Inside the Theatre of Politics: US Presidential Elections

Rousseau, theatre critic, was against politics in drama. Like Plato condemning Homer’s lies, he rejected all deception on stage, demanding authenticity and sincerity instead. But face to face with reality, he turned back the other way. The Social Contract advocates prudence, even dissimulation.¹ He came to feel some lies were necessary, like Plato, who founded his Republic on the “noble lie”.² Xenophon, in his history of Cyrus’s first expedition against the Armenians, hints at the necessity for fraud. Bismarck seems to have largely agreed: making Germany great again, his social welfare rhetoric veiled concessions made to conserve political power, much as was said across the Channel regarding piecemeal electoral and church reform in nineteenth-century England.³ T.E. Lawrence, “deceitful accessory” of the great game in Arabia, thought well of the New Zealanders coming through Palestine and the Australians in Damascus, but hated the lies of the “old men” and realised “the living knew themselves puppets on God’s stage”.⁴ There is venerable history to the drama of politics.

The first English populariser, Shakespeare, thought men and women merely players on the world stage, although he didn’t say they had to punch above their weight on it. Subsequent history shows life slavishly imitating his art. Cardinal de Retz records that on January 13, 1649, during a bout of frondisme in Paris, the Bastille surrendered to cannon siege, an event watched by ladies of society, who set up chairs in the Jardin de l’Arsenal for the purpose.⁵ Observances for the fall of the Bastille at the Champs de Mars in 1792 were carried out under threat of counter-revolution. They attracted a hundred thousand people—uniformed National Guard and “individuals, families, children in holiday mood to see a bit of pageantry and public festivity”, viewed from the balconies by Marie Antoinette and others of the court.⁶

Almost two hundred years later to the day, three million or more men and women marched along the main street of Tehran, watched by seemingly as many, jostling on pavements, peering from windows, and—best view of all—perched on scaffolding set up for the boom in apartment building. Up there, under a hot sun and swinging helicopter gunships, one looked down on a black human sea, thirteen kilometres long, fists in the air, struck by the sea’s brutal roar—margh bar Shah, margh baleh Shah—by its gentle hush as oranges were peeled and quartered for the thirsty—bebahkshid Aghra, durft habaeen?—and the mannered delicacy of High Persian as Red Crescent nurses parted the sea, kneeling to fallen faint—Salom Khonum-i, befarmaeen, hraelly mamnoun hastam—and the blessing of God—Khoda-hafez. The accents re-appeared during the hostage crisis, when special television gantries stood at the embassy gates ready for the network satellite feeds: vast crowds of peaceful picnickers blocked traffic and trade for months, rising to fist the air spontaneously when lights flashed and cameras rolled.

Scholars have set out the background to the theatre/politics topic many times. The modern locus classicus is E.R. Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), followed by Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938). Erving Goffman’s Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1956) has spawned so many copycats the idea is still talk at afternoon tea.⁷ The main surprise about the theatre of politics is, thus, that anyone is surprised.

Yet the idea surprises. Today again, the press seems caught unawares, newly re-offended and puzzled by the resemblance of major political drama to plays on stage. Their plight neatly highlights the dilemma good acting poses for those who are merely spectators: is he acting or does he really believe this stuff? T.E. Lawrence’s thespian leadership of Arabian irregulars made this a poser for British generals in Cairo: “Allenby could not make out how much was genuine performance and how much charlatan.”⁸ Among keys to power on stage as anywhere are authenticity and sincerity, yet to be authentic and sincere, comments Arthur Miller, you have to act really well. La Rochefoucauld, younger, more cynical than Shakespeare, might have backed this: it takes, he thought, all one’s ingenuity to hide one’s ingenuity.⁹

Miller sets out the nature of what gives acting its power in his little book On Politics and the Art of Acting.¹⁰ He doesn’t say if he has read Rousseau or anyone else, but as a playwright himself, he may not have needed to. And if he has, he skips that part and goes straight for the political action. Sometimes he sounds a lot like Rousseau and others who knew both the politics of the theatre and the theatre of politics.

Miller points out that masks, dress-ups and make-up go back to primitive times—judges wear robes, police are uniformed and so on. Dress-up lives, he says, somehow seem more real than actual lives: “seeing such figures out of uniform—eating ice cream or watching TV in their living-room” creates discomfort for viewers. He records his own shock at seeing General Eisenhower under the make-up artist before appearing on television, “as though he were “getting ready to go on in the role of General Eisenhower instead of simply being him”. For the 2000 election, he recalls the Democrat candidate Al Gore rummaging “through several changes of costume before finding the right mix to express the personality he thought it profitable to project … apparently happy, upbeat, with a kind of Bing Crosby mellowness”, and Gore’s rival Bush turning his mouth down, apparently, to look a little ornery.

Politicians, says Miller, need to appeal to a wide variety of people, and so must assume identities not their own: “let’s say six-pack, lunch-box types—they hope to connect with ordinary Americans”. This wisdom has roots in Nietzsche: new movements need an unerring instinct for ordinary folk and how individuals of any kind merge their individuality in a crowd.¹¹ Or in Napoleon, whose wars Lawrence studied at Oxford along with those of Clausewitz: game-changers achieve results not by working on leaders but by moving masses.

In the event, Miller seems to have felt both candidates of 2000 were too tense on camera to be convincing. He says the reason was both were Washington insiders but “since you can’t hope to be president without running against Washington they had to run against themselves, something which surely did not add reality to either of them”. He complains that they were “coached” not to appear threatening to anyone, with the result that both lacked “inner reality”, a sine qua non for real actors, such as James Dean, allowing a glimpse of “their unruly souls”.

Miller thinks unruly is good: a “kind of ‘craziness’ is necessary to successful political campaigning in America”. He heard Roosevelt in Boston once, after Congressmen Barton, Fish and Martin had stymied his every policy. He turned their names into a chant: asking the crowd who had blocked him, he got back the chant “Martin, Barton and Fish”. Miller says the rhythm caught on, which Roosevelt rode “like a galloping horse putting out one thwarted proposal after another followed by the massive crowd’s howling with laughter and roaring back the response ‘Martin, Barton and Fish’”. Miller cites P.T. Barnum: “I don’t care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right.” Miller sees the outrageous as satire, helping to keep a sense of reality and “the border intact between it and fantasy”.

In the studio, it’s different. Miller notes President Clinton was “relaxed on camera in a way any actor would envy”. A tense actor, presumably unless he or she is acting tense, has little credibility, for “relaxation is the soul of the art”. But there are no simple formulas: President Clinton really was “closest to a man of the people”, he says, but in the end spurred much acting in others as they put distance between him and them.

For Miller, the actor’s art ultimately concerns not truth but the faculty of self-belief. He says President Reagan “disarmed his opponents by never showing the slightest sign of inner conflict about the truth of what he was saying”, and even if you didn’t believe what he said “you were still kind of amused by how sincerely he said them”. The actor’s secret is to erase any “dividing line between the performance and himself—he is his performance”. Miller cites examples of this with respect to Reagan, who was or seemed notoriously unable to distinguish between himself and his roles in old films. The public, too, may struggle to discern. On holiday in Florida, Tony Blair entered a restaurant to be greeted, “I just saw you in The Queen; you were great!”

The faculty has been long observed. Nietzsche’s researches in classics showed him the psychology was as ancient as it is modern: the actor’s role becomes stronger in his own eyes than reality, he becomes his role, a “Dionysian” power that miraculously compels the audiences not only to believe him but to believe in him.¹² The English knew it too: it was said of Gladstone that he could convince anyone of most things and himself of anything. T.E. Lawrence felt the dreamer by day far more dangerous than the dreamer by night as the latter forgot dreams while the former believed them and acted to make them come true.

Miller refers all this simply to the impact of the “star” before whom “resistance melts away”. He thought President Roosevelt had this quality most, so much so he was tempted to think Roosevelt wasn’t acting at all. On reflection, he rejected the thought. Roosevelt was an “upper class man with physical weaknesses who showed none, a stunning achievement for a man who lived in a wheelchair”. He out-performed an active incumbent, President Hoover, seen by many ordinary people as a “hero” helping the country “out of a swamp”.

The mystery of the star, says Miller, is to leave the “mind confused, resentful or blank, something that has, of course, the greatest political importance”. President Carter’s electoral defeat in 1980 may show something of this. Sitting opposite president-elect Reagan on television, he blamed neither policy decisions nor the hostage debacle in Iran. Reagan’s personal charm prompted him to confess instead—with his own brand of good humour—“that’s why you’re there and I’m over here”. Says Miller, “when the click of empathetic association is made with a leader, logic has very little to do with it and virtue even less”. T.E. Lawrence also knew the primary power of EQ: “Our kingdom lay in each man’s mind … transcending by purposed emotion, the gradual logical sequence of the mind.”¹³

Paradoxically though, says Miller, a star does not ask his audience “merely to love him”; he can threaten them and yet make them “wish he would love them … that is the power that can lead nations”. The star, says Miller, is not real but “real plus”, “and the plus is the mystery of the patina, the glow that power paints on a human being”. A presidency, he says, is a “heroic” role, not one for “comedians, slick lover types or second bananas”. “He may deliver the Sunday lesson provided his sword is never out of reach, the two best examples being FDR and John Kennedy.” Or perhaps Truman. Miller agrees with his decision to unleash the bomb on Hiroshima, given the extraordinary difficulties posed by island-hopping strategies. He claims a display of “Truman’s unwillingness to kill would have threatened his leadership altogether, and his power, personally and symbolically, would have lost credibility”. According to Miller, the issue was “not Truman so much as the manifestation of power that people require their leaders to personify and act out”. He claims, “we cloak our leaders with a certain magical, extra-human, theatrical aura … to help disguise one of the basic conditions of their employment—namely a readiness to kill for us.” This is why, of course, judges add, or used to add, a black hood to their head and robes when passing sentence of death.

But politics, like war, is not well-made for general rules.¹⁴ President Carter was elected, albeit narrowly, contrary to all Miller’s points. Running in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and Watergate years, he boldly refused to present himself as other than he was, a simple man of religious principle. The record shows he was elected on a quasi-Christian platform, driven by objective stances on policy issues, enlightened views on human rights and a refusal to authorise killing. Or is all this just another rule? Balthasar Gracian, a seventeenth-century cleric, urged fellow courtiers to “be bold, but discreetly so”.¹⁵ And the Christ-like pose accompanied by a little tug of the heart-strings is a play surely seen often enough in our own soap operas, deservedly popular for their acute observation.

Does Fortune play a main role, as Machiavelli, among many, have thought? If so, she was possibly unkind to Carter, who stuck to his principles, from which Machiavelli might have observed, come the vicissitudes of “good” alone.¹⁶ Five months into the Iranian hostage crisis, President Carter authorised “Desert One”, a surprise raid attempting to rescue hostages held in the American embassy, which ended in public failure when some of the helicopters involved crashed at night in the desert. By definition, however, vicissitudes cannot be all bad. The hostages were released, albeit after 444 days, at President Reagan’s inauguration. Operation “Argo”, a clandestine effort to rescue American personnel stranded outside the embassy during its takeover, ended happily: Carter could fairly claim all’s well that ends well without loss of any human life. And it seems forgotten that the entire Middle East peace process—the “Camp David” accords—was Carter’s inspiration alone. He launched it, and marked out the speech-trail beaten by his successors to this day when they travel to the Middle East. His presidency met with sharp domestic criticism but has arguably entered wider history as one of those conducted in the real world on ethical principles.¹⁷

There are those who will wish to say Carter’s presidency was an exception that proves the rule. He was not re-elected; Iran may have thought his successor as President would not be so reticent about using force to release hostages; and “Argo” contained enough theatre for Hollywood to make it into a film story of the same name. Perhaps the roles demanded in politics are best described as conflicting.

Rousseau and Miller, however, miss the main drama of politics. It would be foolish to view politics as merely theatre. Acting is merely a means, and only one of them, albeit ignoble, in the ugly rush towards goals in the real world. Dramatic political strategies are needed even if they amount only to ephemera, old wine in new bottles. Among goals, many observers would see a main one to be deciding which persons or group of persons is to have control of which others. Machiavelli, with hallmark honesty and lack of political correctness, drew this social division in a way arguably valid today, between the rulers and the ruled, the latter being immensely and always more numerous, if softened in functioning democracies by the widespread democratic instinct. But deep down, Machiavelli knew that powers of patronage and some others like it cannot be announced in public. Overcome for once by correctness, he fell back on saying little or no attention should be paid to what actors say but lots to what they do.

Machiavelli’s writing along these lines is apt to be misunderstood by modern-day liberals when they rattle on about the fundamental goodness of humanity, an idea launched by Rousseau on which one understands the jury is still out. (The converse idea—that humanity is fundamentally bad—was Hobbes’s idea, but on the evidence, this also seems difficult to verify with certainty.)¹⁸ Machiavelli’s focus, however, was not the fundamental goodness or badness of humanity but the conduct of political men and women.¹⁹ The play is simply not the thing.

In the end, Miller comes close to recognising this. He worries that the theatrical nature of power reveals the “immemorial tendency of [power] to enhance itself at the expense of humanity”. And that, “In the end we call a work of art trivial when it illuminates little beyond its own devices, and the same goes for political leaders who bespeak some narrow interest rather than those of the national or universal good.” Perhaps the fault for good or ill lies not in the “use of the theatrical arts but in their purpose”.

The historical record, alas, shows that the purpose does not always redeem the fault. Machiavelli’s Prince was written to urge the Medici family to unite Italy into a single nation along contemporary French and English lines. The goal was not only good but also practical as the family was then uniquely in control of both Florence and its long-time enemy, the Papacy. Yet the Machiavelli Plan—he called it a “Holy War”—went unheeded. It took Italy another three centuries to catch up with him. Napoleon, on the other hand, inherited a liberal revolution but instantly made it illicit justification for personal dictatorship. As regards Bismarck, Gladstone observed that he made Germany great again but made Germans small.²⁰

The last word should remain with Miller’s perceptive book. He takes us outside the theatre, citing Tolstoy, who like T.E. Lawrence, knew that “in the end we want a glimpse of God. You can’t act that.” Oddly enough, the former Shah understood the force of spirit too. Commemorating 2500 years of Persian monarchy, a supreme fiction, he turned to the heavens above Persepolis, saying “Sleep, Cyrus, for I am awake.” But the move proved a blunder, and along with others, led to marches against a monarchy become or made widely hated to its peoples. Miller’s final question remains pertinent today: he wonders whether having “acted our way into danger, we can act our way out of it”.

Notes

1 Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, 1758. The dissimulation point belongs to Maurice Cranston, in the introduction to his Penguin translation, London, 1968. An annotated edition by Robert Derathé details the innumerable feints in logic, Du Contrat social, (1762), Paris, 1966. Rousseau thought sovereignty inalienable from the “people” but knew this impracticable in real-world government, which depends upon many layers of delegation. Despite optimism about human nature, he did not trust real people, and sought compromises in theory without making any in practice, a procedure easier argued in French than in English. His idea is workable only in very small communities, such as in stately mansions of others, in which he made his life-long homes.

2 When asked what kind of “opportune falsehood” he had in mind, Plato has Socrates respond, “Nothing unprecedented …but a sort of Phoenician tale, something that has happened ere now in many parts of the world, as the poets aver and have induced men to believe, but that has not happened and perhaps would not be likely to happen in our day and demanding no little persuasion to make it believable.” (The Republic, Book III, Loeb Classical Library, rev. ed., Paul Shorey, Harvard, 1937, pp.301-7.) Nietzsche thought that, besides Plato, the “holy lie” was common to “Confucius, the law of Manu, Mohammed, and the Christian church”. (The Portable Nietzsche, trans Walter Kaufmann, New York, 1954, p.642. Der Antichrist, Neuausgabe, Munich, 1999, p. 239.) T E Lawrence, reflecting on the vast number of failed religions in Semitic lands – where there had been “40, 000 prophets” – thought all creeds were assertions or fictions, not arguments. He noted that the three surviving Semitic religions, all based on the idea of the worthlessness of the world, were successful exports: Christianity has long conquered Europe and America, while Islam has conquered Africa and parts of Asia (Seven Pillars of Wisdom, London, 1926, p.23.)

3 Nietzsche, friendly theatre critic of Wagner till they fell out, may have had Bismarck partly in mind when he said a “real man wants two things: danger and play”. (The Portable Nietzsche, op cit., p.178; Also Sprach Zarathustra, Neuausgabe, Munich, 1999, p.85.) He actually made this remark on men in relation to women, but as he also thought truth and music were women, his writing is hard to confine to one plane of reference. (The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 683, 668; Nietzsche contra Wagner, Neuausgabe, Munich, 1999, p. 439.)

4 Op cit. p.45, p.27. Lawrence saw himself as a “‘godless fraud” (although, perhaps as pillar of wisdom, he did not say so to the Kiwis and Australians at the time), p. 564.

5 Cardinal de Retz, Mémoires ; in Oeuvres, Editions de la Pléiade, Paris, 1984, p.292.

6 R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, The Struggle, Princeton, 1964, p.9. T. E. Lawrence entered Damascus to a ceremonially demonstrative mob, op cit, p668.

7 European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, (1948), translated by Willard R Trask, New York 1952, Ch 7; Homo Ludens, (1938), trans., Boston, 1955; The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, (1959), Penguin, 1971.

8 Op cit. p. 330.

9 Maxims, nr 245, translated, L W Tancock, Penguin, 1959. Nietzsche neatly puts this round the other way: “What someone is begins to show itself where his talents decline – when he stops showing what he can do. Talents are dress-ups and dress-ups are forms of hiding.” Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Neuausgabe, Munich, pp. 95-96 (writer’s trans.)

10 New York, 2001.

11 Die Geburt der Tragödie, Neuausgabe, Munich, p.155.

12 Die Geburt der Tragödie, op. Cit., sections 1 and 2.

13 Op cit. pp198-200; p.335.

14 T E Lawrence said war is “antinomian” or an art, op cit., p.200. Clausewitz too saw war less as a set of strategic and tactical rules than as a (humanist) philosophy – see comments on him in my article, “Blame it on Grotius,” New Zealand International Review, August, 2017 (forthcoming).

15 The Oracle, (1647), trans. L B Walton, London, 1953, p.89. Frederick the Great notoriously practised Machiavellianism whilst proclaiming against it, presumably in part on advice from Voltaire, a sometime adviser. Voltaire thought history showed Montesquieu’s first-strike theories of war self-defeating and felt a truly Machiavellian policy-maker would write a book to rebut Machiavellianism – Dictionnaire philosophique, 1764, under “Guerre”, addition of 1771. While the twenty-first century claims to have invented the “pre-emptive strike”, it has perhaps merely re-invented the wheel.

16 The Prince, trans. George Bull, Penguin, 1961, p.100. Machiavelli’s point is flexibility: a policy appropriate at one political moment may not be at another. There is no silver bullet, one reason he saw all politics as ephemeral.

17 Hendrik Herzberg, Carter’s speechwriter, sets out a recollection of these years that seems fairly balanced – at least to someone living outside America – in “A Moral Ideologue”, collected in his Politics, Observations and Arguments, London, 2004. How presidents are seen during their tenure is one thing but their posterity may be another; Reagan and others today may seem diminished figures compared to the long shadows they cast in office.

18 The centuries have drawn the parties closer, without finality: Kant, a stay-at-home albeit with broad interests, judged mankind on balance slightly more good than bad, while Nietzsche, a wanderer, summed man up as slightly more bad than good. T E Lawrence felt the “ledger-balance of good or evil hard to strike”, possibly led to this by a young, politic, Emir Feisal, who said “Your good and my good, perhaps they are different”. And latterly, Walter Ong SJ identified one barbarian within for very barbarian without, The Barbarian Within, New York. 1962. Ong’s balance might have been agreeable to Machiavelli, who saw circumstances rather than morality the crux of politics, and concluded half and half would be fair for rulers, op cit, pp. 99-100. Before them all, Plato thought evil inevitably entered the state anyway, though a human tendency to excess in cycles of tyranny, oligarchy and democracy; The Republic, Bk VIII, op.cit. p.313.

19 In The Machiavellians, London, 1943, James Burnham claims Machiavelli had “no views” on humanity but this is not correct: The Prince contains many general remarks about human nature and The Discourses show his thinking about human values for a republic, but it is true generalities are mostly tuned to their political context and sometimes distinguished from the “private citizen”. Burnham more correctly said Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is misunderstood insofar as it is not about human nature in general but about economic men and women. Smith did write on general ethics, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he warned against the “man of system” and said the “wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order or society”. (1759), 1982, Liberty Classics, Indianapolis, pp.233-234. It is thus an irony that Smith is often taken to have founded a system of economics.

20 Cited in Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnostics, Chicago, 1968, p13.

Auckland

June 2017