New York, the sixties. Every morning unemployed port workers in the port go in search of a job – “you, Pier Acht. You, Pier six. ” But there is hardly any work. Most sink to Dirty Dick’s, a pub at the bottom of a warehouse. There, under fluorescent tubes, runs every day according to the same script. They drown their worries and anger.
When Governor George Wallace comes on TV, from Alabama, they set the sound harder. Wallace wants to become president. He shouts, ritual, that black workers whiten white workers: “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever!“The port workers cheer. Then there will be a sports program and they turn off the sound again. In the afternoon they drag home, and debts and hopelessness take over life again. What is striking: none of them has any challenge to beat a black person outside. They are mainly left, quiet, depressed. Governor Wallace, four times presidential candidate, also plays theater. And they know.
This is how American sociologist Richard Sennett describes in his book The Performer (2024) Populism: as a play that is performed daily. He calls this piece Defeatdefeat. Every day it starts again.
It is as if Sennett, who lived above Dirty Dick’s for a while, describes Donald Trump who suggests wiping all the Palestinians from Gaza and turning it into a tourist ‘Rivièra’ – something he will of course never do, because it solves nothing and ankle New problems causes, and because you need a military occupation power that Trump does not want to steer at all because his wars are no longer fought abroad but in the interior. It is whether Sennett leader Dilan Yesilgö is on the scene, with her ritual tirades against asylum seekers who suddenly flood the shelter-while the only new one is that she has removed too many beds there in recent years. It is as if he describes the radical-right French politician Jordan Bardella, who, as a MEP has not stuck out a finger for the farmers, but needs farm voices in election time and therefore rags against European agricultural politics. And guess what: The public knows, just like the port workers. Trumps audience knows it, Yesilgöz ‘audience, and also that of Bardella or populists who argue ritually for border controls for which there is no manpower at all.
The audience knows that Gaza had the chance to become a Rivièra-after the Oslo agreements in the 1990s. But Israel did not give the Palestinians sovereignty, liquidated moderate Hamas politicians with whom things could do business, and locked one and a half million people in a strip of ten by forty kilometers. If you want to create a safety problem, tackle it like this, with backing From the main sponsors in Washington.
Now Prime Minister Netanyahu Hamas needs to stay prime minister. Just as Geert Wilders almost gratefully makes a song about Muslim terrorists at every attack, and Femke Halsema starts to burn down everything that goes wrong in Amsterdam. Enemies, polarization – he also lives from it. And it’s crazy, people know it. Someone was surprised when Minister Klever (Foreign Trade, PVV), never caught some Euro -Filie last week said That it is important “that we are and remain united as an EU,” could Trump harm Dutch companies with trading rates? Of course nobody was surprised. They are plays. Cynical plays.
The point is: every time the piece is ready and the canvas falls, the catharsis that belongs to real drama is missing. At Catharsis, Sennett writes, your body gets rid of what is painful or toxic. As you surrender if you have eaten something wrong. Then you can continue. But nothing is driven out at all with these gratuitous plays. They just start every day again. There is no pointe, no relief, not a new beginning. Again, the comfort we have is that voters are not crazy. Eventually they go for a fairer, constructive story. Wallace has never become president.