Dealt a Bad Hand

Ezra Klein | Kayfabe World: Deception, first, last, and always

Harris was dealt a bad hand. She had no time to set up her own campaign. No time to work out its themes or policies or personnel. And she was running, inevitably, as the champion of an administration people were angry at. She could not separate herself from Biden without being accused of disloyalty. But I’m not sure there was any answer she could have given that would have worked. It’s not credible to run as a vice president disowning the record of the administration in which you served. I think she ran a strong campaign, given how little time and how little room she had to build it. But she faced a very difficult problem: A popular incumbent can run on her record. A challenger can promise change. Harris could do neither.

| Ezra Klein, Where Does This Leave Democrats?

Klein nails it. And he goes on to say that the Obama coalition is over, and whatever the Dems are going to do will have to be new:

That means going to new places and being open to new voices. A politics right for the next era will not be a politics designed to win the last election. It’s not going to be predictable, from where we stand right now, just as Obama’s 2008 victory would have sounded laughable in 2004 and Donald Trump’s 2016 win violated everything Republicans believed after their 2012 defeat.

And, maybe focus at least a little on climate change, please?

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Photo by Jamar Crable on Unsplash

Kayfabe World: Deception, first, last, and always

Often overlooked, Donald Trump spent a lot of his earlier years deeply involved in pro wrestling. At WrestleMania 23, he literally body slammed Vince McMahon, the then-CEO of WWE, and later, after his ‘team’ won the event, shaved McMahon’s head, which is a fitting theatrical finish for a staged rivalry.

One aspect of pro wrestling is the concept of kayfabe¹: the participants in the spectacle of wrestling — while in the ring, or in public inhabiting their wrestling personas — all maintain the pretense that it’s real. The state of suspended disbelief has to be maintained at all costs, as Eric Weinstein explains:

Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, all competitors who face each other in the ring are actually close collaborators who must form a closed system (called "a promotion") sealed against outsiders. With external competitors generally excluded, antagonists are chosen from within the promotion and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under Kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, but by the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship which "breaks Kayfabe" is called "shooting" to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception called "working".

And the audience at a pro wrestling match is part of the illusion. Even if they know that everything is scripted and staged, many participate in the fakery, rooting on the heroes and booing the villains. They — and the wrestlers, backstage hands, and celebrities (like Trump and McMahon) — all become enmeshed in a ritual of mutual pretense, like children playing house, or members of a theater group remaining ‘in character’ while ignoring the audience, while the audience work to accept the illusion of the actors actually being fictional or historical figures.

I maintain that Trump — and a sizeable majority of those that voted for him — have drifted into a worldview similar to kayfabe: they are all agreeing to participate in the deception — at many levels — that the world of Trumpian falsehoods is real, and, analogous to the fakery of body slams and pulled punches, they agree to accept the endlessly repeated lies and disinformation as if they are true.

Even though the fakery is being played out at a rally, the national convention, or a debate — in the ‘real world’ — the deception of kayfabe holds those that accept its quasi-hypnotic pull. They truly believe that the 2020 election was stolen, despite the lack of any evidence. They buy the stories about immigrant crime, eating dogs and cats, and that tariffs are paid by the foreign countries exporting goods to the U.S. A world of make believe. And since elections have results, they are attempting to bring into being the make-believe world of Trumpian fantasy, or at least the parts that appeals to them personally. Some people really do want women to die when they seek abortions. Others really want immigrants rounded up and deported.

Or at least until the real world ramifications start to intrude, like a bottleneck in the food production system when undocumented workers are sent back to Latin America, or a spike in the cost of housing when, again, many undocumented construction workers are expelled.

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Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, in which the protagonist ia a fictionalized Borges that starts with a (possibly faked) encyclopedia entry about a (possibly fictional) country, Uqbar, and a strange series of events that leads a growing number of people to adopt the philosophy, languages, and beliefs of this (possibly imaginary) country. An underground organization (possibly fictional) is the likely source of these doings, and their mult-generational goal is to turn our world into Uqbar.

There is certainly something Borgesian about the events of the past few years, a time in which deception and yearning bend culture. Again, Weinstein, who was at this time he wrote this the managing director of Thiel Capital, Peter Thiel’s fund [emphasis mine]:

Evolutionary biologists Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have recently emphasized that it is deception rather than information that often plays the decisive role in systems of selective pressures. Yet most of our thinking continues to treat deception as something of a perturbation on the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory which currently uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information.

If we are to take selection more seriously within humans, we may fairly ask what rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous development for more than a century, is known to exist and now supports an intricate multi-billion dollar business empire of pure hokum. It is known to wrestling's insiders as "Kayfabe".

[…]

What makes Kayfabe remarkable is that it gives us potentially the most complete example of the general process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery.

[…]

Importantly, Kayfabe also seems to have discovered the limits of how much disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated. Wrestling's system of lies has recently become so intricate that wrestlers have occasionally found themselves engaging in real life adultery following exactly behind the introduction of a fictitious adulterous plot twist in a Kayfabe back-story. Eventually, even Kayfabe itself became a victim of its own success as it grew to a level of deceit that could not be maintained when the wrestling world collided with outside regulators exercising oversight over major sporting events.

At the point Kayfabe was forced to own up to the fact that professional wrestling contained no sport whatsoever, it did more than avoid being regulated and taxed into oblivion. Wrestling discovered the unthinkable: its audience did not seem to require even a thin veneer of realism. Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off of the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience.

And the worldview that Trump’s deceptions implied, and the fakery and deception that dominate in his theatrics don’t have to be real, and, like wrestling’s kayfabe, the responsibility for the weightlessness of his hype has now shifted to those that voted for him.

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Trump mysteriously tweeted the unknown word ‘covfefe’ in 2017. From Wikipedia:

Covfefe (/koʊˈfɛfi/ koh-FEH-fee, /kəvˈfeɪfeɪ, koʊˈfɛfeɪ/) is a word, widely presumed to be a typographical error, that Donald Trump used in a viral tweet when he was President of the United States. It quickly became an Internet meme.

Six minutes after midnight (EDT) on May 31, 2017, Trump tweeted "Despite the constant negative press covfefe". He deleted the tweet six hours later but implied that its wording was intentional. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer stated, "I think the President and a small group of people know exactly what he meant."

My bet is that he had never read the word ‘kayfabe’, but instead had only heard it in wrestling circles: he didn’t know how to spell it.

If in fact he intended ‘kayfabe’, his statement can be interpreted to be a warning to others in on the long con he was playing to not talk about the con in front of outsiders, especially the press. Apparently Sean Spicer was in on it, and knew that others were, too.

1. The origins of kayfabe and its etymology are unclear. What is certain that it’s been in use since the start of modern pro wrestling. Some think is may be a garbling of ‘fake’ in pig latin: ‘akefay’. (Pig latin is a simple interference code used mostly by slightly older kids to hide what is being said in the presence of slightly younger kids.) The transition from ‘akefay’ to ‘kayfabe’ [ˈkā-ˌfāb] (where the final ‘be’ might have originally been pronounced ‘bay’) could have been to conceal the derivation through pig latin’s scrambling rules, so that it would work as a code word unintelligible for young and old, alike. Someone in on the deception in pro wrestling might say ‘kayfabe’ to indicate to another insider that there are outsiders present, so they shouldn’t talk about the staging of the matches.