Far too often, modern American politics has come to resemble a form of “cosplay,” in which activists of various stripes cast themselves in the role of virtuous freedom-fighters standing up against an all-powerful, malevolent enemy force. This tendency has exacerbated as our pop culture has shifted toward comic book films and science-fiction movies as our key narratives, while politics have simultaneously moved online into radicalizing ideological echo-chambers. As a result, many Americans perceive political narratives along the lines of Manichean or apocalyptic fantasy tales, and cast themselves as heroic combatants in this storyline of existential struggle. One thought-provoking essay recently argued that in comic book films, “Fear is omnipresent, public institutions are not to be trusted, and the best we can hope for is benevolent vigilantes to take everything out of our hands.” The popularity of these movies likely reflect the growing civic distrust in the United States, and may shed light on a disturbing impulse within the American electorate to favor figures willing to defy institutional and legal norms.
Many Americans now are chafing at the limits of what can be quickly accomplished under an increasingly gridlocked U.S. political system. In their frustration, they are also losing sight of the humanity of their opponents. This is not an entirely new phenomenon. In the 1990s, militia members portrayed themselves as modern-day minutemen, casting Clinton Administration federal agencies such as the ATF as tyrannical. This red-state narrative conveniently & hypocritically disappeared when a right-wing president, George W. Bush, again took office. Recently, American political cosplay has revived, expanded, and taken on a more continental flavor, with Antifa wielding the black and red flags of leftist Spanish civil warriors, and with Alt-Right supporters cosplaying as Nazis, Confederates, and other extreme-right factions.
When groups are engaged in politics as cosplay, the use of uniforms clearly mark insiders from outsiders, forming a ritualistic display of group unity, rather than a coalition of like-minded people willing to have a conversation with outsiders. Contrast the civil rights marches and antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s, or even the more ideologically sketchy Million Man March and Glen Beck’s “Restoring Honor rally,” whose participants generally did not wear uniforms, with the global rallies and marches of Klansmen and neo-fascist blackshirts and Marxist guerillas, whose participants did. In the aforementioned costumeless marches, at least someone could slip into the crowd unidentified, and one could not tell at a glance whether that person was a curious observer or an enthusiastic participant. The adoption of a uniform makes the group’s demonstration more implicitly militaristic, and makes it seem more plausible that violence may occur between group members and hostile non-members.
Continue reading Why We Shouldn’t Turn Our Politics Into a Costume Drama