Paper short abstract:

Trump's challenge to the 2020 US election created an interregnum encapsulating flux in democratic and performance norms. Republicans seeking to affirm the rules faced challenges of audience design in a performance context valorizing transgression. Embodied class habitus shaped differential efficacy.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, Donald J. Trump's aesthetic of outrage has commanded the noisy, decentralized mediascape of US politics. Progressives fought back through the authority of traditional protest idioms, enhanced by the charisma of the arts. Biden's calming presence won enough weary adherents from both ends to claim the presidency, but most establishment Democrats, seeking to restore a national ideal of exemplary leadership, found themselves at a performative and electoral disadvantage. What of Republicans facing the transition?

The paper examines the public performances of the state officials and the (few) Republican senators who pushed back against Trump's attempt to overturn the election. They faced challenges of audience design, seeking to support the transition without jeopardizing their own positions. How could a performance affirm the rules without violating a popular partisan conception of democracy as the freedom to transgress? How could it garner the necessary collective attention while still allowing its performer to fly under the partisan radar? Embodied class habitus may offer one key to the differential efficacy of these stance-takings in convincing the public that the vote would be respected, and even more to the reputational outcomes for the performers themselves.

In this interregnum, the norms of both democracy and performance are in flux. But most factions are predictable. The Washington establishment seeks to restore the liberal exemplarity that enlivens the rule of law. Progressives create exemplary performances that gesture towards a new order. Trumpian populism battens on the unexampled. The stylistic fluctuations of ambivalent Republicans may be diagnostic.