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…
