THE "ASSEMBLIFICATION" OF THE RIGHT-WING

by The Cursed Assembly

So, Trump pardoned all of those that had charges due to January 6th. That reminds us of a little text we wrote some months ago, where we were trying to put into words our discomfort with current appropriations of "assembly" and "debate". Let's get into it:

So, there is a “new” right. That’s what the internet calls it. Alt Right. This right winged movement can be said to have appropriated the symbol of the assembly on January 6th of 2021. Trump was not elected and he encouraged his followers to denounce the election results as rigged.

However, they didn’t stop there. Assembly, decision making, was to be a performance that the alt right would demonstrate without the need for that symbol. They said “Fuck that we are gonna prove you wrong”. This led to a performance of debate and public gathering/assembly to address contemporary topics in a sort of proselytising way. In a way, similar to what evangelical christians do when they go out on the street to preach sermons or talk about the bible. But those are very unilateral approaches. There is no debate opened.

What the conservative movements have been doing, specially in the US when it came to the latest elections, is using the mechanics of debate to show how strong their arguments are. So they go to the streets, to university campuses, they film people sitting in a circle and talking, they turn on mics and sit on benches, ready to debate whoever comes. However, this is not “debate” or “conversation” or even “assembly”. It’s a performative device that appropriates those terms and those possibilities. They are like a battle royal, competitions to win people to their side, just like any religion that wants converts. They want to prove the regular citizen that they are being manipulated by the “woke left”. This woke left is accused of being “the elite”, accused of not talking to the majority.

Powerlessness is turned into a stage. The right wing speaker into a rhetorical magician, all theatrics and tricks. It is all very clickbait-y, and one would think that people would be able to see beyond this - but in fact, these apparatuses made them seem “fair” and “open to discussion” - while their “opponents” on the other side of the political spectrum seem “emotional” and “illogical” and “incapable of dialogue”. We, The Cursed Assembly, read in between the lines of this rise in performative and competitive debate and see the need that our democracy has been having of discussion. The concept of a “fact” and of “logic” and even “common sense” has been a battlefield, as conspiracy theories substitute the old institutions of truth be it History, Media or the state.

That stage of powerlessness has every conspiracy as a play, with recurring archetypes. It even feels like “the woke left” is just a rebranded comedia dell’arte character. But if suspicion of the institutions of truth is what makes these performative mechanisms powerful…then we can look back at ourselves and “theatre” as a trump (no pun intended). Theatre was never an institution of truth. Even if people like our moms don’t go to the theatre in part due to the institution’s elite and bourgeois taste, they still know that theatre “is not real”. It is exactly the liminal place that theatre as assembly has, that can act as antidote.

If one wants to look at the history of theatre, one can think of the concept of Agon . “Agon” is “the game”, “the competition of arguments” in ancient greek plays. There is “agon” when characters with different world views engage in debate. It is characterised by the definition of two polar opposites, an antagonist and a protagonist. This is exactly what is happening in these conversations run by Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro or other right wing public speakers. The “other” who doesn’t know how to speak “like them” is antagonized. The mechanism of identification is set - you will tend to identify with the protagonist, that happens to be right wing.