Electoral Dramaturgy: Insights from Italian Politics ...

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SPECIAL FORUM ON THE GEOGRAPHIES OF THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Electoral Dramaturgy Insights from Italian Politics about Donald Trump’s 2015–16 Campaign Strategy . . . and Beyond JOHN AGNEW University of California Los Angeles

MICHAEL SHIN University of California Los Angeles

“Mr. Trump’s buildings, unlike his father’s, have failed to make any architectural contribution to the cities around them or address social needs. Instead they pop up like middle fingers disdaining their surroundings. They are less architecture than marketing, with the Trump sign the most important component. Despite his appeal to legions of voters, his buildings do nothing for anyone but the super-wealthy who can afford the penthouses within.” —Edwin Heathcote, Architecture Correspondent of the Financial Times, February 17, 2016

the coming of trump The property tycoon Donald Trump’s surge to the top of the list of candidates for the Republican nomination for the 2016 US presidential election in national polls as well as in early primaries and caucuses has been interpreted in a variety of ways. He is appealing to the interests and prejudices of all those, particularly older

white poorly educated men, who feel that they have lost out to women and minorities in an increasingly “politically correct” America. He is a blunt talker whose views on immigration, globalization and guns are free of the caveats that mar the politicians and party hacks he freely insults on the campaign trail. He is seen as a “strong leader” precisely because he lacks nuance, whose personal history as a property tycoon and reality TV star offers a welcome relief from the professional politicians who pivot hither and thither on this issue and that. He is the most effective communicator with an audience that views “nuance” as implying a lack of faith in basic premises about the nature of reality. What these all have in common is not much evidence of policy savvy or even focus on what he might actually do if he were elected president, but overwhelming emphasis on a leader picking up followers irrespective of what he does or says (Mayer 2015). Trump’s peculiar career as a developer of towering apartment and office buildings southeastern geographer, 56(3) 2016: pp. 265–272

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and sprawling golf courses offers a clue to his success as a political communicator. There’s nothing very distinguished aesthetically about any of them. What they indicate is enormous skill at selling an image: Trump himself. “His biggest building is Chicago’s 98 story Trump Tower. Designed by the same architects as the world’s halifa, it has tallest tower, Dubai’s Burj K a resemblance in the sculptural massing, the setbacks and streamlined corners. It is Mr. Trump’s best building but still marred by its massive sign: The Donald is always present, even when he is out” (Heathcote 2016). Snake-oil salesmen, pastors selling the prosperity gospel, and branding that masks disappointing content are nothing new in American life. But never before has American national politics seen such a political performance that lacks any grounding in prior political office or even previous party affiliation. Trump’s supporters seem obsessed with the “leadership” he could provide. But a history of active involvement in politics is not what this is about. They like it when he says that President Obama is “weak” or his opponents are “losers.” The very casualness of his campaign, statements made and then withdrawn or denied, journalists disdained and regular campaign activities such as massive TV advertising avoided, speak to the uniqueness of Trump’s approach to campaigning (Wallace-Wells 2015). To his supporters, the biggest challenges facing the country, apparently, are “terrorism and immigration” (they are against both, period). They want not only to “Make America Great Again,” Trump’s slogan, but “bigger, better, stronger.” Above all, as pollsters report from their pro-Trump informants: “He tells it like it is,” “Can bring change,” and is “From outside the establishment.” The term “establishment” refers entirely to practicing politicians. Billionaires

are exempted. Yet, interestingly, and reflecting the aging demographic at the core of his support, Social Security ranks after terrorism as the top issue for many of his strongest supporters (those for whom Trump is their top pick in their state’s primary or caucus) (Chan 2016). This is a nationalist bloc disillusioned with globalization and the broken promises of the Reagan years, which led them to believe that the rising tide of money in private hands from lowering taxes on the wealthy would redound to their advantage in terms of jobs and growing incomes. When Trump says “We’re being ripped off,” he means by foreigners because our elite is weak and corrupt and allowed it to happen (Sargent 2016). His audience seems to hear not only this but also that he is not part of the elite which, of course, is palpably false. At the same time, and crucially, his supporters no longer seem to believe that the political system is self-correcting. The middle ground offers no solace (Salam 2012). Only a strong man from outside the typical universe of politicians can put things right. He is their cowboy on horseback, an authoritarian like them. He’ll straighten out Washington and the world, they say, just like we do down at the bar. His supporters say that you can tell he is one of them from how he speaks, at a fourth grade level without affectation or the circumlocutions of the politicians, but with the aura of celebrity. And because he is financing his own c ampaign he can’t be bought.

party-system realignment? The collapse of the Republican Party as a coherent vehicle for articulating and aggregating interests is certainly part of this story. It is a surprise because as recently as 2004 the possibilities for a new

Electoral Dramaturgy

conservative-based Republican Party seemed all but assured (Dochuk 2006). The imminent collapse goes back to the Nixon strategy of welcoming into the ranks of the party’s voters those southern whites disaffected from the Democratic Party by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. The Republican Party took over where George Wallace left off. Of course, that unraveling of the South from the embrace of the Democratic Party had deeper roots in the Dixiecrat movement of the late 1940s and before (Feldman 2013). As a result, though, since the 1970s the Republican “base” has been increasingly southernized both electorally and culturally. The South now completely dominates the Republican caucus in the US House of Representatives. The southern front- loading of the Republican presidential primaries in late February and early March gives the South disproportionate influence in deciding the party’s candidate (Dionne 2016). The central issues of the 2016 presidential primary campaign, from disdain for anything done by President Obama and the centrality of opposition to any sort of gun control to hostility to recent legal shifts on same-sex marriage, are also symptomatic of bias towards those regions of the country where these issues rule the Republican primaries. Karl Rove’s strategy of recruiting for G.W. Bush in Protestant stadium churches among the pious but previously politically unaffiliated rather than pivoting to the center to capture socalled independent voters reinforced this trend. The Tea Party movement infiltrating the party after the election of Barack Obama provided an identity politics of the right representing “a visceral anger at the cultural and, to some extent, political eclipse of an America in which people who

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looked and thought like them were dominant” (Fraser and Freeman 2012, 81). Today the Republican Party has ended up with at least three distinctive and increasingly non-overlapping constituencies: a populist base drawn disproportionately from white working-class voters, the evangelicals (who are themselves increasingly diverse), and the traditional urban and suburban upper class Republicans. The Republican Party’s hostile takeover by Donald Trump is the result of a confluence between the mood of a large segment of the population, on the one hand, and the party’s failure to glue together its increasingly divergent electoral constituencies, on the other (Luce 2016). Donald Trump’s success has been overwhelmingly with the first of the core groups with a surprising leavening from the second. Many born-again Christians seem to have preferred Trump over Ted Cruz, possibly because Cruz, who has geared his campaign to all so-called evangelicals, represents a particularly theocratic brand of Protestantism (Schaul and Uhrmacher 2016). In a national poll taken by the New York Times in late December 2015 among 11,000 Republican-leaning likely voters, Donald Trump had his greatest support in the South, New York state, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. More specifically, he fares best of all in a geographical swath very reminiscent of the only parts of the country where there was a swing to the Republican candidate, John McCain, in the 2008 presidential election, when the national turn was overwhelmingly in the opposite direction: from the Gulf Coast northwards following the Appalachian Mountains all the way to upstate New York (Cohn 2015). “Greater A ppalachia” is what Steve Inskeep (2016) calls it. Across

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this region and beyond, many of Trump’s supporters seem to be on the periphery of the Republican Party in terms of personal histories of voting behavior. This can be a weakness in closed primaries where only the registered party faithful rule. But it augurs well for Trump if he survives to the general election in that he seems to attract independents and disaffected Democrats as much as Republicans, if he can get them all out to vote for him. That’s the rub. So, the cleaving of the Republican Party has given Trump his opportunity. At the same time, Bernie Sanders, a self- declared democratic socialist, having only officially signed up as a Democrat in 2015, has jolted what was widely believed to be the apostolic succession of Hillary Clinton to the presidency. The world over, electorally based political parties are in trouble. Whatever their ideological roots or political goals, they increasingly fail to mobilize or they actually put off potential voters. In a globalizing world, national governments find it increasingly difficult to match the ambitions they set themselves. Borders are too leaky. If you say you’ll tax it, capital moves. Shocks from elsewhere no longer stay over there. As populations judge the failure of promise to match outcome, election turnouts are trending downwards everywhere that elections are held (Mair 2013). The cleaving of the support for a major party, therefore, is not something entirely particular to the United States. Besides the disintegration of a party, this could also indicate the beginning of some sort of realignment between parties or a new party system. The United States has been through “party systems”—conjunctions between party ideologies and bases of support—before (Lepore 2016). Arguably,

the sixth one began with Ronald Reagan’s victory over the incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980. The electoral coalition Reagan put together is now coming apart. Bill Clinton’s centrist Democratic Party is also now on the rocks, facing a revival from the left. Populist moments often herald the collapse of the old and the slow emergence of the new. Plausibly, the liberal economics and liberal interventionism that have defined the US’s place in the world since the Second World War—favoring an open global economy, exporting liberal democracy, and disdaining dictators who operate too independently—are now open to widespread popular doubt from both right (Trump) and left (Sanders). The “establishment candidates” could be left in the dust (Simpson 2016).

the theater of tycoon politics Elections are always about drama. But they are not usually entirely theatrical. “Political candidates are judged as much by the performances they give as by the policies they propose” (Chou et al. 2016). As Charles Guggenheim, who worked for Robert Kennedy, once said (quoted in Davies 1986, 98): “people expect drama, pathos, intrigue, conflict, and they expect it to hang together as a dramatic package.” With his background in so-called reality television, on NBC’s The Apprentice, where he got to say “You’re fired” to dozens of putative protégées, Donald Trump is cast perfectly for the role of a lifetime. But the Trump phenomenon is more than the typical electoral dramaturgy. As a TV protagonist, Trump is the Boss. He forces the viewer to line up on one side or the other in judging him. He will not allow


you to be neutral. Show ratings depend on being as outrageous as possible. Nobody tunes in to watch a “reasonable” presentation. Like professional wrestling, it’s the fights that get the audience, however fake everyone knows it to be. And so in his campaign: “he is a savior or a disaster; a bigot or a patriot; a truth-teller or a buffoon; a commanding front-runner or a bubble on the verge of bursting” ( Poniewozik 2015). Trump has taken the logic of reality TV and transferred it to a campaign for the US presidency. Certainly, it is not only this; the populist anger he taps into is real enough. But the Trump campaign is theatrical in an unprecedented way for US presidential politics. Among other things, the candidate calls for banning all Muslims from the United States, building a wall to keep out Mexicans, hints at conspiracies about 9/11 and much else, and mocks a disabled reporter. He has reinvigorated ethnocentrism on the part of white Americans. In the primaries he reversed the usual polarity of campaigning: “Where traditional candidates have gaffes, he has publicity opportunities. Even his ugliest remarks—saying, after a rough debate on Fox News, that the moderator Megyn Kelly had ‘blood coming out of her wherever’— seemed, among his followers, to burnish his reputation as a straight shooter. It’s ‘The Real World’ approach to politics: Let me show you, America, what happens when candidates stop being polite and start getting real!” (Poniewozik 2015) Not surprisingly, the emphasis on performativity by the Trump campaign, as even the Pope can become an attractive target for opprobrium for at least one news cycle, has attracted comparison to other leaders past and present with a penchant for overthe-top hyperbole and self-dramatization.

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Mussolini, Hitler, Charlie Chaplin playing Hitler, and former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin have all put in appearances in the press and on the Internet. The most popular comparison has been to Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister. This makes sense. Their emphasis on electoral dramaturgy is eerily similar. In 2008 we published a book about Berlusconi’s influence on Italian politics since the early 1990s (Shin and Agnew 2008). In 2011 one of us published a more detailed study of Berlusconi as a politician and the public reception he received among Italians and in the eyes of foreigners (using polls in the former case and media outlet coverage in the latter) (Agnew 2011). Frank Bruni (2015), columnist for the New York Times, provides the best analysis of the Trump-Berlusconi pairing when he points out that it is their shamelessness, utter incapacity for shame, about everything from their wealth and sexual proclivities to their self-evident charm and capacity to dominate the news without paying for it that sets them apart. They are type-A Baboon troop leaders par excellence, as evolutionary psychologists might suggest, preening in public display to show their masculine prowess. In a related article using a quiz called “Name that Narcissist,” Bruni and Sinclair (2015) challenge their readers to correctly identify which of the two tycoons said such things as “I am the Jesus Christ of politics” and “I believe there is no one in history to whom I should feel inferior. Quite the opposite.” Believe us, it is hard to tell them apart. How far should the comparison be pushed? It does show how important the purely dramatic can be in a post-party and even post-truth (“Did I say that?”) era. But interestingly the comparison

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also shows the limits to Trump’s political possibilities—towards office and beyond. The reality is that given his control over the media (including most of the public TV channels when in office) and the lack of institutional constraints on his power while in office, Berlusconi had far greater scope to achieve any goal he set himself than a President Trump would ever have with a potentially hostile Congress and Supreme Court to rein him in. Overall, Berlusconi must be considered a political failure notwithstanding his occupancy of political office for fully nine of the years from 1994 to 2011 (May 1994–January 1995, June 2001–May 2006, May 2008– November 2011). He created a “courtier regime” of lackeys and yes-men (and women) (Viroli 2012). He spent enormous political capital using his office to protect his business (and personal) interests (Stille 2006). He opened the door to the massive expansion of vitriolic and demonizing rhetoric about political adversaries (Mancini 2015). He left Italy’s economy in shambles and a country without much if any respect at home or abroad (Anderson 2014). All told, Berlusconi did not exactly Make Italy Great Again. Berlusconi, too, was and is a businessman-media entrepreneur who emerged into prominence as a major political actor in a time of political crisis. In his case it was in the early 1990s when the principal existing parties were collapsing under the weight of either their corruption (the Christian Democrats and Socialists) or the end of the Cold War (the Communists). Berlusconi created his own political party, Forza Italia, named after the supporters’ cry for the Italian national soccer team. In the Italian electoral system without the institutionalized dominance of two

parties, as in the United States, he did not need to force a takeover of an existing party. Like Trump he began his career as a wealthy man by building apartment blocks in Milan. He used political connections (and donations) to accumulate control over all the main national private television channels in Italy. These channels then broadcast a steady diet of soap operas and reality TV shows that would do Trump proud. A “populist consumerism” (Ricciardi 2012, 5) based on American mass consumerism was at the heart of the messages disseminated by his channels. To round out the comparison, Berlusconi was and is a shameless self-promoter. His masculinist posturing alongside such presidents as Putin and Sarkozy, notwithstanding the lifts in his shoes to make him seem taller than he is, broadcast a message of potency and competitiveness that many Italians found appealing. His infamous gaffes about various world leaders (the “tan” of President Obama being one of the most notorious) were always turned into negative commentaries about those drawing attention to them. His anti-Communism, even though the party of that name had disappeared, recalled both old disputes about whose side he was on (and who had won out) and suggested how much he was in favor of the Church and mainstream morality (Communism = anti-clericalism) even as bad publicity about his private life allowed him to wink at conventional mores. A self-confessed “family man,” his history of trophy wives and girlfriends suggested something else entirely. Above all, however, he presented himself as the quintessential anti- politician, the outsider taking a broom to the Augean stables of established Italian politics.


The Trump-Berlusconi comparison, then, does bear some weight. Beyond their similarities in campaigning it also suggests how Trump would rule. What is most galling for those of us in the reality-based community is that, as Bruni (2015) says: “Both men have learned that they can turn cloddishness to their advantage, by casting it as unvarnished candor. Sloppy talk becomes straight talk. Insult becomes authenticity, even if it’s pure theater and so long as it’s a hell of a show.”

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Post-World War II American history, History Compass, 4(5): 975–99. Feldman, G. 2013. The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865–1944. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Fraser, S. and Freeman, J.B. 2010. In the rearview mirror: history’s mad hatters, the strange career of Tea party populism, New Labor Forum, 19(3): 75–81. Heathcote, E. 2016. How Donald Trump’s towers explain his politics, Financial Times, February 17.

references Agnew, J. 2011. The big seducer: Berlusconi’s image at home and abroad and the future of Italian politics, California Italian Studies, 2,1. http://escholarship.org/uc/ item/2bt6w92c Anderson, P. 2014. The Italian disaster, London Review of Books, 36, 10, 20 May: 3–16. Bruni, F. 2015. La dolce Donald Trump, New York Times, July 18. Bruni, F. and Sinclair, K. 2015. Quiz: Name that Narcissist, New York Times, July 18. Chou, M., Bleiker, R. and Premaratna, N. 2016. Elections as theater, PS: Political Science and Politics, 49(1): 43–47. Chan, J.B. 2016. Portrait of a Trump supporter, Reveal: The Center for Investigative Reporting, February 1. http://revealnews .org/author/juliabchan. Cohn, N. 2015. Donald Trump’s strongest supporters: a certain kind of Democrat, New York Times, December 31. Davies, P. J. 1986. The drama of the campaign: theatre, production and style in American elections, Parliamentary Affairs, 39(1): 98–114. Dionne, E. J. Jr. 2016 How Dixie rules the GOP, Washington Post, February 28. Dochuk, D. 2006. Revival on the right: making sense of the conservative movement in

Inskeep, S. 2016. Donald Trump’s secret? Channeling Andrew Jackson, New York Times, February 17. Lepore, J. 2016. The party crashers: Is the new populism about the message or the medium? The New Yorker, February 22. Luce, E. 2016. Trump’s hostile takeover gains pace, Financial Times, February 21. Mair, P. 2013. Ruling the Void: The HollowingOut of Western Democracy. London: Verso. Mancini, P. 2015. Il post partito. La fine delle grandi narrazioni. Bologna: Il Mulino. Mayer, W. G. 2015. Why Trump—and how far can he go? The Forum, 13(4): 541–58. Poniewozik, J. 2015. What “The Apprentice” taught Donald Trump about campaigning, New York Times, October 9. Ricciardi, A. 2012. After La Dolce Vita: A Cultural Prehistory of Berlusconi’s Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Salam, R. 2012. The missing middle in American politics: how moderate Republicans became extinct, Foreign Affairs, 91(2): 148–55. Sargent, G. 2016. Donald Trump explains American politics in a single sentence, Washington Post, February 10. Schaul, K. and Uhrmacher, K. 2016. Ted Cruz has an evangelical problem, Washington Post, February 21.

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Shin, M. E. and Agnew, J. A. 2008. Berlusconi’s Italy: Mapping Contemporary Italian Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Simpson, E. 2016. This is how the liberal world order ends: not with a bang but

Viroli, M. 2012. The Liberty of Servants: Berlusconi’s Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wallace-Wells, B. 2015. Donald Trump vs. the modern political campaign, The New Yorker, December 11.

with a pair of defiant anti-establishment presidential candidates, Foreign Policy, http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/19/

dr. john agnew ([email protected])

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is a Professor in the Department of Geography

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at UCLA in Los Angeles CA, 90095. His

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dr. michael shin ([email protected])

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is an Associate Professor in the Department of

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statistics and electoral studies, with a special

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interest in Italy.