This post originally appeared on my newsletter, “Open + Worlds.” Subscribe here.

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I wasn’t going to write about the events of the last week—there’s a lot to be said, and I’m not sure my voice is the one that needs to be heard right now. Within the crucible of online discourse, it’s sometimes expected that we speak, otherwise we risk lending credence to those we oppose through our silence. Sometimes it is not enough for evil to walk unmasked for it to be recognized as such. Especially in our moment of profound distortions, how do we learn to recognize and name the obvious, and to continue to name it as such even as the flood of obfuscation rises around us? We need to call bullshit—both on the violent, white supremacist insurrection that took place on January 6th, and on the various political distortions and back-bending doormats (ubiquitous across the political spectrum, from far-right conspiracy theorists to free speech liberals and shit-posting leftists) that piss on our legs and tell us it’s raining.¹

In this week’s newsletter, I’m going to describe a particular discourse that has emerged both within and as a result of this week’s political disaster—let’s call it the melodrama of theatrical dissent. We’ve seen a number of failures this week, not least of all the profound failure of the pundit and intellectual classes to understand what has taken place. One inevitable consequence of the coup—insurrection, putsch, mob, whatever—at the Capitol has been the media’s craven attempts to “personify” the perpetrators. Not only to identify them for possible criminal charges but to understand their motives and get at their “psychologies” in a way that only serves to reduce this week’s world-historical events to the petty dramas of a moralized fable. (To a certain degree, that’s a natural response. The events themselves were a melodramatic, reactionary response to social and political change. But we can do better.) In the final section, I hope to draw a preliminary conclusion about what the melodrama of theatrical dissent says about the diminished prestige of the US and its myth of white, ethno-nationalist exceptionalism.

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I don’t mean this to sound deflationary or glib, but the events of the last week were melodramatic. I keep thinking of the image of the gallows that has circulated online as a representative symbol of what is so often melodramatic about conservative protest. The gallows are an emphatic visual representation of political violence—but, despite the presence of revolutionary discourse, the gallows, as wielded by a far-right mob, do not promise any sort of social upheaval. Instead, they are a menacing symbol of the status quo, a reminder that white supremacists will always have certain tools of political violence, like the lynch mob and the noose, at their disposal to curtail progress. The gallows are both prop and stage, instrument and performance, tool and ideology, for the enactment of white supremacy.

The insurrectionists that stormed the Capitol weren’t just protesting; they were staging a little melodrama. Every costume, every prop, every flourish was part of the dramaturgical design for their spectacle, intended to add bravura and weight to their performance. These rioters were saying, “Our perceived slights are evidence of a hidden evil that we must act against.” The hyperdramatization of the protest was meant to give their grievances both heightened transparency and moral clarity.

Within a melodrama, the absurd and the serious coexist—and that’s the point. By bringing these different registers together, melodramas suggest that we live in a moral universe, where even the most farcical elements of reality are evidence of a hidden dimension of good and evil. In The Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks refers to this underlying drama as the “moral occult”—“the domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality.” But melodrama is about more than just human psychology. For melodrama to be an effective vehicle, it needs the context of social disorganization and political upheaval, of complex problems for which melodrama’s simple message of Manichaean morality appears particularly enticing. It’s about flattening out the world under the weight of spectacle until few options (good versus evil, us versus them) remain.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, melodramatic protest emerged as a particular response—a public and theatrical response—to social upheaveal in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Britain’s unprecedented industrialization. According to Elaine Hadley, melodramatic protest during the nineteenth century “hearkened back to a deferential society and its patriarchal grounds for identity.” (For more on this historical context, see her book Melodramatic Tactics.) The emergence of a market economy—one rooted in both the ravages of industrial capitalism and the dislocations of imperialism—not only rent divisions within society (in effect, creating a classed society), but it also erroded former social relations (class deference, the patriarchy) that, for all their ills, at least offered the pretense of stability. Theatricalized dissent was not only a reactionary response, but it also offered the nostalgic fantasy of a past unity that had been disrupted by the crucible of social change. (Make America Great Again, anyone?)

In late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century US, this melodramatic mode emerged most clearly in response to the struggles and liberation of enslaved Black people. Again, theatricalized dissent was a reactionary response to perceived uncertainty and change. We can see it in the racist spectacle of D. W. Griffith’s melodramas, which not only glorify the aesthetics of white supremacy (complete with nostalgia for all of the charms of the Confederate past), but also resurrected the Klan as a social and political force. (In a recent tweet, Jamelle Bouie mentions that the Klan is an important antecedent for the Capitol protests: “i’ll keep saying this but for example look no further than the ku klux klan, theatrical and silly and also deadly serious.”) Melodrama is both the context and vehicle for white protest against the perceived loss of hegemonic control.

One enduring motif of the melodramatic mode is that of the family divided. The family (typically white, always heterosexual) is under threat by “storms”—the storms of progress, of class warfare, of minority resentment. The family must be reunited. Fortunately, division is nothing more than a temporary condition. Melodrama holds out the hope that a family divided will one day be restored under the will and power of the patriarchy. Quoting her father, Ivanka Trump tweeted in the aftermath of the insurrection: “This moment calls for healing and reconciliation. We must revitalize the sacred bonds that bind us together as one national family.” Reconciliation, sacred bonds, national family—it’s hard to read these words and not think of family as a singular, uniform thing. The melodramatic myth of a unified “national family” thus quickly dissolves and what we’re left with is the unfettered arm of authoritarian control, which presides under the banner of divine will.

Critics who perceive the underlying melodrama of our present moment are nonetheless captive to its spectacle when they seek to personify the forces at work in world-historical events. Instead of understanding rupture and disunity in terms of superstructural forces, they view them as part of the shallow, internecine melodramas of our “national family.” If only East Coast liberals had returned home to see their families during Thanksgiving. If only West Coast hippies had stayed in their small towns. The problem isn’t racism, but rather transgender people upsetting poor Sally in the bathroom. This isn’t white supremacy, it’s your Uncle Gerry, your Grandpa Pat, your mother, your aunt, your sister, your uncle, your father, your brother, your son, your daughter, your cousin, your neighbor, your teacher, your police officer… Hence, the psychologization of white supremacists, as pointed out by Tressie McMillan Cottom. Hence, the pathologization of Trump’s political decision-making, as pointed out by Lawrence Glickman. Hence, the troubling fetishization of certain white insurrectionists within the gay community, itself part of a larger pattern of fantasizing about a certain form of masochistic domination that upholds whiteness, as pointed out by John Smilges. What starts as a desire to know—a realist ambition to chart the psychologies of bad people—ends in a melodramatic world of flat characters and heightened sentimentality. No matter what she stood for, she was still a human. Shed a tear.

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In 2017, Anne Helen Petersen argued in an essay for Buzzfeed that the Mark Wahlberg vehicle Patriots Day was the first movie of the Trump era because it turned an actual event (the Boston Marathon bombing) into the occasion for a “male melodrama”—a sentimentalized dramatization that centers on the choreographed heroics of a lone white man. I’ve not stopped thinking of her essay for the last four years, and I’m convinced the melodrama is the characteristic mode of the Trump presidency, insofar as it was an absolute spectacle of excessive stupidity in the guise of moral clarity. Petersen helpfully points out what makes Wahlberg’s portrayal so melodramatic:

He doesn’t have to sleep, or obey the laws of time and transportation. He has a limp, but he’s ostensibly invincible; he’s just a normal cop, but he gets to be part of every minute of the drama. It doesn’t matter if the logistics are impossible, after all, so long as the narrative makes you feel that sort of unilateral heroism is possible.

Ultimately, what melodramas such as these make us feel is that it is not the event themselves that matter but the feelings we attach to them. The point is not to dwell on our uncertainty and ambivalence surrounding the War on Terror (and the US’s culpability in radicalizing young Muslim men around the world) but to feel that pang of pride when we remember how we persevered nonetheless.

Despite how often I think about the centrality of melodrama, I’ve not quite figured out how to describe why it matters. What good does it do to recognize the ways that melodrama manifests across a variety of social, cultural, and political formations? What does it tell us that we don’t already know?

I think melodrama is a useful analytic that helps us to avoid the kinds of reductive, reactionary responses that have proliferated in the wake of January 6, 2021. One notable example is Lee Fang, an investigative journalist at The Intercept, who tweeted, “This is the result of America raised on childlike action films. Simplistic storylines, battling in costumes, good vs. evil. You can’t punch your way to better politics results, there’s no final boss to fight. The actual change comes from boring legislative process and elections.” Less than twelve hours after the events fist unfolded, Fang’s response is noteworthy as a kind of glib, reactionary cultural criticism. It’s akin to blaming Grand Theft Auto for school shootings or “rap music” for Black men’s incarceration. There’s simply no causal connection. The substance of his claim turns on a kind of character study of the rioters, a portrait of exaggerated emotions that, even as it attempts to reject that hyperbolic response, is nonetheless drawn to a characterological explanation, as if violent insurrection were an indication not of failing external factors but of a failure to appreciate the right kind of culture.

In a later tweet, Fang cites an article in Tablet Magazine on the “Crises of the American Regime” to argue that “growing isolation and decaying common national identity fuels political, racial, and partisan resentment that is ripe for exploitation.” Again, it’s telling that Fang’s response to crisis is full of melodramatic tropes: gothic decay, atmospheric menace, fraying “national identity,” dramatized emotion. Indeed, while it purports to be a description of an unfolding crisis, Fang’s response is actually prescriptive, insofar as it restricts the range of emotional responses that are available to people. What of solidarity and new forms of collective identification? What of new kinds of national identity that are no longer premised in patriarchal domination or settler colonialist exceptionalism?

One of the problems I’m trying to draw out here is centered on how we respond to these events and make sense of them. One response I’ve seen is to be enthralled by the melodrama of theatrical dissent—and their spectacular motifs of a divided family, the “storm” of history, nostalgia for past deference and patriarchal authority—and I want to call bullshit on this sentimental response. By sentimental, I don’t mean sympathetic; little as I agree with these responses, I’m not suggesting they are in alignment with the insurrectionists. Nonetheless, they express a desire to understand, and thus sentimentalize, their psychologies. The problem with most melodramas, however, is that they’re reactionary. The world of occultic meaning, of moral clarity and Manichaean good and evil, is already long gone.

I’m still not sure what conclusions to draw from all of this. My sense is that the melodrama of theatrical dissent is one such symptom of our moment of waning empire and, in particular, the unmasking of the ethno-nationalist lie that is US exceptionalism. Sentimental responses suggest that the blame for the events on January 6 lies not with structural forces but with a certain failure to understand the motivations and inner workings of the rioters. Bad feeling, they suggest, needs to be understood. But does it?