spoke as if extemporaneously. The flow of his words revealed no
rehearsed spaces for stops or pauses, no patterned and practiced place-holders for
emphasis, or conversely, for intimations of interior vulnerability, or spaces other
candidates might script for communicating splashes of biography and intimacy.
As the debate settled into its turn-taking flow of question and answer,
question and answer, Carson, then Rubio, and then Bush replied to their first
queries with responses that smacked of picked over scripts and multiple
rehearsals. Whereas in his delivery Trump projected the flow of uninhibited
speech, the flow of words coming from the other candidates betrayed the
cadence of written monologues. They appeared well-rehearsed both substantively,
in terms of what they said, as well as stylistically, in how they did their
saying: their words flowed from comma to comma, short pause, from comma to
period, longer pause, to comma, and so forth (Bush, groomed in the Bush style
of diction, being the exception). Trump, for instance, started his first full answer
with the words, ‘‘I cannot say I have to respect the person that, if it’s not me, the
person that wins. If I do win and I’m leading by quite a bit, uh, that’s what I
want to do.’’ Rubio, by contrast, started with the words, ‘‘Let me begin by
saying…,’’ and delivered them as if he had begun with this response dozens of
times before. It rang of practiced, and the practice dimension had never fallen
away such that the performance might approach the rhythm of skilled but
unpremeditated speech.
Before the debate’s first break, Trump interrupted Megyn Kelly as she
charged him with having a history of sexist language. Trump interjected, a
Figure 1: Candidate Donald Trump at the first Republican presidential primary debate, held on August 6,
2015, in Cleveland, Ohio. John Minchillo, Associated Press (Color online).
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single finger raised, ‘‘only Rosie O’Donnell.’’ The audience erupted with
laughter, and as Kelly tried to re-establish her question, Trump spoke over her,
saying ‘‘thank you’’ to the crowd, as if he were a comedian building intimacy
with his fans during his set. He responded to Kelly’s charge, stating, ‘‘I’ve been
challenged by many people and frankly I don’t have time for total political
correctness, and to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either.
This country is in big trouble. We don’t win anymore.’’ The audience adored
him for it. Trump worked the room for the remainder of the evening. He joked
and delivered asides. He grew angry, and routinely set his right arm into
motion, chopping at and puncturing the air around him. He pointed.
The production’s staging and choreography combined with Trump’s words
and comportment to project powerful representations of an autonomous and
authentic character. He was named a rebel at the outset when he was prompted
to raise his hand. He commanded center stage, and was spoken to and spoken
about more than any figure alongside him. He claimed that what he spoke he
knew with certainty; that it was truth, and that he truly felt what he expressed.
He claimed that his thoughts and feelings were just like those of his audience,
only better. Thus by speaking them, he simultaneously asserted that he was
authentic, or that he did not hide anything within him, and that he was brave,
because he alone was willing to speak what others also thought but dared not
voice. The production combined with Trump’s discourse and performative
stylings to cultivate dimensions of charisma (Smith, 2000). Trump used his
performative power, and played his character with force and swagger. The
audience listened, watched, interpreted. Over the course of the debate, a
considerable portion exchanged its howls of disapproval for cheers of rapturous
adoration. If one accepts the candidate’s premises, the characterization falls
within the rubric of what could make for a compelling leader. Between
performer and audience, legitimation was underway.
Collective representations and comportment
Presidential candidates aspire to lead an entire nation, one composed of a
multitude of groups, each formed around shared identity traits, and held
together by varying degrees of solidarity. The nation comprises individuals
whose selves represent varieties of combinations of these identities. The
challenge for candidates seeking office under these conditions is to signal both
identification and distance, both membership and autonomy, from these various
identity spheres. Candidates must appeal to particular identities and signal
solidarity with them, and they must distance themselves from others. Yet to
signal the capacity to lead the entire collectivity, a candidate must perform the
contradictory act of simultaneously embracing particularistic identities while
signaling a capacity to transcend them as well. Candidate Obama, for instance,
had to negotiate the boundary of race, and to signal a connection with the
African American community while also performing his autonomy from it
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(Alexander, 2010). Put another way, a candidate must indicate that she has the
capacity to understand and identify with a group’s basis of solidarity while not
being beholden to it. And to make it even more challenging, the candidate must
appear to walk the boundaries between these social spheres with authenticity.
Donald Trump, however, played by a different script, one carved not from
typical discourse of the political sphere but one cobbled together from television
and movie treatments of leaders and the political process. Commentators such
as Mark Shields (PBS NewsHour, 2015a) noted that he seemed to be part
Howard Beale, the unhinged television news personality in Network (1976). In
the film’s defining scene, Beale claims to speak what should be obvious to any
right-thinking individual: ‘‘I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody
knows things are bad… They’re crazy.’’ Solutions are not to be pursued through
detailed discussions about the problems; ‘‘first,’’ Beale instructs his TV audience,
‘‘you’ve got to get mad,’’ exhorting viewers to shout out of their windows, ‘I’m
mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!’’’ Others, such as Eliza
Berman (2015; see also Douthat, 2015) of Time.com, commented that in Trump
they saw dimensions of Bob Roberts (1992), the titular character in Tim
Robbins’s representation of a Senatorial candidate who is both a wealthy
businessman and an entertainer, as well as ‘‘something of an American fascist in
the making.’’ In the movie, candidate Roberts presents himself as a winner who
can clean up the mess that past and present politicians, all failures, have created.
He traffics in American nativism and nostalgia as well, performing at his
campaign events his folksongs, ‘‘Retake America,’’ ‘‘Times are Changin’ Back,’’
and ‘‘Complain.’’
Trump also projected the persona he inhabited in his reality television show,
The Apprentice, which aired 14 seasons, and was been broadcast on NBC from
2004 to 2015.7
In the show Trump plays himself, which he presents as an
authoritative, boardroom boss-like figure, one who speaks in simple characterizations
and declarations, with ‘‘you’re fired’’ being his signature phrase.
In these references, we see these fictional characters, and the broader themes
they represent – from voicing anger and initiating a reckoning, on the one hand,
to the dangers of charisma and callowness of the electorate, on the other –
shaping public interpretations of Trump and his campaign while the drama is
developing and unfolding. When Shields, Berman, and many untold others,
recall figures like Beale or Roberts – or Goldwater, Joe McCarthy, or Huey
Long – they are bringing to the fore particularly resonant dimensions of the
interpretive reservoir of shared signs, or the collective symbolic environment,
that texture the social drama as it takes on its form. Many redolent signs within
this universe inform our interpretations of Trump, even as they remain
unspoken. Whether we explicitly, and with intention, draw upon this
7
See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364782/?ref_=nm_flmg_slf_42.
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environment or not, it is operating on us, suggesting who Trump is not like –
Henry Fonda’s Young Mr. Lincoln, for instance – and who he is like.
For instance, Trump’s performance in the first Republican debate reintroduced
to America a character who could start and stop a machine with
the pound of his fist, and could attract women to his side with the snap of his
fingers. ‘‘It’s not a trick,’’ he once explained, ‘‘it’s a gift.’’ The audience knew
that The Fonz would fix the problem, and that they did not need to fully
understand how. He was a winner, and he was always in command. The other
characters in the show could trust him, as could the audience.
The Fonz was a lead character in the American situation-comedy television
show, Happy Days, which aired on the ABC network for ten years, from 1974
to 1984. The show was set in 1950s Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Stories were
typically set in either the living room and kitchen of the lead family’s suburban
home, or in the dining area and men’s bathroom of the local drive-in diner. The
show was laden with nostalgia for the simple troubles and sincere pleasures of
small city life in mid-century America. The cast was largely white, and most of
the show’s dialogue was spoken by teenage boys. When Trump says he is going
to ‘‘Make America Great Again,’’ Happy Days approximates the collective
representation he is conjuring.
The Fonz was a liminal figure in this universe. He was older than the teens but
younger than their parents. He was an outsider who was always around, and he
was clearly loved, respected, and admired by the other characters. He was a
problem solver. A central feature of his character, however, was that he had a
capacity for violence. When it appeared in the plot, it would be directed at
temporary characters introduced to harass and bully the show’s teenage leads.
The Fonz would intervene as the teens’ protector. He would stand up to the
bullies, and his aura of potential menace would prompt the bad guys to yield
and surrender. When The Fonz performed his capacity for violence, its lifespan
was short, and, being mobilized in the service of justice, it was followed by
applause. Trump and Fonzie are far from identical. Yet both figures perform an
exaggerated masculinity, for instance, and both pretend to fix problems with the
equivalent of a wave of the hand. Both project, in and through their bearing,
expectations of authority and respect in a manner that is performative in its
purest sense. They are both resistant to criticism, and are incapable of
apologizing except in a joking manner. In the debate, Trump was angrier and
more forceful, and with greater intensity and for longer duration, than The Fonz
ever indulged in. Yet Trump was also angrier and more forceful than real
political theater will typically indulge.
Why was Trump impervious to this stage’s typical rules of decorum? How did
he defuse the punitive and disciplining forces that he set into motion, forces that
sought to coral and subdue him, for at least the duration of the drama’s first act?
Part of his capacity to evade punishment – i.e., the destruction of his character’s
role within this dramatic context – resides in the way he used his body to
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acknowledge, but ultimately resist criticism from others and to dismiss their
demands that he engages in self-reflection.
Trump channeled The Fonz most powerfully when his ego was challenged. In
the first episode of Happy Days, Fonzie enters the men’s room of Arthur’s diner
to find Potsie struggling to unhook a brassiere he had earlier placed on the
radiator. Potsie fails, sputters nervous gibberish to Fonzie, and leaves. With the
bathroom to himself, The Fonz eyes the undergarment, rubs his fingers together,
and as he touches it the brassiere springs open. Fonzie then turns and walks to
the mirror to face himself, at which point he raises his hands to comb his hair.
He stops himself halfway, however. He lowers his arms a fraction and with
hands out and palms up as if to initiate an embrace, he leans back and shakes his
head slightly as if to say, ‘‘what did you expect, you’re perfect just as you are,’’
and then he casually exits the scene (Figure 2).
Through this gesture, Fonzie is forgiving himself for engaging in the act of
self-reflection as much as he is engaging in simple narcissism. To reflect is
superfluous, particularly if undertaken to analyze and alter oneself. To initiate
the act represents a momentary lapse in one’s knowing of oneself. It suggests
that he forgot who he was, a person who is flawless, and in engaging in
reflection, he has insulted, if slightly, himself as sovereign, and as a sovereign.
Having initiated the check for flaws, he must apologize and then forgive
himself, and thus restore a kind of unity. Inasmuch as it invites, Fonzie’s mirror
performance is a gesture that commands of its recipient: ‘‘Accept the truth as it
stands before you, and that truth is I that I am presenting myself to you in my
entirety, my inside is the same as I present myself on the outside. What you see is
me. I am flawless, and I am to be accepted, and loved… just as I am.’’
Trump gestured similarly in his debate performance, during moments in
which the audience expressed its disapproval, and when moderators asked him
Figure 2: The Fonz examining himself in the mirror on the television show, Happy Days. Screenshot from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQc9L2RbQkw (Color online).
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to reconsider his prior statements. Through performing the Fonzie-mirror
gesture, Trump was simultaneously acting out a refusal to engage in self critique
as well as an insistence that he knows, and we know, and he knows that we
know, that he is flawless, if not magical. ‘‘It’s not a trick,’’ he performs, ‘‘it’s a
gift.’’
Asked on The Graham Norton Show to explain the phrase, ‘‘jump the shark,’’
film director and former actor on Happy Days, Ron Howard, replied:
Well the show had gone and become a number one hit. Very successful.
And, along with it, there was sort of a culture around it. The mythology of
the Fonzie character, that started off as kind of a normal guy and then he
kept getting more and more powerful, tapping on jukeboxes, snapping his
fingers, girls would run, everything would happen. And, but audiences
loved it. And it was really working.
And so finally they decided that they would start off season, I think it was
probably season 5 or 6, with the biggest thing ever. Fonzie was going to
waterski and jump over a white shark (light audience laughter). And…we
did it.
But people tended to think years later that that was the point where the
show had kind of gone beyond the pale. And so then they started saying,
you know, that that’s Happy Days’s jumping the shark …moment, that it
sort of reached its high, and um sort of came down.
The reality is that it remained a number one show for a long time and after
I left the show it was a top ratings getter. So I don’t know how accurate it
is, but: jump the shark (-Dec. 4, 2015).
Contemporary lay pop culture criticism poses that this formula worked up
until the Fonzie character was set in a plot device so artificial that it defied even
the show’s already highly artificial parameters. Yet this was not the case. The
show continued for an additional six seasons, five of which it remained in the
top 25 most popular shows in Nielsen ratings, and during which Henry
Winkler, the actor who played The Fonz, continued to be nominated for and
win television awards for best actor in a comedy series.
In early-December 2015, Republican elites are asking themselves when
candidate Trump will begin to alienate voters and lose support. When will one
of his statements be interpreted by his supporters as so outrageous that it
breaches the boundaries of acceptable political discourse and effectively sinks
his campaign, they ask. Their question is as much about drama as it is about
rational discourse or political and material interests. Some portion of the
electorate on the right is cathecting with the character, not being swayed by his
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arguments, to the extent that he offers arguments that reach beyond simple
binary oppositions of us and them, heroes and villains, winners and losers.
Fonzie remained popular well after he jumped that shark.
Rewriting the political script
Trump’s plot is that America is in decline because its leaders are stupid losers who
have let the cunning leaders of foreign peoples out-negotiate them. Presidential
candidates’ plots have simple structures. They have a beginning, in which the
candidate names a problem; a middle, in which the candidate describes a plan,
however broadly, to fix the wrong; and an end, at which point the candidate
insists that, once elected, he will fix the problem and restore the nation to its
mythical greatness. Trump initiates a plot in similar fashion, by naming a
problem. He varies from typical plot form, however, in the middle element;
instead of naming a policy or plan, he shifts to character development – to a
winner, an experienced manager, and a strong negotiator. He then return to form
by closing the plot with the reiteration of his campaign slogan, namely that he
will ‘‘make America great again.’’ For instance, when asked to speak in greater
detail about the policies he may pursue if elected president, Trump replied:
‘‘Well, I think the press is more eager to see it than the voters, to be
honest,’’ he said. ‘‘I think the voters like me, they understand me, they
know I’m going to do the job.’’ … ‘‘But I know the press wants it,’’ he
continued. ‘‘I don’t think the people care. I think they trust me. I think they
know I’m going to make good deals for them’’ (Bump, 2015).
If the middle element of the plot is the policy or plan, then in Trump’s
formulation, the plan is the man, and the man is the plan. Like in the Fonziemirror
performance, the reflection in the mirror solves the riddle of how what
might be wrong will be fixed. Trump will bump it with his fist.
His script dictates that he make inflammatory characterizations of identities
who have been marginalized historically but whose claims for greater inclusion
and respect have received increased attention in recent years; basically of
women, and ethnic, racial, and religious minorities. In most cases, candidate
Trump responded to criticism of his comments by initially insisting that he was
telling the truth and that he will therefore not apologize. Next he would soften
his exclusionary rhetoric by adding caveats, or by insisting that the source of the
problem lie with who questioned him or with people misinterpreting him. He
would couch these strategies within the central theme of his campaign, that
good management and deal-making will reverse the poor decisions the nation’s
current, stupid leaders have been making.
Trump denigrated Mexican immigrants during his announcement speech (Jun
16), portraying them as a threat to the nation, and adding that ‘‘[t]hey’re
rapists.’’ In subsequent exchanges he added that he loved the Mexican people,
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that many Mexicans work for his companies, and that he will win the Latino
vote in the general election. Next he dismissed the notion that Senator John
McCain’s prisoner experience during the Vietnam War made him a hero (July
18), but that he liked ‘‘people who weren’t captured.’’ During an interview on
CNN the day after the first Republican debate (Aug 6), in which he was
questioned by moderator Megyn Kelly about his history of using sexist
language, Trump characterized Kelly’s demeanor during the exchange as, ‘‘You
could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her
wherever.’’ He later tweeted that ‘‘wherever’’ referred to her ‘‘nose,’’ and that ‘‘So
many ‘politically correct’ fools in our country. We have to all get back to work
and stop wasting time and energy on nonsense!’’ (Aug 8). He suggested that
Carly Fiorina was too ugly to be president (Sept 9). And when he was asked if he
would support registering Muslims within the US into a database, he replied
that he certainly would (Nov 20). While he initially insisted that the database
was not his idea but the interviewer’s, Trump later said that tracking techniques
were essential if the US wants to prevent the arrival of Syrian refugees, who in
videos look to be strong and very powerful men, from turning into a great
Trojan horse event (ABC News This Week, 2015). And during a campaign rally
in South Carolina in late November, after being challenged for asserting that
thousands of Muslims cheered in the streets of New Jersey when the World
Trade Centers were destroyed, Trump mocked the reporter who he claimed had
documented the celebrations. Trump locked his elbows to his side, raised his
forearms, made loose his wrists, and wiggled them about wildly, all while
pretending to imitate the reporter’s speech by collapsing syllables into one
another.
Performing charisma
Examining the biographies and political careers of Adolf Hitler, Winston
Churchill, and Martin Luther King Jr., Phil Smith (2000) finds that though these
figures were famous for inspiring oratory and captivating performances, they
were attributed the status of being charismatic for just brief periods of their
lives. Through comparative analysis, Smith describes how each of these
figures rose to prominence during periods defined by cultural climates in which
the binary symbolic code contrasting good to evil was unusually active and
perceived to be deeply threatened and troubled. It was through skillfully
performing salvation narratives under these cultural structural conditions,
Smith argues, that charismatic authority coalesced around these figures and
transformed them into mythical heroes and saviors. As the cultural conditions
changed, and the charge that had been animating the binary code of good versus
evil abated, Churchill’s and King Jr.’s charisma evaporated.
Trump narrated the American community as degraded and humiliated, as
being laughed at, and as having had suffered a string of losses. He specified
enemies and named threats. Performing exaggerated, clownish, and grotesque
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motions, he mimicked enemies with his body. Pointing and slashing downward
fiercely in his gestures, he attacked and threatened the enemies with his hands.
He insisted that he spoke common sense, or truths that everyone knew but were
afraid to speak. He asserted that this indicated he was brave, autonomous,
authentic, and rebellious. He commanded that details of problems or plans were
inessential, and suggested that requests for details represented efforts to
obfuscate and neuter. He was magic, he performed, and his audience must trust
in his special capacities. His wealth, after all, should be proof enough that he is
in command of unusual powers. And finally, in his grammatically simple
speech, he substituted himself in for the state.
One of my aims in this article is to demonstrate how analyzing performances
in a manner consistent with cultural pragmatic theory contributes to structural
hermeneutic research. In this instance, I have argued that a performance style
and technique, enacted within a system of signification that is structured by
collective representations, and shared codes and narratives, resulted in the
production of dimensions of charisma. My interpretation builds upon Smith’s
by representing Trump’s authority as charisma in its formation, and by
conceptualizing it as a partially realized interpretive status that remains entirely
susceptible to erosion and collapse. Thus my aim has been to represent
performance in a semi-durable cultural milieu but in a way that allows for
contingency, or for capturing processes of symbolic formation as well as those
that may precipitate its decomposition and dissipation. Trump will likely
continue to irritate the good versus evil binary in effort to render it the dominant
structure of the election’s cultural environment. His opposition will face the
difficult challenge of countering his dramatic energy by narrating that things are
not all that bad. Habermas argues that legitimacy must ultimately be rooted in
some rational justification. Yet rationality is not immune to cultural constitution.
When the very representatives of the production of facts are vulnerable to
delegitimation processes, their symbols – i.e., the results of their theoretically
guided, methodologically performed exercises in research – are susceptible to
being easily dismissed and ignored.
Political Parties as Solidarity Spheres: The Right Battles Within
In mid-June, shortly after entering the race for the Republican nomination,
Trump began a steady March to the top in Iowa, New Hampshire, and national
opinion polls. New Hampshire primary voters have picked the eventual
Republican nominee in four of the past six elections. Donald Trump averaged a
double digit lead over his competitors in New Hampshire opinion polls from
early August to early-December (realclearpolitics.com).
During Trump’s rise in the polls, elite conservative opinion-makers, such as
New York Times columnist David Brooks, shifted their interpretations of the
candidate from a figure who represented an unwelcome but minor distraction to
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one who posed a threat to the Republican Party’s very identity. In mid-July,
Trump registered his first mention in the Shields and Brooks segment of the PBS
Newshour. Brooks spoke briefly of Trump, ‘‘I don’t think he’s going to get any
air… he will just be a sideshow… and barely noticed, except for on a really slow
news day’’ (PBS NewsHour 2015b).
What is identified, and what kind of work is being done, when commentators
diagnose an electorate’s mood as ‘‘anti-establishment,’’ and make prognoses
about how this affect-collective favors particular characters while placing
others at a disadvantage? Through these statements commentators introduce
and name a character, the electorate; they attribute to it the property of being a
coherent collective entity while simultaneously identifying textures and cleavages
within it.
In these types of actions, commentators reflect on particular signs they deem
indicative of developments within the dramatic field, signs such as event
attendance, opinion polls, and monetary donations, and with these they build
plots which detail how each of the characters will fare under these particular
conditions as we all move forward, from plot point to plot point – primaries,
party nominations, general election – in the drama’s overarching narrative flow.
While this activity is in part descriptive, and based on collective signs broadly
accepted as indicative of a reality, it is also performative; that is, it is a
significant tool by which commentators enter the drama and affect change
within it without appearing to ever step foot on stage.
Put another way, commentators build the steps of the election staircase as we
ascend it, but they do not do so in entirely neutral ways. Naming the important
elements to which audiences should attend and should accept as indicative of
popular trends, emphasizing some signs while downplaying, dismissing, or
leaving others unstated: this is interpretive power, which can, under certain
conditions, be converted into constitutive power.
In his initial comment, Brooks emplotted Trump in the drama as effectively
having no future in it, or by essentially negating him as a phenomenon.
Negation proved infelicitous. A month later, with Trump still leading in the
polls, and continuing to keep anti-immigrant discourse at the center of the
Republican production, Brooks shifted his efforts from Trump the character to
the Republican audience, who, Brooks claimed, had been momentarily seduced
but would find its way back home:
What matters is that whether the Republican Party rediscovers where
George W. Bush was on immigration, where John McCain was on
immigration, where a lot of – where Bob Dole – where a lot of previous
nominees have been.
And the party has wandered into an anti-immigration or an antiimmigration
reform direction as a result of the rise of the talk radio part
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of the party. But that part of the party is waning, frankly, and I think it will
be very possible for Jeb Bush or Rubio, whoever the nominee is, to be
where McCain was and to be where George W. Bush was.
Those are not ancient history of the Republican Party. The party will
rediscover that moment (PBS NewsHour, 2015c).
Brooks’s framing created a gentle and non-punitive interpretive pathway for the
prodigal voter’s return. The Republican electorate is constructed as essentially
rational. While it was momentarily seduced by the siren song of talk radio, or
reality television, the affair has come to a close. Order, whereby the party’s the
central organizing ethos realigns with Brooks’s normative ideal of republican
conservatism, is in the process of being restored.
A month later, with Trump continuing to lead Republican opinion polls,
Brooks shifted to more forceful tactics:
Donald Trump’s voters are what they call low-information voters. They’re
classically the kind of people who don’t vote in primaries. In some sense,
his lead is completely – not completely, but largely artificial (PBS
NewsHour, 2015d).
Brooks returned to negation: Trump’s supporters, Brooks insists, will not play a
role in the political drama’s central plot points.
A week later, on the Fox News Sunday television program, George Will, also
an elite opinion-maker on the Right, tried a forceful and blunt approach to
dislodging Trump from the representational center of the Republican production.
Will embedded the unwanted dramatic element in a counter-narrative, and
insisted that it represented something other than it claimed to be. The signs
being interpreted as support for Trump did not, in fact, represent a robust antiestablishment
mood, or even authentic support for the candidate. Rather, those
who were supporting Trump were doing so based on the demands of the
dramatic structure; act one necessitates the introduction of a Trump, and that
the audience acts out a third version of the carnivalesque and anti-structural,
namely, that of ‘‘primal scream therapy’’:
What’s going on here is those deemed least qualified to be president are
most qualified to do what voters want done today, 160 days before the
first votes are cast in Iowa, which is send a message.
That was George Wallace’s engaging theme in 1968. He said, ‘‘Send them
a message,’’ in the end (INAUDIBLE), the pronoun ‘‘them’’ is anything you
wanted it to be. So, that’s what they’re doing.
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This is a version of the 1960s fad call primal scream therapy. You’re
supposed to shout and get rid of all your repressed pain from childhood.
This is particularly so for Mr. Trump and what makes him fragile as a
candidate is, first of all, he’s a one-trick pony. He consists of saying ‘‘I’m
rich. Everyone who disagrees with me is stupid and all our problems are
simple if you put me in charge.
Second, people haven’t yet reminded themselves of the peculiar intimacy
we live with our presidents now. They are in our living room every night.
They’re constantly in the national consciousness.
And third, since we are at the end of this going to send a president, people
have to say, ‘‘Do we really want to give nuclear weapons to Donald
Trump?’’ – at which point I think things change’’ (FOX News Sunday,
2015).
Here we see Will name the audience as a character, and narrate how its actions
are determined by our location in the dramatic arc; in act one we always hear
the primal scream, he suggests.
Will draws to the fore the president’s role in political dramas of the twentyfirst
century, and encourages the Republican electorate to think about having
Trump play such an intimate and familiar part in their lives for the next four
years. From the merely unpleasant, Will shifts to the cataclysmic, and as if
smacking someone’s face to restore focus from delusion, he introduces to the
story the most potent symbol of presidential power, the nuclear bomb, and
insists that people must ask themselves if they want Trump to control such
instruments of devastation. In closing Will returns to narrating dramatic
structure: ‘‘act one, the primal scream phase, comes to a close when people have
moved through the steps I have just narrated,’’ he suggests.
Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative think tank, American Enterprise
Institute, (no relation to David Brooks), followed Will’s comment on the
program by reiterating David Brooks’ characterization of Trump supporters:
Well, George Will is right. This is a low information, high entertainment,
high protest movement. It’s summertime. It’s the same thing in the movies.
It’s low information, high entertainment.
And this is what you see. If this persists past Labor Day, it’s something for
the Republican Party to panic about.
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The show’s moderator, Chris Wallace, quickly interjected:
Let me interrupt for a moment… because I get e-mails. Maybe you do. But
I certainly get e-mails.
And you were saying to me – when you say low information, that just
makes people’s blood boil. They say this isn’t low information. This is a
considered judgment. We think the politicians we’ve elected – you know,
the Republican said, give us majority in 2010, 2014, things haven’t
changed. Barack Obama talked about hope and change. They haven’t
changed in the right direction.
They say this isn’t low information. They’ve gotten something that you
haven’t gotten.
In the preceding examples, we see conservative commentators channeling
their inner Vladimir Propp or Roland Barthes; they perform a lay structuralism,
and through seeking to impose a grammar on the narrative (Barthes, 1977c),
they do their structuralism performatively, in hopes of making their interpretations
a reality.
While political commentators such as Brooks and Will have tremendous
constitutive power in terms of crafting and disseminate their narratives about
party, politics, and nation, their voices are not determinative. In addition, the
legitimacy with which they wield their power and occupy their roles has eroded
considerably in the opening decade and a half of the twenty-first century. David
Brooks, in his comment above, named talk radio culture as a malignant
interpretive force within the party.
In early November, George Will took similar aim: he penned a column that he
opened with the lines, ‘‘Donald Trump is just one symptom of today’s cultural
pathology of self-validating vehemence with blustery certitudes substituting for
evidence. Another is the fact that the book atop the New York Times non-fiction
bestseller list is a tissue of unsubstantiated assertions’’ (Washington Post Nov.5).
That book was, Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency,
written by Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, and his co-author, Martin Dugard. Fox
News Channel launched in 1996, and has since established itself to be, in the
words of Mark Shields, ‘‘the validator… the gatekeeper for Republican,
particularly conservative voters.’’ In other words, it has accrued legitimacy.
Will appeared on O’Reilly’s television show, The O’Reilly Factor, the night
following his column’s publication. During the heated exchange, Will asserted
that O’Reilly was ‘‘doing the work of the left, which knows that in order to
discredit conservatism it must destroy Reagan’s reputation as a president and
your book does the work of the American left with its extreme recklessness.’’
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If one battle line is emerging between members of its commentariat, a second
one has formed in Congress. The current boundary wars over and within the
Republican Party – were fueled by the party’s losses to Barack Obama in 2008 and
2012, in which John McCain and Mitt Romney, each of whom struggled to win
the party nomination, were interpreted as insufficiently conservative, and as being
RINO’s, or Republicans in Name Only. The Tea Party emerged within the party in
2009, as a reaction to what its initial members interpreted as an excessive
economic stimulus package designed by President Obama to stanch and reverse
the effects of the banking and housing crises of 2008. While since its inception the
Tea Party has lost considerable momentum as a grassroots movement, it has
nonetheless had considerable success in institutionalizing itself in Congress. The
Republicans regained control of the House in the 2010 midterms, in fact, due in no
small part to the Tea Party movement. It was this victory for the party, one of
historic proportions, which moved Republican Representative John Boehner into
the position of Speaker of the House. Close curtain.
Curtain rises, just under five years later: The Congressional Republicans who
most clearly represent the legacy of the Tea Party, now known as the Freedom
Caucus, won a significant victory in the intraparty boundary war’s latest flareup,
when House Speaker, John Boehner, resigned his Speakership and was
replaced by Representative Paul Ryan in early November. In 2012, when Mitt
Romney was being constructed as insufficiently conservative to represent the
Republican Party, he made Paul Ryan his running mate in order to signal to Tea
Party conservatives that they would be represented in his administration. Ryan,
he astutely observed, adequately represented that vibrant tribe within the party.
While use of the term RINO has receded, and the Tea Party movement has
lost much of its steam, the party continues to battle over the central organizing
components: over what it means when one claims to be a Republican, over what
shall be the party’s dominant ethos, over what policies and strategies flow from
the ethos, and foremost, over who shall stand in for and represent the party as
its nominee for the presidency.
The competition for that position is the battle to determine the party’s identity.
The outcome, and the means by which it is reached, will influence how many
Republicans continue to recognize themselves in that identity, and greatly shape
the degree to which they feel attached to it and be moved by it. That is, the
resolution of this internal battle will inevitably determine the intensity of
solidarity the Party’s ultimate candidate can generate not only within party
members, but in those on its edges, and in those voters who linger in the country’s
political center. Solidarity is what moves people to disrupt their routines – to get
up early, to negotiate bad weather, to stand in line – in order to vote.
Solidarity stems not just from identification with a party, however. It is also
fueled by the desire to perform and reiterate difference; it is cultivated, and may
be mobilized against, powerful symbols of that which people oppose. In the US,
this means symbols of what is undemocratic or anti-American, and for the
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Right, the material repository of these meanings and sentiments is Hillary
Clinton.
The Two Hillary Clintons
Act one is predominantly devoted to character development. Having been in the
national spotlight on and off for a quarter century, Hillary Clinton entered the
field in 2015 a symbolically saturated figure. Her body, or her televisual image,
is not simply capable of instantaneously activating interpretive frameworks; it is
incapable of not activating well established and deeply intuited reservoirs of
sense making. She is a collective representation – e.g., ‘‘Re–Re–Re-Reintroducing
Hillary Clinton,’’ New York Times Magazine, Jul. 15, 2015 – and a deeply
divided and deeply divisive one: e.g., ‘‘Scandal at Clinton Inc.,’’ The New
Republic, Sept. 22, 2013; ‘‘Planet Hillary,’’ The New York Times Magazine,
Jan. 24, 2014; ‘‘Can Anyone Stop Hillary,’’ Time Magazine, Jan. 27, 2014;
‘‘Hillary’s Inevitability Trap,’’ The New Yorker, Nov. 17, 2014; etc.
When Mrs. Clinton appears on the television screen her imagine activates
within the viewer’s visual register, depending on their predilection or aversion to
the candidate, one of two sign constellations.
For those sympathetic to her, her cause, her journey, and her struggle, Mrs.
Clinton’s image connotes a figure who blurred and transcended pernicious,
restrictive boundaries, who rewrote the role of the First Lady and its relation to
the office of presidency, and one who has over the years pursued an ambitious
series of professional roles while sustaining family and intimate relationships –
all while under the aggressive gaze of the media and public, and in pathbreaking
fashion. In this register, she is the author of the most ambitious
domestic policy proposal since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society; she survived
personal humiliation in the most public of ways while keeping her dignity
intact; and she is a former Senator, a former Secretary of State, and she is a
legitimate contender for the presidency of the United States.
On the other hand, since her first step onto the national stage, Clinton’s
performance of professionalism and womanhood have also been met with and
inspired deep suspicion. For a sizeable portion of the American audience,
Clinton’s image on the television screen activates signs such as cattle futures,
Whitewater, missing documents and Vince Foster; a feminist who privileges her
aspirations for power over her personal relationships and personal dignity;
carpetbagger and Benghazi; and ultimately, in the late William Safire’s pointed
characterization, she represents ‘‘a congenital liar.’’
The meaning of Hillary for any particular voter varies within and between
these two frameworks, of course. One person may see her as a combination of
any number of signs within one of these constellations, while another, albeit
rarer figure, may see her as a composite of signs drawn from both symbolic
arenas. Yet these frameworks formed and crystallized over time, and while they
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represent her public identities in particular, many of the signs within the
frameworks – such as representations of womanhood, representations of
holders of power, and representations of women who hold or seek to hold
power – are tethered to categories that transcend her as individual, categories
that predate her by many years, and by many generations. With such a saturated
symbolic matrix, she is limited in her capacity to perform her character into new
terrains of meaning, or to redraw the symbolic boundaries that constitute her.
In late July, when the words ‘‘email’’ and ‘‘server’’ followed her name like
insatiable zombies, Judy Woodruff asked Mark Shields and David Brooks on
the PBS Newshour if they thought the candidate was at risk of being
overwhelmed by the story. Shields, the act’s left-leaning character, commented,
‘‘the problem it brings back, there’s two Clintons.’’ He continued:
There’s the Clinton of great boom, the lowest unemployment, the balanced
budget, happy and prosperous and optimistic and confident America. And
there’s the Clinton memories of the Whitewater and those law firm billing
rights that were miraculously discovered in the family quarters of the
White House. And all this lack of candor of what the meaning of ‘‘is,’’ all
of this comes back, and I just – I think it hurt her in 2007, when she was
running against Barack Obama (PBS NewsHour 2015e).
The ghosts of the past weigh heavily on the brains of the present. Bill Clinton,
too, had a ‘‘there’s two Clintons’’ problem (Mast, 2013). Shields is a savvy
commentator and reader of the political field. Yet, while his characterization of
Hillary’s split symbolic framework is prescient, it also reveals a slippage
whereby Hillary’s character is merged with, and partially subsumed within, that
of her husband, his presidency, and a still more amorphous signifier, ‘‘Clinton.’’
The comment shows that tenacious interpretive structures, formed during the
past two and a half decades, will frame each of her performances. Hillary, it is
claimed: is secretive, and has deep and dark secrets. She organizes dense bunkers
around her, and is compulsively untransparent. The Clinton Foundation is
representative of these qualities, and it is built, and has enriched itself and the
Clintons themselves, through dubious social connections from around the globe,
and with figures from Wall Street.
The scandal framework exists and awaits her; it arrived on stage and
started setting up well before the former Secretary officially announced her
candidacy. It is effectively predetermined; it will involve an excess of details,
embedded in narratives that take investigators and audiences back and deep
into hazy state, financial, and social capital networks. Her accusers will
overpromise what they will reveal about her, and she will drain the drama of
energy with delays, alternately precise and passive language, and by narrating
her opposition as continuing to play from that dusty script, ‘‘the politics of
personal destruction.’’
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Many of these elements helped to precipitate the creation of the House Select
Committee on Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi and to
compel former Secretary Clinton to testify before the Committee in a public
hearing. Clinton’s campaign suffered summer doldrums, and her chances for
attaining the presidency were imperiled not solely by email and Benghazi
investigations but also the ‘‘political revolutionary,’’ Bernie Sanders, who, like
Trump, performed in a manner and from a script that cultivated dimensions of
charisma, though one of a decidedly different variety than that constructed by
Trump.
It was candidate Clinton’s performances on television in mid-October, in the
first Democratic debate and before the Benghazi Committee, which revived her
campaign and lent it a modicum of direction after having drifted all but
rudderless through the summer. Clinton appeared before the Benghazi Committee
on October 22. Three weeks prior (Sept. 29), in a segment titled ‘‘GOP
Shakeup’’ on Sean Hannity’s Fox News (2015) interview program, House
Majority Leader, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), stated that Clinton’s campaign for
the presidency was struggling because the House Benghazi Committee’s
investigation had rendered her ‘‘untrustable.’’ Representative McCarthy held
considerable power within Republican ranks. House Speaker John Boenher was
set to vacate his Speakership, and McCarthy had been targeted as his likely
successor. Yet in the Hannity interview he spoke lines that nearly parroted
verbatim the Clinton team’s framing of the Benghazi Committee, namely, that it
represented an illegitimate and politically motivated effort to derail her bid for
the presidency.
McCarthy’s performative ineptitude was staggering. For three minutes
Hannity and Rep. McCarthy took turns expressing their frustrations with the
inability of House Republicans to enact their agenda. At the four minute mark,
the two slipped into a dialogue and give-and-take cadence more suggestive of a
buddy comedy than a ‘‘news’’ interview.8
McCarthy displaced Hannity from the
role of interviewer and began to play both roles, interviewer and interviewee,
and interjected: ‘‘The question I think you really want to ask me is, how am I
going to be different (from Boehner as House Speaker)’’? Hannity joked, ‘‘I love
how you ask my questions. But go ahead, that is one of my questions. Go right
ahead.’’ McCarthy – lively, engaged, and very much energized – laughed sharply
and briefly, and continued as if he were speaking to a close friend:
I knew you’d want to ask it. What you’re going to see is a conservative
speaker that takes a conservative Congress that puts a strategy (in place) to
fight and win.
8
See Norton (2011) for a structural hermeneutic interpretation of the Fox News show, The O’Reilly
Factor, which demonstrates how this genre of television programming legitimate their partisan
assertions and conclusions.
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His speech slowed and became more measured, and his pronunciation became
clearer, lending it the effect of sounding more intentional. He paused
deliberately after each sentence, and stressed particular words, punching them
up for emphasis:
And let me give you one example. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was
unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a
select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are
dropping. Why? Because she’s un-trustable. But no one would have
known any of that had happened had we not fought and made that
happen.
McCarthy played the role of the politically motivated villain seamlessly and
with glee. Failing to anticipate the dramatic implications of the role he had
conjured forth into the interview and inhabited with enthusiasm, McCarthy had
performed away a great deal of his constitutive power. No longer considered a
reliable narrator of the GOP cause, McCarthy was also no longer considered a
tenable candidate for the Speakership position.
It was a gift to former Secretary, as it radically altered the dramatic landscape
she was set to enter when she would sit before the Benghazi committee. Prior to
McCarthy’s ill-considered intervention, tension had escalated in advance of
Clinton’s ‘‘long awaited appearance.’’ Expectations for conflict and heated
exchanges had grown, as had anticipation of possible new revelations, new plot
points and character developments, that might add fuel to the narrative fire.
McCarthy’s comments deflated expectations, however. Most significantly, they
allowed Clinton to enter the production in a far more favorable role, one
significantly easier for her to play. Prior to McCarthy’s blunder, Clinton would
have needed to use her performance before the committee to staunchly defend
herself but without appearing excessively defensive, evasive, or secretive. She
also would have needed to move onto the offensive but without appearing too
aggressive. As an actor, she would have entered the stage, the ornate meeting
room of the House Ways and Means Committee, with a sense that the stakes of
her performance were enormous. In terms of style and technique, her task
would have been exceptionally challenging, and with television cameras
instantly capturing whatever she happened to perform in the moment, she
would have had little room for slippage.
In terms of character, prior to McCarthy effectively declaring that the
investigation was politically motivated, Clinton would have entered the stage as
a figure of suspicion, as if an accused figure on trial. She would not have been
bound in handcuffs or wearing the orange jumpsuit that signifies prisoner, of
course, but she would have entered the drama playing a defendant’s role. In this
position her status, or the symbolic weight conveyed by titles like former
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Senator and Cabinet Member, would have been destabilized, even if partially.
And the characters sitting opposite her would have had greater space to
represent themselves in the drama not even as her equal but as having authority
over her.
After McCarthy’s gaffe, however, any dimensions of suspiciousness Clinton’s
character retained were matched by an equal measure of victimhood. No longer
reduced to mere suspect, she was able to perform the role of a senior
statesperson, one worthy of deference, and one capable of commanding respect
without being met with a snicker or raised eyebrow. She was able to play the
role that she had played effectively many times in the past, one of devoted public
servant who was being dragged through a degradation ceremony, a show trial,
by politically motivated opposition.
She played it superbly, and was helped tremendously by a talented supporting
cast. Republican members of the committee pressed and prodded the former
Secretary, used sarcasm to dismiss her responses, and employed props such as
stacks of paper meant to give material form to the emails Secretary Clinton had
sent and received via her private server. They aimed for damning symbolism, or
to turn emails and a computer hard drive into a smoking gun. Instead the props
registered as merely mundane, and the investigative efforts as petty.
Critically, the panel members slipped into moments of internal bickering,
which escalated periodically into shouting matches. Offering a highly effective
counter-performance, Democratic committee member, Elijah E. Cummings
(Maryland), played the role of an exasperated bystander witnessing a ridiculous
act of persecution. Through his dialogue and hand gestures, Cummings
Figure 3: Representatives Trey Gowdy, left, and Elijah E. Cummings, right, arguing during Hillary Clinton’s
appearance before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, on October 22, 2015. Screenshot from https://
www.c-span.org/video/?328699-1/hillary-clinton-testimony-house-select-committee-benghazi-part-1 (Color
online).
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disrupted the Republican production by claiming to represent common sense.
His performance allowed viewers to identify with a representative of critique
operating from within the production itself. ‘‘He is the reasonable one, I would
be like him,’’ those sympathetic to Clinton could think to themselves (Figure 3).
As the committee members slid into episodes of in-fighting, Clinton was able
to perform a character of rationality and patient bemusement, as if she had been
forced to participate in a silly spectacle (Figure 4).
Yet Clinton also found moments to perform registers of poignancy, moments
created by another sympathetic and skilled supporting cast member, Democratic
committee member, Adam Schiff (CA). After specifying who the villains
were on stage, Schiff shifted the drama’s tone from the professional and
bureaucratic into the realm of the private sphere, toward friendship, camaraderie,
loyalty, and loss:
it is the actions of the committee that are the most damning of all, because
they have been singly focused on you… I know the ambassador was a
friend of yours, and I wonder if you would like to comment on what it’s
like to be the subject of an allegation that you deliberately interfered with
security that cost the life of a friend (Ambassador Chris Stevens)
(Washington Post Staff, 2015).
Schiff’s set up effectively softened the lighting, shuffled the other committee
members toward the stage wings and into the shadows, and allowed the former
Secretary to inhabit center stage, solo. Clinton replied:
Figure 4: Hillary Clinton watches on as Representatives Trey Gowdy, Elijah Cummings, and Adam Schiff
argue during her appearance before the House Select Committee on Benghazi (Oct. 22, 2015). Screenshot
from https://www.c-span.org/video/?328699-1/hillary-clinton-testimony-house-select-committee-benghazipart-1
(Color online).
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You know, I’ve – I would imagine I’ve thought more about what happened
than all of you put together. I’ve lost more sleep than all of you put
together. I have been wracking my brain about what more could have been
done or should have been done (ibid).
Softening her tone, the former Secretary conjured images of extended
contemplation, and hit notes of grief and loss. Her performance forcefully
disrupted the investigative and prosecutorial script the Republicans had been
both playing and denied to be playing (Figure 5).
Clinton’s performance was highly effective. Her standing in national polls
increased, and online commentary indicated that her performance before the
Benghazi Committee was an important contribution to lifting her formerly
enervated campaign. The ‘‘top comment’’ to a Slate.com story titled,
‘‘Democrats Just Can’t Muster That Much Enthusiasm for 2016’’ (Newell,
2015), read:
I feel better about it after seeing her performance in the GOP committee
that is ‘looking into benghazi’ or whatever they say. – by Open Range
Much of the drama of the transfer of presidential power remains to be
performed. Candidate Clinton’s challenge is less to change herself than to
identify and perform a coherent arrangement of signs drawn from within the
positive side of her framework outlined above, and to do so consistently; this
represents her pathway to authenticity, to the extent that her current symbolic
Figure 5: Hillary Clinton expressing sorrow before the House Select Committee on Benghazi (Oct. 22, 2015)
over the loss of former US Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens. Screenshot from https://www.c-span.org/
video/?328699-1/hillary-clinton-testimony-house-select-committee-benghazi-part-1 (Color online).
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constraints will allow this interpretive category to form and coalesce around
her.
The Dramatic Field at the Close of Act One
Yet the dramatic field in which Hillary Clinton will perform her second act will
contain two other leads, both of whom had successfully generated dimensions
of charisma about their characters. With the slogan, ‘‘Make America Great
Again,’’ Trump conjured 1950s America, and cast himself in this imaginary
setting as outsider figure, one akin to the Fonzie role.
He projected a character that is neither consistently nor coherently antiauthority,
but one that is capable, willing, and sometimes even eager to stand up
to authority figures, be they of a government, entrepreneurial, or civilian
variety. The character showed an appetite for momentary thrills and a capacity
for chaos, and that he was unapologetic about his tendencies toward self-
aggrandizement.
Sanders, too, cultivated degrees of charisma. Like Trump he performed
narratives of threat, but his were about threats to dignity and purpose rather
than the sting of being laughed at or the stain of humiliation. He too performed
a quasi-anti-authority character, but his was anchored in a coherent and
recognizably intellectualist script about economic exploitation. His villains were
systemic – ‘‘the system is rigged against us’’ – inasmuch as they were particular
people or social roles, Wall Street bankers and ‘‘the one percent’’ notwithstanding.
Sanders appeared to aggressively disregard his costume, hair, and
appearance more broadly. In so doing, he has performed the binary of style
versus substance – an interpretive schema, not a social fact or law – whereby an
excess of one is interpreted as indicating a necessary decrease in the other.
Having presented himself as clearly not interested in style and appearance, he
must be all about substance and depth, the costume connoted.
These conditions leave very little dramatic space for another variety of
charisma, and few alternative archetypes of outsider or anti-establishment
characters, as well. Early on the Clinton campaign sought to cultivate gender as
indicative of the candidate representing an outsider or rebel, given the US’s
legacy of all male presidents. In this context, it found little purchase.
To the contrary, Hillary Clinton was effectively placed in the role of
administrator and establishmentarian. The drama developed tropes of a high
school contest for authority. Trump affected a ‘‘greaser,’’ outsider character, one
who could part the hallways of students and teachers with his swagger of
unpredictability and potential menace. Sanders wandered the hallways slightly
less conspicuously, but the ruffled copy of the Daily Worker under his arm
cultivated curiosity and some intrigue. Candidate Clinton was left representing
a character somewhere between a hallway monitor and a student council
representative with her eyes on class president.
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As a consequence, her performances of expert knowledge and bureaucratic,
managerial skill reiterated her position within a character type that has been
decidedly unpopular to date. This character formation sits precariously vis-a`-vis
the plots she will face in the general election. In this symbolic contest, her
private email server will be more easily constructed as representing either gross
oversight or simple duplicitousness and deception. How could the aspiring
student class president fail to know the rules, after all? Likewise, should she be
interpreted as guilty, a failure to punish her would clash with American
democracy’s narrative of egalitarianism before the law. What has been given
little voice in the public, political discourse to date (as of Dec. 2015), is the
degree to which the standards for judging candidate Clinton’s choices and
actions have been much stricter than those applied to her male competitors.
Candidate Clinton’s success in the Benghazi performance is perhaps most
revealing of her character bind. The emotions she expressed in response to the
loss of her comrades garnered considerable press attention and favorable
commentary. Thus her performative success came foremost through her
demonstrations of loss, grief, empathy, and compassion. Selecting and deeming
her emotional moments noteworthy, praiseworthy, and broadcast-worthy,
reiterated that the central features of her campaign character were the opposite:
those of an administrator or establishmentarian, or one who interprets through
policy and data, and who is only capable of acting based upon metrics of
‘‘triangulation.’’
At the close of act one, these candidates’ characters had formed into collective
representations of authority types. The men had cultivated quasi-charismatic
personas, though of two very different stylized varieties, while Clinton had been
relegated to the role of administrator, establishmentarian, or worse still: a
figure of traditional authority, i.e., ‘‘coronation.’’
Conclusion
Political campaigns are about the production of meaning, and their outcomes
are determined to a large extent by how well their leads, the candidates, perform
these meanings to citizen-audiences. Candidates seek to craft the meaning of
their campaign’s foremost symbol, themselves. Yet a candidate’s capacity to
control her own meaning – the constellation that comprises her own character –
is limited. Candidates perform about themselves but also about each other, and
a vast and complex network of commentators, from news reporters to late night
television hosts to talk radio hosts to bloggers, engage in the meaning
production as well, though with widely varying degrees of constitutive power.
Meaning is produced by these figures engaging in the act intentionally, but
candidates’ meanings are also shaped by non-intentional, or structural elements,
as well. As a field of candidates forms, the collective dimension of the field
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affects the interpretive schema of similarities and differences between the
candidates. In the battle for party nominations, for instance, a reformist
candidate on the Left may be rendered merely centrist when a socialist steps to
the stage, while a staunch conservative may morph into a ‘‘progressive
republican’’ when a reactionary xenophobe enters the drama. The effects of
structure and form are further heightened in the general election, when all
parties’ final candidates face one another. Their characters bear the residue and
scars of the prior twenty months of meaning work, and in the end, voters may
be motivated by the simple binary logic of ‘‘anybody but someone from the
other party.’’
Finally, events introduce to the drama a dimension of contingency that can
scatter meanings and re-order the dramatic field. Though events are narrated
and folded into the drama’s existing plots, they have a reconstituting power as
well, such as the ability, for instance, to turn an audience’s ‘‘anti-establishment’’
mood into one in search of reassurance, and attuned to signs of experience and a
measured temper.
The terrorist attack in Paris on 13 November, for instance, effectively scuttled
Ben Carson’s moment atop Republican opinion polls. Soft-spoken in style but
vocal about being religiously devout, the neurosurgeon was increasingly being
interpreted as an alternative to the brash stylings of Donald Trump. Carson’s
star began to rise in August 2015, and continued to trend upward through the
next two months when he caught and even surpassed Trump in the polls in early
November. Carson had risen despite developing a reputation for bungling
questions about foreign affairs, however. When ISIL terrorists murdered and
maimed hundreds of people on the streets, in cafes, and in the performance
venues of Paris, the redolent symbol of a terrorist attack on the homeland was
re-introduced, and with considerable energy, into the presidential competition’s
dramatic field. With the stage’s backdrop replaced by a battle scene, Carson’s
understated presentation of self combined with his flubbed performances as an
aspiring ‘‘commander’’ to render him an untenable alternative to Trump and the
other contenders. Carson’s polls numbers began to slide immediately after Paris,
and show no signs of recovering as of early-December.
The stage’s backdrop shifted again on 2 December, when the battle field of
Paris’s Bataclan theater was replaced with the Inland Regional Center in San
Bernardino, California. Again, ISIL sympathizers, though this time a married
couple, murdered and maimed dozens of Center’s workers and service
recipients. A twitter user tweeted, ‘‘@realDonaldTrump his poll numbers jump
every time instances like this occur.’’ Candidate Trump retweeted it. This time
he was being accurate.
Political power and the practice of politics in the US are in flux and poised to
undergo considerable transformation. Party boundaries are straining and
threatening to collapse under a strength of forces not seen since the era of the
Civil Rights movements and Watergate. Elites’ power to diagnose and
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characterize the social and natural worlds is diminished, and voices of experts be
they of the political, media, social-policy, or scientific variety- are
increasingly being met with suspicion, resistance, and even disdain. These
signals of stress are accompanied by another powerful indicator of flux: sizeable
portions of the citizen public are demonstrating not only a tolerance for
candidates who bend the norms of political and civil discourse but a will to
celebrate such transgressive performative acts.
Variations within notwithstanding, act one revealed an angry audience in an
anti-establishment mood. As the first act is drawn to a close, a sizeable portion
of the electorate on the Left was rallying around the theme of political
revolution. A large proportion of the Right, on the other hand, was attributing
legitimacy not to figures with political experience or policy expertise but those
who foreground their personalities and who routinely deploy exclusionary and
apocalyptic discourse.
Boundary troubles, destabilized structures, genre defying performances are
the dominant characteristics of the 2016 presidential election drama’s opening
act, and they indicate that creative and destructive energies are at play.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx (1990) set out to
explain why France, at one moment seemingly poised to usher in new and more
egalitarian forms of social relations, instead succumbed to Bonapartism and
reverted to its old dictatorial ways. He opened his investigation of the creative
and destructive energies at play in the 1848 French revolution with a powerful
characterization of why revolutionary zeal yielded to the symbols, language,
and images of the past:
The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing
themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed,
precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up
the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle
cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in
this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language (ibid, 15).
It is hard to imagine a more cultural explanation of the forces shaping a
revolution’s dynamics and trajectory. While Marx started his narrative with this
lament, he did not begin building his explanatory framework from its insights. It
was prose for Marx, not epistemology.
In this article, I used Marx’s brilliant observation to launch an interpretive,
cultural pragmatic investigation into the initial stages of a democratic transfer of
power, or act one of the 2016 US presidential election. I assembled an
interpretive framework from the works of Barthes, Geertz, and Alexander, and
trained these tools on key performances in the autumn of 2015, and on the
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interpretive frameworks audiences brought to bear on them in a process by
which they attribute dimensions of legitimacy to particular actors.
Barthes specified the structure and logic of Pierre Poujade’s discourse to
explain the populist’s effectiveness, and to identify its impact on voters who
would make decisions within these symbolic conditions. Poujadism, Barthes
argued, delegitimated interpretative complexity and expert knowledge, and in
their place nurtured a discourse of simple calculation and a romanticized
common sense. Barthes concluded that Poujadism thrived to the extent that it
denied alterity and difference, and that it is in this restrictive and simplified
discursive environment that the seeds of fascism bloom.
This encourages us to pay particular attention to the structure and logic of
Trumpist discourse. As a narrative, ‘‘we’re going to build a wall’’ has tremendous
semiotic efficiency and power. It communicates and constitutes much while
demanding little interpretive effort. It classifies in simple ways: we will do the
building to keep them out; it will keep our friends safe from those enemies; it will
keep us pure, and prevent foreign dangers from infiltrating and polluting our
body politic. As a single signifier, ‘‘wall’’ packs an immediate and powerful punch.
It is tangible, accessible, and intuitive. A wall’s materiality imposes itself on a
person, and asserts its physical superiority over one’s body. Discursively, it
imposes itself on the mind. A wall not only closes off space, it strangles open
inquiry. It replaces openness to inquiry with retorts and celebrations of common
sense. And yet for all its symbolic power, and for the considerable performative
success it has met with, experts assert that a real, material wall would not be
effective at its stated purpose. How do we account for the performative success of
a sign whose material referent is determined to be a failure?
Geertz’s work shows that meanings operating in the setting have the capacity
to explain the unanticipated success of obvious lies, gross exaggerations, and
expedient elisions, and that by discerning them we can unpack and resolve
apparent contradictions between solidarities and interests.
At the moment of writing this final sentence, Donald Trump has been named
the Republican Party nominee, and Hillary Clinton is poised to fill the
Democratic position to represent the party in the general election. In this paper,
I have endeavored to show how the symbolic struggle in act one created
circumstances and relationships that made it possible for one of these candidates
to play a hero’s part in November.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Jeffrey Alexander and Samuel Nelson for encouraging this
project and sharing informal reflections on its theme, and the anonymous
reviewers for their insightful comments and recommendations.
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About the Author
Jason L. Mast is a Global Research Fellow at the Institute of Advance Study,
and affiliated with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, at the
University of Warwick. He is the author of The Performative Presidency: Crisis
and Resurrection During the Clinton Years (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
His research interests include politics, disgust, and the intersections of cultural
theory and the cognitive neurosciences.
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