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The GOP Is Now the WWE of Politics
Once Republicans became the party of fantasies and tantrums and putting on a show, Marjorie Taylor Greene was inevitable
Back in 2016, as I finished writing Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, my book about our founding national weakness for mixing fiction and reality in problematic ways, I wondered if I’d attributed too much significance to postmodern professional wrestling. I wrote about how boundaries between entertainment and the rest of life were definitively dismantled in the 1980s and 90s, after which America “became an amazing coast-to-coast theme park, open twenty-four hours.” The simultaneous WWF-WWE explosion, I argued, isn’t just a metaphor for the devolution of the political right into a make-believe gladiatorial circus — rather, I argued, both phenomena were symptoms of the same, long-festering American pathologies.
The last several years have confirmed that I didn’t overstate the case.
At all.
Ostentatiously super-fit Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene––who believes the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, that mass shootings are staged by gun control proponents, that “beams of blue light” from space-based “solar generators” started forest fires in California and, of course, that a “global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles” runs America––is the first full-on MAGAMania Smackdown member of Congress.
Which she demonstrated more clearly than ever one afternoon last week at the Capitol, on her 130th day as a House member and 127 days since a brigade of her MAGA compatriots stormed the building. She walked out of the House Chamber some distance behind Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and then tried to stage a WWE-esque confrontation on location, as if she were Hulk Hogan attacking Randy Savage or Jeff Hardy trash-talking CM Punk. Two Washington Post reporters were nearby.
“Hey, Alexandria,” she shouted at her House colleague. “Hey, Alexandria,” she shouted again. Representative Ocasio-Cortez kept walking. But Greene, refusing to be ignored, gave chase and kept shouting, demanding to know why Ocasio-Cortez supports Black Lives Matter and antifa “terrorists,” why she won’t appear with her, Marjorie Taylor Greene, in a…
