Showstoppers
Jason Fitzgerald
When we hear the word showstopper, we often hear the sound of spontaneous applause, an ovation so forceful that it (as the saying goes) stops the show cold. We love people we call showstoppers for their ability to manipulate speech, imagery, and presentation (Aristotle’s “diction, song, and spectacle”) to inspire that kind of response from us. But while we are cheering, the other actors are delaying their entrances, the stage manager can’t call the next cue, and the musicians’ hands are frozen above their instruments.
Computer engineers must identify with these less visible performers, the ones who never expect fanfare, because in their lingo, a showstopper is “anything that creates an obstacle to further progress,” such as a bug or an app that prevents another from doing its job.
What would happen if, in the world of politics, we learned to value this second kind of showstopper, the one who creates “an obstacle to further progress,” over the first kind? I’d like to use two recent examples to suggest that this small shift in focus can transform us from adoring but passive spectators to active critics of the relationship between performance and power.
One gave a rousing performance but wielded very little power; the other had plenty of power but little performance skill.
Greta Thunberg and Nancy Pelosi are each in their own way political showstoppers. In late September 2019 they were forced to share a news cycle when Thunberg gave a powerful speech to the U.N. Climate Action Summit the day before Nancy Pelosi announced the opening of an impeachment inquiry against President Trump. One gave a rousing performance but wielded very little power; the other had plenty of power but little performance skill. The former has been trying to teach us to be like bugs in the system; the latter finally acted like one.
In recent years Pelosi had been held up by major U.S. news organizations as an effective antagonist to Donald Trump. And yet the majority of her victories had more to do with publicity than with procedure. These included tricking the president into taking the blame for a government shutdown, challenging his manhood and intelligence , and allowing a photo of herself standing up to the president to go viral. Aside from these virtuosic performances, though, Pelosi’s strongest stance since regaining her position as Speaker of the House had been against wielding the procedural power of an impeachment hearing, despite all evidence of its legal necessity. Pelosi, in other words, is precisely the kind of politician targeted by Thunberg.
The 16-year-old daughter of a Swedish theatrical family with no political power, Thunberg has for that reason been more impressive than Pelosi at grabbing headlines. For example, Thunberg travelled to the U.N. Climate Action Summit by sailboat, which (she admitted in an interview) had more to do with P.R. than climate advocacy: “I’m not saying that everyone should stop flying and start sailing everywhere,” she explains, “but…it sure gained a lot of attention.” It did, but it also scripted her into the role of inspiring child celebrity whom liberal bureaucrats like Pelosi can embrace in exchange for free advertisement of their good intentions. She became part of a long-running show whose plot is simple: the world’s leaders insist on their commitment to rescuing the planet while having no intention of doing it themselves. What makes the video of Thunberg’s UN Climate Action Summit speech so powerful is her refusal to play out her part in this script. After not cracking a smile when her first line received applause, Thunberg threw that script back in her spectators’ faces. “You all come to us young people for hope,” she exclaimed, “How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” It was an extension of the message she delivered to the Senate Task Force the week earlier: “Don’t invite us here to tell us how inspiring we are without doing anything about it.”
Thunberg’s brilliance lies in her understanding that virtuosic spectacle—the work of a showstopper in the familiar sense—holds no political power on its own. (Indeed, after both the Summit and COP25 concluded with no groundbreaking changes in international policy, Thunberg admitted, “We have been striking for over a year, and basically nothing has happened.”) Knowing that spectacle is all she has to work with, though, Thunberg behaves like the first kind of showstopper to point out how desperately needed is the second kind, the one who is able to stop the system from going down its current path.
The lesson here is that political theatre is conditioned by political power
While Pelosi is no climate warrior, when it comes to impeachment, she seems to have heeded Thunberg’s lesson. Her press conference the day Thunberg’s speech was going viral showed none of the young activist’s rhetorical skill, but the simple announcement of an “official impeachment inquiry” produced a noticeable obstacle to the 45th presidency’s self-staging. Though a mass defection in the Senate was as unlikely then as it is now, Senate Republicans spent a few weeks avoiding the familiar script of loyal support for their leader. They condemned Trump’s military withdrawal from northern Syria, and they refused to support his attempt to enrich himself by hosting an international summit at one of his own properties. Meanwhile impeachment, according to one polls analyst, went “from fairly unpopular to having near-majority support.” The man who said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose voters found himself in the position of the frustrated stage manager, musicians, and less-noticeable actors, waiting in the wings for permission to take the stage.
The lesson here is that political theatre is conditioned by political power, and so the exercise of political power is necessary to slow down or change the progress of our political theatre. That does not mean the elements of political life that we associate with theatre—“diction, song, and spectacle”—are “distractions” from the work of governance. Every political action requires these in some measure, however small. But performances that are successful in these theatrical terms often fail to transform the institutions that shape our lives.
Recent weeks have seen Republicans and conservative media manage to regroup behind their leader, as attention turns to American politics’ master showstopper, Mitch McConnell. And yet, the possibility of a last-minute defection from his ranks remains palpable—and would be quite a show. Pundits continue to wonder what spectacle will break the president’s hold over his cheering voters. It may be that what will take to shutter the Trump Presidency Show is the revelation that his theatre is only as effective as his power.
