Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the first two here and here.
Pro wrestling, for all its mass appeal, cultural influence, and undeniable profitability, is still dismissed as low-brow fare for the lumpen masses; another guilty pleasure to be shelved next to soap operas and true crime dreck. This elitist dismissal rests on a cartoonish assumption that wrestling fans are rubes, incapable of recognizing the staged spectacle in front of them. In reality, fans understand perfectly well that the fights are preordained. What bothers critics is that working-class audiences knowingly embrace a form of theater more honest than the “serious” news they consume.
Once cast as the pinnacle of trash TV in the late ’90s and early 2000s, pro wrestling has not only survived the cultural sneer; it might now be the template for contemporary American politics. The aesthetics of kayfabe, of egotistical villains and manufactured feuds, now structure our public life. And nowhere is this clearer than in the figure of its most infamous graduate: Donald Trump, the two-time WrestleMania host and 2013 WWE Hall of Fame inductee who carried the psychology of the squared circle from the television studio straight into the Oval Office.
That’s the opening of my good friend Jason Myles debut appearance in Current Affairs.
Jason has hosted one of the best podcasts in the left-media landscape for years, and it’s been really wonderful seeing him finding his voice as a writer. The whole essay is great, and this passage in particular made me genuinely physically uncomfortable as I read:
Nearly 50 years after Piper was run out of the arena, the Republican Party now employs the same theatrics once reserved for the ring, where scripted violence easily blurs into the real deal. Rowdy Roddy might not have expected a riot, but when Trump is the one implying that migrants are vermin—claiming they “pour into and infest our country”—he knows he is urging his audience to stand from their seats and pick up their folding chairs. Only this time, their target is not the man in the ring, but their fellow Americans.
…and he wraps it all up on exactly the right note.
Read the whole thing here.
Thanks for reading Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis! This post is public so feel free to share it.
If you want to check out my own writing outside of this Substack in the week, I wrote two articles for Jacobin:
Trump and ICE Are Driving the Country Off a Cliff
and:
The Right’s Antisemitism Is Too Flagrant to Ignore
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