America’s Cultural Revolution

The takeover of the Kennedy Center may seem like an afterthought in the furious drama of President Donald Trump’s first month in office. The abandonment of the transatlantic alliance, proposals to annex territory on multiple continents, the evisceration of national institutions, and overt claims to kingship are such eye-popping departures from precedent that the leadership of a somewhat stuffy, self-consciously elite performing-arts venue seems negligible by comparison. But Trump’s peculiar preoccupation with the Kennedy Center is symptomatic of a profound change in the nature of American power since his inauguration: America is undergoing a cultural revolution. “This is going to be great television,” Trump said at the end of Friday’s stormy session with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It may as well be the motto of his administration.

It is a new kind of cultural revolution. Unlike the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, which imposed ideology on their populaces by means of culture and entertainment, America’s current reality is the overturning of the political order by the country’s entertainers. The American culture industry has overwhelmed politics: Washington today can be understood only as a product of show business, not of law or policy.

The Trump administration has been consistent in its veneration of show business, if in nothing else. The president has put a WWE executive in charge of education, made a Fox News talking head his secretary of defense, installed a celebrity conspiracy theorist to lead the National Institutes of Health, handed control of Medicare to a TV doctor, and appointed a right-wing podcaster as deputy director of the FBI. Elon Musk is running government reform because he can live-post it. Dr. Phil accompanies ICE on raids. Trump’s Cabinet picks resemble the cast of a reality-television show by design: Trump understands, by instinct and through experience, that the line between entertainment and power in American life has effectively dissolved.

In his farewell address, President Joe Biden described the incoming administration as an oligarchy. He was mistaken. It is rule by performers: a “histriocracy.” Anyone who wants to understand what is happening in American politics needs to understand it on those terms.

In 2016, a reality-TV star’s rise to the presidency was novel, and seeing that surprise triumph as an anomaly was still possible. No longer. The 2024 election was not just evidence of a rightward shift among traditionally Democratic voters, or of rising anti-government patriotism, but a clarification of how fundamentally American politics has shifted the ground from which its meaning derives.

Politics has become an offshoot of spectacle. Trump has left intellectuals grasping for historical analogies: Is he a fascist or a populist? Is he a latter-day Know Nothing or a modern demagogue? The analogies are unsatisfying because they fail to account for popular culture as a political force, the way it has scrambled traditional dividing lines. Trump has Orthodox Jewish grandchildren and is a hero to the white-power movement. He won a record percentage of Arab American votes, then appointed an ambassador to Israel who claims that “there is no such thing as Palestinians.” He enjoys fervent support among evangelicals despite the fact that his character is a living contradiction of every value they revere. These paradoxes would not be possible in a politics that selects the country’s leadership on the basis of ideas and character. They make sense if brute exposure determines who wins.

[Stephen Marche: Welcome to the burning ’20s]

As the grand soap opera of this American presidency unfolds, displays of rage and wonder fill every moment: get-rich-quick schemes, rigged games, vengeful punishments. The audience is hurried from one hustle to another. The distinction between a con and a joke has blurred. The great circus showman P. T. Barnum prophesied the rise of Trump when he declared: “Let me furnish the amusements of a nation and there will be need of very few laws.” The connection between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and John F. Kennedy is more than genetic. Norman Mailer, in his famous essay on the 1960 Democratic Convention, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” noticed a mysterious sadness that gripped the spectators, which made sense only when he saw the future President Kennedy in the flesh: “The Democrats were going to nominate a man who, no matter how serious his political dedication might be, was indisputably and willy-nilly going to be seen as a great box-office actor, and the consequences of that were staggering and not at all easy to calculate.” Trump’s Cabinet is the staggering consequence that Mailer could not calculate.

Ronald Reagan in the 1980s made the connection between celebrity and power even more explicit; he rose after a career in which perhaps his most famous role was starring opposite a chimpanzee. The “Great Communicator” told corny jokes and knew that television was everything. The Republican Party “won one for the Gipper,” as Reagan’s campaign slogan had it. When his administration abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, releasing news media from any obligation of impartiality, it prepared the way for histriocracy without government interference.

Rule by performers is distinct from autocracy. The ruling performers serve the narrative needs of their fans first and foremost. Policy will always be an addendum to the show. The overturning of Roe v. Wade had compelling emotional heft for Trump’s base, a soul-stirring final scene to the movie that had been playing in their minds for generations: “We beat the cosmopolitan elite to save babies.” The happy ending was that abortion became illegal in much of the United States.

But winning for show is very different from having a desired effect on the world. Since 2018, the rate of abortions has, by most accounts, kept rising—not that anybody seems to care, because the narrative impulse is the primary political driver. In fact, the restrictionist policy’s failure provides an opportunity for endless sequels. Trump has served the pro-life movement’s storyline needs by creating the conditions for an increase in abortion numbers: so many more bad people to punish, so many more babies who need saving. In a politics determined by performance, outcomes are epilogues that nobody reads.

[Read: Trump’s conquest of the Kennedy Center is accelerating]

The reality of rule by performers is profoundly disconcerting to American intellectuals’ self-conception of their government’s dignity. This is the message of the Kennedy Center’s takeover that the D.C. political elite has been so slow to register. If you think it’s a joke to have RFK Jr. in office, that’s the point. Jokes gather attention. Attention creates exposure. Exposure drives power. The greatest asset for any politician today is a bottomless narcissism that requires unremitting attention to satisfy.

Rule by performers doesn’t need to impose an autocrat’s lies on the people; people do it to themselves through their entertainments. In 1984, George Orwell described doublethink as the kind of intellectual gymnastics demanded by a totalitarian society: “To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.” Reality television and the WWE demand similar distortion-effect gymnastics; their audiences willingly suspend their disbelief and gladly accept events they know are artificial as real. The audiences come to political debate already prepared for the blurring of illusion and reality. “The public appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived,” Barnum understood, which is why they called him the “Prince of Humbugs.” In Trump, they have a king.

As forewarned, America has amused itself to death. Histriocracy is much less stable than traditional autocracy—wilder, more unpredictable. Turbulence is to be expected, as creating drama is the point of the government and the source of power. No doubt, the Kennedy Center will be consumed by a whirlwind of thrills and chills over the next four years. But when a circus departs, it leaves behind dirty streets, empty pockets, and lingering regrets. Under rule by performers, only one law is inviolable: The show must go on, until the curtain falls.