“Politics as Public Spectacle: Contesting Masculinity or Rigged Outcome?”

In his influential essay, “The World of Wrestling” (1972), semiotician Roland Barthes argues professional wrestling is not a sport but a public spectacle having more in common with ancient Greek drama, the Roman circuses, and the plays of Shakespeare than a contest of strength and skill settled by fair competition. As a public spectacle, the audience enjoys the rituals of wrestling “completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not” because at stake is not the outcome of the fight itself, but the audience’s participation in a larger drama. Specifically, a wrestling show is a public spectacle celebrating “a purely moral concept: that of justice.” In other words, wrestling participates in the language and symbols of mythology to embody a truth beyond objective facts that communicates deep core convictions.

Applying Barthes’s analysis of wrestling as public spectacle to the American electoral process, this essay contends that American voters, like a professional wrestling audience, are not interested in facts, but desire a public spectacle in which good triumphs over evil, justice vanquishes injustice, and the average Joe defeats the career politician. Given the vagaries of the Electoral College, the influence of dark money in elections, and the increasing role the Supreme Court plays in validating or determining election outcomes, it is not surprising many Americans believe the electoral process, like a professional wrestling match, is rigged. Consequently, the American “audience” is willing to overlook moral inconsistencies in their favorite “wrestler” (candidate) for the sake of affirming the bigger narrative truth celebrated and enacted by the public spectacle we call the electoral process: a myth called the American Dream.

One of the factors at play in this spectacle are questions of masculinity and violence, and the relationship between the two, which unfortunately often translates to acts of aggression and violence in the real world. Particularly troubling are certain dominant conceptions of masculinity in the popular imagination that appear inseparably linked to violence and then manifest as antidemocratic authoritarianism. The 2024 electoral cycle is reenacting this spectacle yet again, this time by staging a “contest” between two hyper-masculine yet geriatric candidates to determine who is the true man of the people and defender of the American Dream.

Like ancient Greek drama and the Roman circuses, large public spectacles also serve a religious function. In an increasingly secularized culture, public spectacles have replaced sacred liturgies—which if the rise of the religious “nones” is any indication, are losing their relevance in the broader culture anyway—and are embraced by both major political parties in order to prop up the myth of the American Dream that generates and perpetuates the never-ending election campaigning cycle that is the source of all their power and wealth. In Robert Bellah’s analysis, these spectacles are part of a national civil religion that transcends confessional boundaries thereby maintaining and perpetuating the belief in America’s divine origin while sidestepping the divisiveness of dogmatic traditionalism. This civil religion, interwoven into the political process, shares “much in common with Christianity” but is “neither sectarian nor in any specific sense Christian” (Bellah, Beyond Belief, 175). In fact, as this civil religion expands, it becomes the standard by which individual religions—including Christianity—are judged as to whether they are truly “American.” This is evident in the rise of Christian nationalism, a movement which distances itself from the humble figure of Jesus found in the Bible and replaces it with the exaggerated masculinity of “swole” Jesus—a ’roided up Christ who frees himself from the cross by flexing his muscles.

In other words, the public spectacle we call the Presidential Election exists to validate a national myth about what kind of nation we are that is grounded in certain notions of masculinity, power, and success that play out in the public arena as a fight between good and evil, with each party painting a picture—much as in professional wrestling—of the opponent as a weak, sniveling, self-serving coward, and their candidate as the “man of the people,” an average Joe who triumphs over the system because he is the manliest and strongest. Like the carnival barker, or the wrestling promoter, the campaign manager “sells” the vision that under their candidate’s leadership America will become virile and strong and defeat all its foes. Throughout this process truth and facts are subsumed under a larger, self-validating myth, so that even in defeat the candidate can claim victory by arguing that the opponent won by cheating, breaking the rules, or other cowardly means. Just as in wrestling, when the “heel” wins by eye gouging or introducing foreign objects into the ring when the referee is not looking, candidates now subvert the very concept of truth to justify their own narrative, as evidenced by the Capitol Uprising on January 6, 2021.

An analysis of the symbols and rituals of professional wresting—the characterization of opponents as “babyfaces” or “heels,” the appeal to certain ideals of masculinity and fair play, and above all the celebration of spectacle and excess—provides a lens through which we can analyze the American electoral process as a rigged public spectacle intended to reinforce cultural and national narratives of American triumphalism embodied in images of masculinity, violence, and power. Once truth and personal character are subsumed under this all-encompassing myth of the American Dream, democratic elections become another manipulable tool, lending credence to the Marxist analysis that religion—even a highly secularized civil religion—is merely an opiate for the masses that numbs voters into inaction. Resistance is subverted and eliminated by perpetuating the belief that the entire electoral process is rigged. So why bother?