Last Call

Performative Politics in the Age of Pretence

That great Canadian writer of satire and love stories, Mordecai Richler, anticipated something of the way politics are conducted these days in his short novel Cocksure.

In the story, the beautiful but elusive Polly Morgan is so immersed in movie culture (this was before social media enveloped us) that she has come to understand that you need only to have memorized a few scripts to navigate contemporary life. We’re all actors, after all, saying the words, following direction, changing costume as required. It’s important to be convincing, to believe every word that’s spoken, but it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t change anything. It’s just performance.

Our besotted hero, Mortimer Griffin, has come to understand the mechanism of Polly’s fey detachment, but remains ardent in his pursuit of her. Matters become complicated, however, when he crosses the powerful tycoon known as the Star Maker. Mortimer is in real trouble – thugs are coming to kill him. In desperation, he tries to persuade Polly to act out a scene she’s bound to be familiar with – the one where she has to make a phone call to save her lover’s life. She nods. She gets it. She runs out the door and down the street, comes to a vacant phone booth (there are still phone booths), but that’s too easy. There has to be someone inside the booth, holding things up, to build suspense, so she runs on. The second booth she comes to, fortunately, is occupied. She bangs on the glass …

Rat-tat-tat. The teenager was done, just in time, Polly sensed, and she entered the booth. Polly deposited her sixpence and dialed nine nine nine.

            “Metropolitan Police here. Yes.”

            Polly smiled warmly.

            “Hello! Hello! Is there anyone there?” the officer asked.

            Gratefully, Polly hung up, hung up without speaking, and on the wide screen that was her mind’s eye, sirens sounded, police cars heaving into Beaufort Street in the nick of time. Crowds formed. They embraced. Somewhere in the night a bird was singing. Tomorrow the sun would come up. Tomorrow and tomorrow. Old Sol, she thought.

Mortimer, the reader is left to suppose, is murdered.

And this is where we are – in our Facebook and Instagram posts, in our immersive video games, in our self-branding and image-making exercises, even politics. Especially politics. The players go through the motions but they don’t mean it. They’re not lying exactly. (Sometimes they’re lying.) They’re operating in an environment in which performance has pushed substance to the margins. The important stuff happens offscreen. Or not at all.

Watch majority leader Chuck Schumer make a statement in the United States Senate. The place is vacant, the seats around him, empty. He might as well be standing in front of a set or a green screen. Maybe he is. Whatever the Senate chamber might once have represented, let’s say, a forum for earnest, informed, impassioned debate, it’s now defunct. The situation is much the same in the British and Canadian parliaments. Years ago, the Conservative MP, Enoch Powell, observed that the best way to keep a state secret in Britain was to announce it on the floor of the House of Commons at 8 p.m. – when most MPs and journalists were at dinner. These days, the journalist Andrew Marr observed, it would hardly matter what time the announcement was made. The Commons is lively only at Question Period. But Question Period is theater. It exists for scoring points and recording sound-bites. We know this but we may have forgotten what a Canadian member of parliament, Michael Chong, revealed a few years ago. He complained that even the speeches no one listened to in Parliament were programmed. “Virtually all speeches for debate are written in various leaders’ or ministers’ offices,” he wrote. “Members have no input into the content of those speeches. They are reading, literally reading, someone else’s words into Hansard.” This is not why the member’s constituents elected them. To speak lines written for them by hotshot ministerial assistants somewhere in the bowels of the Prime Minister’s office. But that’s where we are.

Perhaps none of this is news. But it’s notable that the phenomenon is evident across at least three democracies. Many of the decisions that affect us happen somewhere offstage. What we see and hear in the places where democracy was meant to play out is mostly meaningless. Our representatives put in an occasional appearance in the House of Commons, the Senate or House of Representatives. They read from a prepared script. They may be heckled if the other side thinks the occasion will be noticed, but more often they speak to a camera that records their words for an audience that isn’t there. They might as well be pounding on the glass door of that phone booth, then lifting the receiver but saying nothing. There’s someone at the other end, waiting patiently.

Or maybe not.

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Sources: Mordecai Richler, Cocksure (McClelland & Stewart, 1968); Andrew Marr, My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism (London: Pan Macmillan, 2005); Michael Chong, “Rethinking Question Period and Debate in the House of Commons,” Canadian Parliamentary Review, Autumn 2008.

Photo: Pexels: Luis Quintero 2111759