One of my favorite phrases to emerge from the Golden Age of Blogging is “dingbat kabuki,” coined by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo back in G. W. Bush’s first term. I think the initial appearance is in this post about some minor argument between the White House and Congress that Marshall thought was a deliberate fake (I don’t recall the events well enough to say whether this was correct).
It’s a highly memorable phrase, and one that pops into my head a lot when I look at news from Washington. There’s an element of dingbat kabuki in the latest Joe Manchin story, for example: for all the “Oh Em Gee, this will torpedo Biden’s entire economic package!” pieces flying around, the odds are very good that this is mostly one of the ritualistic bits of theater that members of Congress love to engage in. Everybody runs around yelling for a bit, Manchin gets his name in the media a lot, and in a few weeks he’ll vote for a great big spending bill that’s been shorn of some mostly symbolic funding, and the world will go on turning. I’m personally in the Kevin Drum camp and would prefer them to frame this around some particular program that’s a low priority for Manchin and cut that wholesale, but it’s probably slightly more likely to end up with just everything on the list getting a bit less money.
I tend to use the phrase “dingbat kabuki” a bit more expansively than Marshall’s original coinage, though. He was talking about a transparently fake fight ginned up as a distraction from something, but I think it applies to a much wider range of common Washington practices, both between politicians, and between politicians and the media. More and more, I find myself keying in on the latter.
There are two particular forms of political-media dingbat kabuki that we’ve seen a lot of in these eventful last few weeks. One is the ritual complaint about the president not taking questions:
the other is the ritual sparring with the Press Secretary after a briefing:
I tried to grab relatively bland exemplars for this, but of course these events always light up partisan Twitter in a huge way. Biden not taking questions after a brief speech is touted as evidence that he’s a barely functional robot, and Psaki has either completely dismantled that reporter and everybody else who might think similarly or mortally offended a billion Catholics, depending on the proclivities of the person editing the clip to post it.
What stands out about these, to me, is how staggeringly insignificant they are. Biden giving non-answers to a handful of shouted questions wouldn’t measurably improve the state of American democracy, and the reporter on the other end of Psaki’s sharp response isn’t going to change his mind or quit the field. He’ll be back again, asking essentially the same questions; maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but they’ll be stamping their feet and striking poses again soon, and for the rest of their careers.
It’s true that there is a sense in which these kind of events might be useful, but that’s not the world we live in. This is particularly true of the press briefings and press conferences, where for all their complaining when those events don’t happen, the members of the media regularly demonstrate the meaninglessness of it all. The real tell that it’s all a show is the sheer density of non-answers that go unquestioned. If these events were really about holding public officials to account, a glib non-answer would be followed up with the same question again. But that basically never happens, because the only real point is for the individual reporters to get clips of themselves sparring with a public official so that everyone knows they have a cool job. So every reporter takes their turn asking their own question, takes whatever answer they get, and goes back to the office with their head held high and no useful information.
It’s a particularly stilted brand of theater, with all the moves choreographed a generation or more ago. Even the responses on social media have taken on the same character: “Biden is a coward!” “Psaki DESTROYS obnoxious reporter!” yelled from the cheap seats at prescribed moments.
It’s dingbat kabuki, and we’d be better off paying it far less attention.
Kind of a grumpy note to end the week on, but we’ve had a lot of news lately, which means a lot of repetitions of this particular dance thrown into my timeline over the last few weeks, and I’m sick of it. Anyway, speaking of formalized rituals, here are some buttons:
And if you feel so moved, the comments will be open.