Dispatches Mailbag: The Faux-Centrist/Right-Wing War, France, Is MAGA Fascism, Project 2025, and Climate Change
We've got a load of topics today as we navigate an increasingly strange world
Hey all. Sometimes there’s a period where there’s a lot going on - I’m getting tired of them being all the time, for the record - and people start reaching out without a prompt for a mailbag here at Dispatches From A Collapsing State. I was sitting down to start the process of catching up on emails, and I realized this is one of those times. With the Right becoming even more overt in their fascistic desires and plans, and with recent developments around the world, I think people are looking to make some sense out of the chaos.
So, I checked in with the question-askers, edited a couple of them for clarity and time, and here is what I consider to be a pretty interesting and thorough group of subjects. We’re talking about authoritarian wins in Europe, relevant history regarding the battle between the Left, Right, and Center, whether the MAGA Movement is fascist, what I expect from the proposed Project 2025 plan, and how global climate change could shift our politics and culture.
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Now, to the mailbag.
Joe: I remember you talking about professional wrestling kayfabe and how it helped explain Trump back in 2016/2017. I think I even heard Jim Cornette talk about it on his podcast. Since I’ve been following your research and have been learning so much about capitalism and neoliberalism and what is going on. Do I have this right: the Right and the Center “hating” each other is a work and their hate for the Left is a shoot?
Okay, okay. This is going to require some catching up for people because there’s a lot going on here.
Jim Cornette is one of the most revered professional wrestling managers of all time and had built a podcast empire dedicated to talking about how modern professional wrestling is worse because of the abandonment of something called kayfabe, which was the performance of a fake reality in which what happened in professional wrestling was treated like it was “real” and the performance and cooperation were hidden from the audience.
The screenshot below is from a thread I posted back in December 2021 that was attempting to explain the relationship between Fox’s public facing coverage and what happened behind the scenes.
My point here is that reality is, and has always been, weird. It’s structured and fake and artificial and manipulative, most often stratified between the reality of the powerful and the masses. Professional wrestling, oddly enough, has always been an incredible medium for explaining what is happening and why. The point of the enterprise is to manipulate reality in order to profit off of people who are being emotionally activated. In the case of professional wrestling, which has its roots in carnival culture, the fan in the audience is “a mark,” who isn’t supposed to be aware of the manipulation and cooperation. Meanwhile, the performers and promoters craft a story line to upset, anger, and compel them to part with their money in order to experience catharsis.
Beginning in the 1990’s that reality shifted.
Listen. You don’t have to find professional wrestling interesting, even though it is infinitely interesting for all of the reasons we’re about to discuss. But culture - whether it’s movies or TV shows or even professional wrestling - allows us to understand much, much larger and important things about the world we live in. And our present circumstances demand understanding.
Okay. So, in November of 1997 something happened that is now notoriously known as “the Montreal Screwjob.” You don’t have to know the particulars but, in case you are curious, you can find a quick explainer video below. If you want a deeper dive, Radiolab produced a banger of an episode that compared the whole ordeal to the novel Don Quixote.
Here’s a brief summary: Vince McMahon, the now-disgraced Donald Trump-like head of the World Wrestling Federation, broke kayfabe on live pay-per-view, screwed his world champion, and then, during the fallout, created a product in which “marks” were replaced with “smarks,” or wrestling fans who knew the reality was artificial and were interested in the relationship between what was scripted and what was “real,” leading to a new “reality” in which most understood professional wrestling wasn’t authentic but were obsessed with the moments in which real and fake and pseudo-fake intertwined.
This happened because of the internet. Fans of professional wrestling were combing sites that explained the inner-workings, opening a door into specialized knowledge and necessitating a new approach. Professional wrestling is a hell of an example of this, but we now see it throughout our culture. The internet, and its holy spirit neoliberal capitalism, has welcomed us into the inner-workings of nearly everything, creating a culture that is authentically inauthentic and infinitely vulnerable to advanced manipulation.
Trump, MAGA, and the New Right are benefactors of this environment. Trump emerged in 2015 ready to say what no other politician was particularly interested in revealing. He told followers that the Democratic Party and Republican Party were full of shit, that they relied on wealthy people like him, and the system was so corrupted that something had to be done. In communicating this, Trump was blowing the lid off kayfabe, a reality in which a convenient story existed for the benefit of the wealthy over the masses. He wasn’t lying. The political duopoly between Dems and the GOP was marked by the neoliberal consensus that lay hidden behind high-profile “feuds” and “battles” over certain legislative hot button issues.
The truth is, Trump had no interest in changing this. The New Right wanted to take advantage of dissatisfaction and tired kayfabe by creating a new pseudo-reality marked, once more, by “smarks,” or people consuming their messaging and conspiracy theories, who were still vulnerable to advanced manipulation. Rather than discussing the larger issues of neoliberal capitalism, however, what happened was that conspiracy theories and rebranded paranoid tropes constructed a new reality to their advantage.
To answer Joe’s question, the “battle” between the Center and the Right, as represented by our political duopoly, has always been a “work.” They are agreed on most things - namely the need for a society driven by the wealthy and the powerful and supported by American force and power - with a few culture war issues that supply the tension. The real hatred and antipathy has been saved for “the Left,” which has been systematically hunted down, destroyed, and discredited. As that has happened, the gap between the Center and the Right has diminished, save for aesthetic differences in how to express these ideas. The United States has predictably moved further and further right, so much so that now Centrists are virtually indistinguishable from their “rivals.”
The main stumbling block now rests on who the parties represent. The Democratic Party is the party of the professional managerial class - college-educated middle-managers and content-creators - and the GOP serves an elite few donors who are obsessed with obliterating liberal democracy. When you find differences in political stances, that is largely where the division originates: who will be protected and served as the pie continues to be sliced thinner and thinner.
Also, just to add to the discussion, here’s the recent article I wrote about mystification and what’s happening to our pseudo-reality.