CPAC as Simulacra
Spending a few days in the flagship event of the American Conservative Union told me a lot about the exhausted discourse in our country
CPAC is a simulacra, that is to say a copy of a copy of itself, reflecting not only a larger trend in Republican politics but American politics generally.
This year I sojourned to the Gaylord Resort in Maryland’s National Harbor not so much for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that has been going on since Reagan times, but some other work and interviews related to my book. Perhaps I also went because, at this point in my life as a scholar of conservative media, it is my habit.
Something this year about CPAC felt hollow, a brightly branded wrapper that did not hold much by way of substance. There were few big American political names beyond Trump. Guests looked in vain for the usual hotel suite parties paid for by eager lobbying groups. I did not smell the sweaty pheromones of drunk college Republicans in their khaki pants or grandma’s pearls about to lose their virginities— they barely showed up. Aside from some guy getting dragged away by security dressed in a white KKK robe and a few errant neo-Nazi Groypers in sunglasses and trench coats, I did not even see the usual robust number of sketchy far-right figures who typically troll the conference. They just seemed like a handful of lame young men who hadn’t grown up.
The biggest names were other presidents of Latin American countries, like Argentine president Javier Milei and El Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele. Ironically, the first days of CPAC coincided with an offshoring HR conference at the Gaylord. It was as if CPAC itself was off-shoring its brand to countries where it might still symbolize something legitimate, much like seeing a Woolworth’s store in Mexico City when the brand is long gone in the US.
I bring up “simulacra” because I recently re-read Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation from 1981. A simulacra is a copy of a copy, not so much trying to represent something real, but a derivation of reality such that we don’t know what is, well, real! In his book, the French post-modern theorist describes how our culture -- soaked in mass reproduced imagery -- has devolved away from the real and towards a procession of simulacra which is "never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself."
I walked around the CPAC exhibition hall, nearly empty compared to its heyday. Much like the Internet imitates life, now real life imitated the boomer social media newsfeeds that have come to be emblematic of this corner of the conservative movement. As I walked around this veritable Facebook Marketplace of silver toothpaste, vibrating weightloss hoverboards, Trump Hammocks and John Birch Society booths, I couldn’t help but feel like I was living an overly-xeroxed version of the cultural juggernaut Trump had created only 8 years ago. Was this gesturing towards what Baudrillard would call “hyperreality,” or a process where our perception of reality seems blended with fact, fiction, digital, and physical such that we don’t know the difference between them anymore? An exhibition hall mimicking a Facebook feed mimicking political advertising mimicking grassroots stakeholder groups mimicking…?
Trump has long been a master of media and tabloid, of the crowd. Yet what was happening to this political movement formerly composed of grassroots activists — far less skilled in his media savvy — who tried to copy his social media mastery by bringing his gusty self-branded hucksterism to real life in boothes in a hotel expo room?
Or was this all the winding down of something old to usher in something new?
Too Much Red Pill
Some people around the MAGA movement have read Baudrillard because of a fixation on “The Matrix,” where they get their beloved “Red Pill” metaphor, which rebel leader Morpheus offers Neo to “wake up” from the machine-coded simulation he is living in so that evil AI can harvest his bodyheat as he sleeps in a soma holiday. The Wachowski siblings (two trans women, ironically) who wrote the movie required the entire cast and crew to read Baudrillard. Right-wing personalities today use the term “red pilling” to describe a fundamental realization that institutions of media, business, and governance not only have a bias but a coordinated agenda and they working to create a simulated information reality that is not serving the average person’s interests.
Since 2016, there has been a lot of energy dedicated to “Red Pilling,” a lot of energy spent developing shows, podcasts, tweets, bots, and influence campaigns on social media to get “users” to mistrust institutional sources of knowledge. Many were people who held views — be they anti-vaxx, anti-statist, anti-government — who once held positions of power in the ancien régime but now were sidelined to opposition media because those institutions no longer found them acceptable… often reasonably so or simply because times had changed.
Yet being a digital warrior and political activist can mean plugging in and out of the Matrix a little too much— engaging the old media by constantly being a thorn in its side on social media. The entire endeavor of offering an alternate read on reality can have a disembodying effect, constantly engaging the people you hate in order to prove why they are wrong or malicious.
As former aid to ousted Representative George Santos, Vish Burra, explained to me over lunch at CPAC, once you “wake up” from the Matrix, you still have Morpheus asking you to go back in, unplugging, replugging your brain into the machine’s simulation that harvested your energy to begin with. Going in and out of the very system that kept you asleep. The feeling of exhaustion from existing between the digital and the physical becomes palpable, overwhelming. What is real?
I watched Bannon and his War Room podcast bring on Naomi Wolf, the so-called "doppelganger” of Naomi Klein, a left-wing activist and writer, who wrote a best-selling book of the same name last year. Klein has written powerful journalistic takes on branding, never-ending crises, and the environment. Wolf and Klein have often been confused on Twitter in recent years, creating a weird feeling of a floating Naomi signifier out there for “left” or “progressive” or “transgressive” or “vanguard” that meant “good” or “bad” depending who asked. Both had asked the public to question patriarchy, capitalism, or the mainstream… in very mainstream outlets. Yet one had taken a more leftist posture, the other more neoliberal. Both benefitted from the affordances of elite cultural production at one point or another.
And here I was at CPAC watching a feminist icon doing a live recording with Steve Bannon.
In another decade, Wolf was a darling of feminism and the Neoliberal Democrats. The year I was born, she wrote a pretty compelling book, The Beauty Myth, about how patriarchy and capitalism conspire to make women believe they need to be beautiful to succeed, yet she managed to do it without dissing the concept of glamour or beauty itself. As years passed, the transgressive yet thoughtful positions Wolf inhabited sometimes found themselves under attack. Evidence she presented in her doctorate of homophobic sentencing in 19th century England turned out to be misinterpreted. Couple this with anti-vaccine Twitter advocacy during a pandemic and she was ejected from mainstream consensus. At the height of COVID anxiety, every position around “the jab” or “masks” rooted in distrust of Big Pharma or Big Government had the patina of a 1960s-style transgressivity that could often be understood as a form of revolutionary action. (At the time, I was recovering from experiencing a COVID death in my life, so felt the anxiety, fear, and confusion of systems that just felt inadequate… while the vaccine represented hope to me, I understood vaccine skepticism in the fog of fear.)
Sometimes, I felt bad for Wolf when I read Klein’s book. It didn’t mean I wanted to absolve Wolf from responsibility for opinions that I felt were fear-mongering without a proper solution. Yet, Klein managed to take that feeling of having a golem-double, who representing something similar but not the same, turning it into a best seller. What did Wolf get? In several reading groups I’ve taken part of, many asked: was Klein’s vision of the world, her theory of collective action, and her skepticism of authority any more effective in making the world a better place for the average person than Wolf’s articulation of something adjacent but oddly similar? Or did it just adapt better? Is the verdict still out?
Both women asked to look behind the veil of power. Were they inverted reflections of each other, or rather shiny facets in lab grown diamond, reflexive of larger system of exploitation that they were interrogating in different ways in different vernaculars?
The mantras of Left and Right have increasingly called into question the sincerity and efficacy of expert institutions in serving the interests of people they draw legitimacy from. The organized Left and Right look at each other suspiciously because their chants are the most obvious thing to attack. Going after complex financial instruments, confusing derivatives, the epistemological reasoning behind the scientific method, or opaque policy-making processes is harder than dissing a PR gaffe from the other side.
Bannon keeps going on his drumbeat of cleaning house by whatever means necessary to usher in a new order by delegitimizing the old to anyone listening. Once the anti-hero dark-darling, the convenient Rasputin or “Great Manipulator” of TIME magazine, he keeps going with his cheugy cast of characters (no doubt disgraced pillow-salesman and voting machine skeptic Mike Lindell is seen as a little weird to even the most MAGA). The quirkiness can begin to feel like family for those of us raised on WWE and late-night infomercials, which gives it the patina of authenticity or at the very least, nostalgia.
In the revolutionary worldview, you must destroy the old before you create the new. In this sense, today’s MAGA movement isn’t far from a Marxist read on history shared by some Leftists. I once heard Bannon proudly claim he was a Goldman Sachs Leninist, after all. Who was copying who?
The Washington Matrix
CPAC was not the only thing about my DC trip that felt simulated. Other friends working in think tanks or various government offices increasingly described the feeling of living in systems and institutions dissociated from material reality, from impacting human lives and problems as they exist today. It was as if the institutions were no longer run by humans, but a code a previous human programmer set up. And this goes for left and right.
Oh you’re a liberal? Protect global liberalism and world order by supporting the war effort in Ukraine. (But was this in “Americans’” not “America’s” interests, some asked?)
Oh you’re a conservative? Fight the state’s interventions! Fight the imposition of regulations! (But of course impose restrictions on reproductive health, discussions of queerness in classrooms, some insisted.)
Is this endless “action—reaction —reaction to reaction” chain going to last for much longer? Were these institutions and political parties living up to the promises they made to the humans they initially were meant to serve? Was there some kind of singularity, a messianic end to it all? A violent collapse? A repeat of a grand-historic cycle? Or was it just the messy experience of history offered in my favorite play, the History Boys: “History is one damn thing after another.”
Baudrillard also talks about how this procession of simulacra includes when “everything is metamorphosed into its opposite to perpetuate itself in its expurgated form.” He used the examples of proofs of theater becoming anti-theater, art becoming anti-art. I couldn’t help but think of contemporary politics as being a procession of the “anti” — anti-Israel, anti-racism, anti-Big Tech, anti-Big Government.
I hadn’t been to newer neighborhoods of DC, like the Navy Yard or “North of Shaw” where new apartment buildings house Washington’s intellectual class, offering them the fuel they need (Sweetgreen salads, Whole Foods, manicures, coffee) under their apartments so they can effectively plug back into their home offices, their mini matrixes.
These buildings are lovely to live in for a city starved of housing — they would make the most sense to live in if I was a DC resident with the right paycheck! How could I say no to such comfort and lifestyle? And yet the new neighborhoods also usher in some discomfort. When asked to “pay with my palm” at a Whole Foods, I suddenly felt revolted by the effort, time, and incentives that led to the creation of that technological surveillance capitalism option when, as the meme goes, “All I wanted was some healthcare.”
These buildings, technologies, and politics are products of the values of this time. The glass and steel and reflections of neighbors across the street in their lux one-bedrooms and floor-to-ceiling windows create an eerie feeling of constantly being seen and seeing, but not knowing the others nearby. In this sense, I felt like a xerox of others I saw but did not know. I saw my reflection blend with another’s.