Performative politics

To score a political point, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., took to the chamber floor on the evening of March 31 and spoke for a record-breaking 25 hours and 5 minutes. The speech was predictably livestreamed on TikTok and garnered more than 350 million “likes” over the course of the marathon session. Sen. Booker’s intention was “to uplift the stories of Americans who are being harmed by the Trump Administration’s reckless actions, attempts to undermine our institutions, and disregard for the rule of law.” And the speech seemed to serve its purpose, garnering attention and commentary across media, new as well as old.

The news cycle is a relentless master, however, and just weeks later Sen. Booker’s effort has receded into the background amid a maelstrom of competing conflicts, whether actual, as in the case of Russia and Ukraine, or manufactured, as in the trade wars sparked by President Trump’s escapades with tariffs. But what Sen. Booker’s speech captured perfectly was the performative nature of our contemporary politics. The speech was not really about any particular policy or intended to advance any legislation. It was instead a kind of social media stunt, a performance aimed at fomenting opposition to the Trump Administration.

People behave differently when they have an audience. That’s true for judges and referees as well as for politicians and policymakers. The age of social media has created a situation in which every moment can become an occasion for performance. The constitutional scholar Yuval Levin has traced the shift in American institutions from venues for public service and sacrifice to platforms for performative self-gratification and self-aggrandizement. “When we don’t think of our institutions as formative but as performative—when the presidency and Congress are just stages for political performance art,” says Levin, “when a university becomes a venue for vain virtue signaling, when journalism is indistinguishable from activism—they become harder to trust. They aren’t really asking for our confidence, just for our attention.”

Given the nature of our social media saturated society, it should be no surprise then that as institutions have shifted to performativity that social trust has cratered. When performers are rewarded for seeking attention rather than truth, it naturally follows that what we hear from our institutional leaders is aimed at satisfying the demands of the audience. As the Apostle Paul put it, “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions” (2 Timothy 4:3).

In one sense performative politics is nothing new. With the advent of television the electoral calculus shifted, contributing in one landmark instance to the victory of the photogenic John F. Kennedy over the rather less visually impressive Richard Nixon in 1960. More than a half century later with the advent of the internet, mobile phones, and social media we have in Donald Trump the first president formed in the crucible of reality television. President Trump has the temperament and instincts to take full advantage of the opportunities to dominate the news cycle and the social media conversation, including on his own social media platform.

It is often too easy to wax nostalgic over some superior period in our political lives, when statesmen governed from principle and opportunists were marginalized. But a moment in the presidential debates that devolved into an argument over who could hit a golf ball farther does seem like both a nadir of political discourse as well as a signal symptom of our performative politics.

Where can we find solutions for our political malaise? On some level the incentives have to change. We must stop rewarding performative politicians, as well as leaders in other institutional settings, with our attention and with the power and money that follows. We must demand, instead, principled leadership. We must reward and respect statesmanship and punish and decry mere performativity. In this way the solutions to the challenges of our democratic self-government are right where they always have been—with the people. The virtue of the American people must be the spur that reforms and rebuilds our institutions, lifting up and supporting true service and leadership.

“Our Constitution,” wrote John Adams, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The American people must embody moral virtue and religious faith once again before we can expect to be delivered from the devastation wrought by performative politics.