In defense of ‘performative’: When they go low, put on a show

The word fairly drips with scorn when you hear it, usually from the lips of snooty progressives over oat milk lattes: “Performative.”

What they mean to say is “pandering” or “manipulative” or “as cheesy and fake as a Trump C-note.” But it’s time for a little restorative justice for “performative,” which doesn’t belong with those other pejoratives — because, I ask you, what did Cory Booker do on April Fool’s Day that was anything other than performative?

And yet, Booker, with his frankly astonishing feat of endurance for speaking on the Senate floor for 25 straight hours without so much as a bathroom break, should be an inspiration to all Dems and progressives alike. My completely unwanted and sure-to-be ignored advice to anyone looking to fight the Trump administration: Be more performative!

Liberals have for years operated with a fairly strict church/state separation between the “serious” business of governance and the tawdry, often absurd spectacle of political theater. But, Earth to libs, theater won the day in 2024. Kamala Harris lost the election not when an assassin’s bullet zoomed past Donald Trump’s head, but when he rose from the ground a few seconds later with a bleeding ear — which may or may not have been caused by a flying projectile — and struck the pose that sold thousands of T-shirts. Trump’s superpower is his almost reptilian instinct for the killer meme or the irresistible image, as well as his conviction — maybe his only conviction (outside a New York courtroom) — that politics is nothing but theater.

Some of the thousands who appeared at the “Hands Off” rally in Santa Cruz on Saturday understood that. I saw women dressed as witches, Wonder Woman, the berobed women in “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

As distasteful as it surely must be for those who oppose Trump, fighting him effectively may mean emulating him, at least in his implacable thirst for attention. Cory Booker, for instance, said a lot of stuff during that 25 hours, most of it surely sincere and from the heart. But he got attention for the reality-show stunt of holding the floor with no sleep, food or urinary relief. Would it be nice to live in a world where we were all reflecting on Sen. Booker’s stirring soliloquy on democracy? Sure, but that’s not this world. Our world is “Was he wearing a diaper?”

For more than two months, Democrats have been moaning about having no real power to stop anything the Trump administration is doing. But post-Booker, Dems have a bit more bounce in their step, not because of his stirring words, but because he answered the call from the enraged blue-state constituency of the party to “Do something!” Did Booker’s stunt give one millisecond of pause to the bull currently thrashing around in the china shop? No, but it sent a clear directive to liberals and progressives: Do something that is a bit awkward, out of your comfort zone, a tad humbling. But for the sake of Mom, apple pie and Franklin D. Roosevelt, do it in front of a camera or a live microphone! 

Of course, Trump is not the only one who has successfully deployed theatrical shock and awe. At this point in the first Obama administration, the right wing was quickly coalescing into the Tea Party, which shamelessly embraced the iconography of the Founders to hustle its anti-Obama views. And herein lies a real opportunity for what looks like a long spring and summer of protests against Trump. The Tea Party is a good 15 years in the past now, and since then, Lin-Manuel Miranda has made dressing up in waistcoats and knee breeches hip again. In a reinvigorating reminder that the Founders don’t exclusively belong to the right wing, wouldn’t it be boss if lefties and progressives hijacked the imagery of the Tea Party? Yes, yes it would. Such a thing might even begin to reverse the relentless current flowing one way of “owning the libs.” When are the libs going to do some owning of their own?

Which brings us to Old Glory. Sure, for many on the left, the good ol’ American flag carries a lot of baggage. Some are downright hostile to it as a symbol of militarism and imperialism. But if you folks want to get up off the floor, electorally speaking, when it comes to ambivalence or qualms about the flag, I have one message (and write this down and stick it on your fridge): Get Thee Over Thyself. The left has ceded the flag to the right — the Gadsden flag was given up to the extreme right without a fight and is probably already beyond saving  — and that’s allowed the Fox News crowd to hide their sins, small and enormous, behind waving images of the Stars & Stripes. Don’t like the symbolism of the flag? Change it, make it different colors, mix it up, find an alternative from history, combine it with the Canadian maple leaf flag for a bracing symbol of U.S./Canadian solidarity. Or just wave it proudly! But don’t run away from it. It belongs to you too.

In the realm of language, embrace the example of Frank Luntz. He is a Republican consultant who had an outsized influence on the rise of the GOP in the Gingrich era of the mid-1990s by his unapologetic use of code words and euphemisms to communicate in the political realm. (Turning “estate tax” into “death tax,” to cite the most famous Luntz-ian example.) Is this the crude tool kit of the propagandist? Probably. But in the bar fight for the soul of the country, you better be willing to pick up a broken beer bottle. 

Be like Luntz. Certainly, loaded words can cause as much damage as good. But instead of putting such terms on ice, learn how to use them effectively. Think of, for example, the postwar term “appeasement,” which was wielded effectively for good and ill for decades, after Britain’s ruinous pre-World War II efforts to placate Adolf Hitler. Those overtones can be a bit unsettling, but if it can push some elected officials out of their zone of cowardly silence, isn’t it worth reviving? The term “progressive” has an opposite; why not use “regressives” as a way to define those you are opposing? Imagery works a lot in the same way. Trying to find a unique way to portray Donald Trump on a protest sign? Why not put him in the artistic milieu of Maoism?

Santa Cruz, of all places, should be leading the charge on protest creativity. It was in Santa Cruz, in 1985, that local activist Ann Simonton wore a swimsuit made out of meat to protest the Miss California pageant, because beauty pageants “treat people like meat.” Forty years later, people are still talking about it. That’s how to do a lasting protest!

As your disinterested outside advisor, let me dispense one final hard truth. That famous Michelle Obama line, “When they go low, we go high”? That’s as out of fashion as Crocs and skinny jeans. Does it mean you have to crawl in the gutter? Not necessarily. Maybe the line should be revised, “When they go low, we put on a show!”

If you don’t have real political power, make a play for the next-best thing: attention. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez get that, and so apparently does Cory Booker. To paraphrase some old English guy no one remembers, “All the (political) world’s a stage.” Trump knows this, and whoever might emerge in a post-Trump world better know it too.

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.