I have been long impressed by the relationship between theater and politics, and am impressed once again in considering the posts and discussion at DC this week. Theater is the art form, according to Hannah Arendt, that most closely resembles politics, and as such it can be of great political significance, for better and for worse.

I have based my intellectual career on this. Theater opened Polish society to major changes, and in the process, it changed my life. It presented alternative visions; it constituted an alternative space, for the Poles and also for me.

The theatricality of public events, particularly when televised as a “media event,” can at least momentarily express the solidarity of a nation state, as was evident to the British this week in the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, real not only for British subjects, but as well for the global audience.

But the relationship is not always a happy one, as events of this week and our discussions at DC show. Theater, broadly understood, especially bad, base theatrical entertainments, can present fundamental challenges to democratic life. Rafael Narvaez examined this in his post. Kitsch entertainment created junk politics in Peru. Like junk food, it provides its immediate pleasures, as Lisa pointed out in her response to Narvaez. But it can also have quite serious negative consequences. In Peru, it was implicated in the political culture of corruption. And perhaps it’s not surprising that the role model of the Peruvian exotic dancer turned politician, Suzy Diaz, was Cicciolina, the porn star turned parliamentarian in Italy, the European country that also has been marked by corrupt anti-democratic politics. Of course, these entertaining figures do not cause the corruption, but are manifestations of it.

Matters are in a way worse in the U.S. The reality show star Donald Trump, who has used his theatrical skills of self promotion to make and lose fortunes, has been playing at being a Republican Party candidate for President of the United States. It seems impossible to take him seriously, but his performance as demagogue has been quite impressive, leader of the Republican pack at this point. DC contributor, Gary Alan Fine, might call this pungent politics. The Trump spiel, as all Americans know all too well, has focused on the eligibility and competency of President Obama, “the worse President in the history of the United States.”  First, Trump took on the mantle of Birther-in-Chief, pushing the issue until the President relented and released the generally unavailable long form birth certificate.

The official document, the short form, released at the time of the election, was not enough for the birthers. But of course for those who can’t imagine a black President now the long form is not enough. Some are convinced it’s a forgery, while others, with Trump as their leader, now turn to the question of whether Obama was a good enough student to deserve admission to Columbia and Harvard Law. Never mind that the Obama graduated Harvard Law magna cum laude and that he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review. Just not smart enough. There are those who are driven by suspicion which will never be satisfied. It has Shakespearean qualities, as Paul A. Kottman explored in his post. Suspicion is a powerful force, more powerful than facts, whether it be in the form of Desdemona’s handkerchief or Obama’s long form birth certificate.

One of Obama’s great tasks is to redefine the American Dream by overcoming the great American Dilemma, the legacy of slavery in a democratic society. For a stubborn twenty or twenty five percent of the population, there is resistance led by Trump the clown. This is high drama mixed with comedy. Fine theater reveals the tragedy of racism. It does battle with mediocre theatrical form.

And this battle is not only on the stage, it also appears in everyday life, when we look closely. One of the “closest lookers” died last week. Iddo Tavory’s post on Monday remembered and honored the distinctive sociology of Harold Garfinkel. He died last week, but his intellectual project, avoiding abstractions that turn away from the complicated details of how people make their worlds in interaction, lives on. It is not a disease named racism that denies the President’s eligibility and competency to be President, but it is racism as it is created and recreated in the dramas of everyday life.

In the mid-eighties a young woman was hired as a receptionist at a local TV station in Lima, an anonymous and fortuitous circumstance, which set in motion one of those bizarre episodes in Peruvian politics. A possessor of ambition and bodily capital, Susy Diaz was quickly promoted to semi-exotic dancer, working for a prime-time TV show named “Laughter and Salsa Music.” “Salsa,” to clarify, meant women dancing in thongs, and “laughter” meant, in general, men demeaning the women in thongs. Diaz soon took the central stage. Her fan base grew rapidly, and so, almost as with Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s “metamorphosis,” one fine morning she woke up to find herself transformed into a tabloid celebrity.

I remember one of those tabloids run by Fujimori with a front page devoted to Diaz’s sexual exploits, photographs of purported anal sex included. Confident with her popularity, she also expanded into picaresque theater, as well as singing. One of her theater pieces was entitled “The Erotic Congresswoman,” and one of her songs was “Let Me Blow Your Horn.” “Catharsis for the masses,” as Adorno would say, “but catharsis which keeps them all the more firmly in line.”

Susy Diaz’s ambitions grew in proportion to her newfound fame. Inspired by Cicciolina, the Italian porn star turned parliamentarian, Diaz used her popularity to launch a tumultuous, one-of-a-kind political career. Convincing members of the Agrarian Party (a caucus devoted to peasant-related issues) that she would be a good addition to their ranks, she soon found herself running for Congress, with a campaign that was simple and faithful to her style. She first inscribed her ballot number on her buttocks to thus remind fans and cameras of the reasons to vote for her. If it had worked in the domain of tabloids and TV, why wouldn’t it work in the domain of politics?

Naturally, she also had issues to defend, and what not, a Plan B reserved for the strained occasions when journalists asked about her political platform. She became a spokesperson for witch doctors, transvestites, “and other minorities.” She spoke on behalf of sexual freedom with the same verve with which she, “a good Catholic,” also spoke against abortion. She won, and was sworn in as Congresswoman and “Mother of the Fatherland” in July of 1995.

Diaz’s political career involved only a few odd initiatives, including establishing a national holiday to celebrate the Day of the Mother-in-Law, and making it unlawful for hotels not to dispense free condoms for customers in need. Her career concluded with a prison sentence for having received money from Fujimori, who bought her congressional support with public funds.

I will call it “Junk Politics.” This particular kind of Junk Politics will never be seen in the U.S., puritanical such as it is. But it is worth considering the Diaz episode, so unusual as it may seem, because there are American variants, which may become important in the near future.

Diaz advocating for witch doctors may sounds very alien, but is it so different from an American politician defending the idea that a deity created the universe five thousand years ago? These positions involve a deep hostility against reality. They are regressive, psychologically and historically — characteristics of Junk Politics that can be seen on the left and on the right: on the left, Chavez’s notion that capitalism may have destroyed life on Mars, on the right, the widespread idea that God, who created the universe 5000 years ago, happens to “hate fags.”

Proposing a national day for the mother-in-law is not so different from proposing that Obama is a Marxist, pro-gay Muslim cleric in disguise: both involve too much ado about nothing; and they say nothing, advance nothing, and will bequeath nothing. Powerful American communicators, especially those in the business of deriding Obama and anyone left of Obama, have things in common with Diaz. Like her, and like many other populist and doctrinaire communicators, for that matter, they are naturally attuned to the needs, symbolic and emotional, of their audiences. They effectively appeal to the lower emotional register (anger, fear), and generally eschew their follower’s higher-order capacities (comparison, evaluation and synthesis).

Fifty one percent of Americans think that God created humans in their present form. Thirty six percent believe in UFOs, and thirty one percent believe in astrology. Thankfully, in contrast to Peru, voting is not mandatory in the U.S. Otherwise, dear democracy, scrupulously representative as it is when it comes to voting, would reflect these percentages, these incredible failures of the American educational system. The bad news is that Junk Communicators, current or forthcoming, may harness this piece of the political market. The lesson from Diaz is that, given certain publics and conditions of reception, Junk Politics can very easily beat the Habermasian ideal of rational communication.