Performance Art in Politics
From invisible handcuffs to the Boston Tea Party and the double-slit experiment
In July, U.S. Representative for New York’s 14th district — Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez — was arrested, alongside 17 Democratic lawmakers and 17 protestors by Capitol Police in front of the Supreme Court.
Adorned with green bandanas, the protestors marched from the Capitol building, rallying against the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade.
After arriving at the Supreme Court, they took a seat on the street, shouting “The people, united, will never be divided.”
But while cameras came out, AOC and several other representatives were seemingly arrested.
AOC walked with her hands hidden behind her back, pretending to be in handcuffs, before raising her fist to supporters on the sidewalk.
A similar performance was put on by Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who got up from her sitting protest and seemingly arrested herself in a video that shows her hands behind her back, void of handcuffs, with no police present.
Joining the rehearsal was Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Jackie Speier of California, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Andy Levin of Michigan, among others.
The group of ‘criminals’ were guided gently to the grassy lawn between the Supreme Court and Capital Building, where they were given water, conducted interviews with the media, and posed with their congressional IDs in lieu of mugshots. The New York Post reported the group was released at 2:30 p.m., just a few hours after the start, and were charged with “crowding, obstructing or incommoding,” resulting in a $50 fine.
The performance was intended to provide credibility to the representatives exercising civil disobedience, showing they were rebels with a cause. But instead, social media quickly responded, taking them to task for their slacktivism.
“America is so racist and sexist that two minority women who are elected members of Congress had to pretend to be arrested today,” posted Washington Times columnist Tim Young.
AOC responded to the debacle during an Instagram Live Q&A, stating: “Republicans’ favorite hobby is to make conspiracy theories out of everything to distract you and keep you from talking about what’s actually important - which is the fact that they are trying to take away your bodily autonomy. If I was faking that, why would I intentionally fist pump somebody? It’s so silly.”
But the arrest is just the latest viral opportunity to transform a political issue into a performance piece, to provoke an image of credibility and fabricate a truth to garner a reputation.
Unfortunately, this happens often within the recent administrations of Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden, but it stems all the way back to the origins of our country.
In February 2020, Biden claimed he was arrested in 1977 during a visit to South Africa to meet with Nelson Mandela.
“This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” he told a crowd in Columbia, South Carolina. “I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robben Island.
“After he [Mandela] got free and became president, he came to Washington and came to my office. He threw his arms around me and said ‘I want to say thank you.’ I said, ‘What are you thanking me for, Mr. President?’ He said: ‘You tried to see me. You got arrested trying to see me.”
The claim quickly triggered fact checkers at The Washington Post, who concluded “there is no evidence that Biden was ever arrested trying to see the imprisoned future president of a democratic South Africa,” citing evidence related to lack of mentions in his memoir, trouble regarding the proposed location of the incident, and a quote from Andrew Young, the U.N. ambassador Biden claimed he was arrested with, telling The Washington Post directly: “There is no chance I ever was arrested in South Africa, and I don’t think Joe was, either.”
But Biden didn’t stop there.
In January 2022, Biden told an audience in Atlanta, “I did not walk in the shoes of generations of students who walked these grounds. But I walked other grounds. Because I’m so damn old, I was there as well. You think I’m kidding, man. It seems like yesterday the first time I got arrested.”
Again, The Washington Post followed up the statement with an article, connecting the claim to a story Biden has told on many occasions involving his mother and a protest she attended in Lynnfield, Delaware. The different versions of the story vary from her being walked home by the police to him being stared at while standing on the porch of a young, black couple. The Post concluded again, “There’s no evidence we can find that Biden was ever arrested.”
It’s possible these attempts at credibility derive from the attention presidential candidate Bernie Sanders drew when a photo and video resurfaced of his arrest from August 1963 during a civil rights demonstration in Chicago at West 73rd Street. The video provided him with a reputation among young voters, confirming his consistent progressive stance on civil rights issues that continues throughout his career.
But one place it didn’t stem from was Hillary Clinton’s 2008 gaffe, when her campaign was rocked after fact checkers exposed her story of arriving “under sniper fire” in Bosnia, which was ultimately disproven. Instead, a video showed the presidential candidate being greeted by children bearing flowers upon arrival.
Performance activism has also been pervasive from companies through their social media presence. Both BlackRock and Halliburton, two organizations know for their nefarious business dealings and profiting off war and the misfortune of many Americans, posted videos to twitter during pride month citing their alliance with the LGBTQ+ community.
The public, often unknowingly, has fallen susceptible too, sharing black squares and Ukrainian flags on their accounts to signal support for ongoing issues without proposing a solution or meaningfully contributing towards resolutions.
The minimal efforts associated with actions that provide no direct change have been referred to as “performance activism” or “slacktivism” by several journalists and cultural commentators.
In 2017, Jeff Ihaza of The Outline wrote “one of the most crippling tendencies of modern liberals is their obsession with being seen, whether it be at a protest wearing a fuzzy pink hat alongside Madonna or in viral tweets totally owning the president. This preoccupation with optics is more often than not frighteningly self-centered.
“From ‘performative’ activism to a fixation on clever protest signs, modern liberals know better than anyone else how to cash in on a political movement, but they know very little about how to harness the power of one.”
While the comments are applicable, it’s harsh for Ihaza to criticize the modern era for a situation that’s been happening since our country was founded. The concept of perception has been utilized by parties to vie for independence, advertisements, campaigns and other factors swaying voters and elections since the start.
The term “Argumentum ad populum,” translating to “appeal to the crowd,” was first used in 1726 when Isaac Watts added the phrase to John Locke’s list of informal “ad” fallacies.
It’s hard not to see the concept in action when thinking back on the Boston Tea Party.
In 1773, a group of military men and political patriots boarded the Dartmouth and unloaded 342 chests of tea, dumping them into the water. We tend to view this inciting incident as the rebellious origin of America. But the concept was little more than a performance piece centered around the Whig’s idea that taxes could not be imposed without the endorsement of the people’s representation, along with a protest against mercantile practices of the British government and the tea monopoly granted to the East India Trading Company.
The reality is Britain was lowering taxes on legal tea in an attempt to compete with American smugglers, not raising taxes. Many of the smugglers, involved in politics and whom we now consider our Founding Fathers, didn’t appreciate the competition.
The Boston-based patriots dressed as Native Mohawk Indians before storming the ship, some with painted faces and skin, others wearing headdresses and carrying hatchets.
Our culture has accepted a modern interpretation of the event, saying the cause was taxation, and the Native American attire was symbolic, showing the groups allegiance with American values over British imperialism. But the reality is the costumes were a disguise, a tool to shift the blame if the results didn’t pan out accordingly. But as news quickly travelled of the incident, the symbolic storyline emerged and our Founding Fathers saw the opportunity to turn the smuggling narrative into a call for action regarding independence. Political performance art at its finest.
The concept of appearance continued on, affecting the re-election of 8th President Martin Van Buren.
His rival, Willian Henry Harrison, adorned the persona of a frontiersman, despite the fact that his father was a Virginia planter and signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Harrison cloaked himself as a man of the people. He claimed to be rugged and from the earth, projecting an ethos of the true blue collar American. (Sound familiar to the “working class” president known for living in a gold-plated penthouse?)
Harrison eventually convinced the public and was able to push out Van Buren, a legitimate middle class politician known for being the first President whose native language was something other than English.
It’s just continued on from there.
Whether it’s Bill Clinton posing with Al Gore at factory warehouses for photo ops, Barack Obama adorning the compassionate crown while participating in drone strikes throughout the middle east, or Trump’s ability to style himself as the blunt-speaking champion of the blue-collar American, all while offering tax cuts that helped billionaires pay less taxes than the working class in 2018.
The performances found themselves center stage during COVID, where politicians like Gov. Gavin Newsom were giving speeches in masks, only to be photographed hours later at the French Laundry breaking all social distancing and restaurant guidelines he instilled.
Or how about Chris Cuomo’s dramatization of emerging from quarantine in his Southampton basement, appealing to the public through his own ‘suffering’ to show his solidarity with those out of work from restaurants closures.
The news-anchor-turned-television-personality was seen multiple times prior to his “emergence,” especially in East Hampton weeks before when he got into a fight with a “jackass loser fat-tire biker,” who asked him why he was breaking quarantine without a face mask.
“Who the hell are you?” was his subtle response caught on video. “I can do what I want.”
Then there’s Elizabeth Warren’s claims of victimhood, the authenticity behind Biden’s televised COVID vaccine (which even Snopes cites as a ‘mixture of true and false’), John Kerry’s military service controversy, Brian Williams Iraq helicopter scandal and George Wallace’s more modern version of his controversial day at the University of Alabama, where instead of protesting, governor Wallace stood in the doorway, blocking two black students from entering the university. The list goes on and on.
But are these performances all in the name of politics, to appeal to an audience looking for signs of themselves in our leaders? Or is this just a human condition? To justify our mistakes and decisions, to convince ourselves we’ve been on the right side of history, doing the right thing and living our truth.
Maybe it goes even deeper than that. Maybe it’s just an example of the observer effect, that neat little study of the double-slit experiment, where physicists found observation can change the results of experiments.
Maybe we can’t help but act a certain way when we’re under the notion that someone is watching us — a tough thing to grapple with in a world run by surveillance states, reality television and social media platforms.