Is there anything we can learn from professional wrestling? (Part 3 of 3)

This is the final part of a three-part series about sports and the white working class, with an emphasis on professional wrestling. This part discusses elite cultural superiority in their criticisms of Trump and professional wrestling, and what liberal elites can learn about communicating with the white working class from professional wrestling.

Are there any lessons to be learned from professional wrestling? Maybe not. Despite changes to the blood, sex, and violence that characterized pro wrestling during the 1990s and 2000s, the sport remains an oft-maligned curiosity to elites that many would say carries little to no cultural value. According to Common Sense Media, an organization that recommends media for children, WWE Friday Night SmackDown! (a leading pro wrestling show) is “crass, outlandish, and not recommended.” The organization further writes that, “parents need to know that this sporting event-meets-soap opera is brimming with non-stop physical violence, including body slams, headlocks, knees to the groin, smacks, punches, and kicks.”

It’s also quite tempting to dismiss any possible value in pro wrestling not only because of the violence inherent to the sport, but also because until relatively recently matches were replete with extreme racism and sexism. For example, the Mexicools were a group of unmasked luchadores who wore stereotypical Mexican attire like cowboy hats and bandanas and carried leaf blowers and rode in on lawnmowers in their first appearance. Women were also frequently confined to marginalized roles and hyper-masculinized if they dared to deviate at all from the oversexualized, feminine norm. Women in the ring existed solely for the male gaze, as either hyper-masculinized comic relief or arm-candy for male wrestlers.

Since Trump’s election, elites have written many negative comparisons between Trump’s presidency and professional wrestling in the opinion pages. To many elites, pro wrestling is the perfect analogy for Trump: low-brow, racist, sexist, violent, and possessing a shaky relationship with the truth.

To be fair to these commentators, over the years Trump has done much to earn this comparison: at first by sponsoring the wrestling contests, then by throwing thousands of dollars from the rafters in a dramatic stunt, and later by being a physical participant in Wrestlemania 23. All this involvement with pro wrestling earned Trump a place in the WWE Hall of Fame, making his election the “first time in history a WWE Hall of Famer would ever hold the distinguished title of U.S. Commander-in-Chief.”

Indeed, there are many reasons why comparisons between Trump and pro wrestling are likely deserved. For example, who can blame commentators for drawing comparisons when the biggest donor to the fraudulent Donald J. Trump Foundation was the WWE? Or when Trump posts GIFs of him bodyslamming the CNN logo on Twitter?

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

However, it’s pretty clear when one scratches the surface of these criticisms even a little that the real target of many of these opinion pieces are the white working class. Dripping with condescension, these critical pieces often bear the same hallmarks of arguments for cultural superiority that are frequently levied by elites at the white working class. Fans of pro wrestling are reduced to caricatures of racism, sexism, violence, and yes, white trash. Some commentators have even tried to equate fandom of wrestling or other violent sports with support for Trump, as if by consuming this low-brow, culturally inferior sports entertainment it causes you a more gullible victim for Trump’s lies.

Professional wrestling is the perfect example of a sport that has acquired distributional significance, because it is strongly classed, both internally and externally. Externally, pro wrestling embodies the virtues of the lower classes in open displays of strength and violence. Internally, as discussed in the prior part in this series, wrestlers purposefully work to class the sport by playing on class conflict in their backstories.  What elites seek by putting down pro wrestling are the social profits they obtain by outwardly differentiating their own choices in consumption from the working class.

However, while the elites may continue to thumb their noses at the nation’s first pro wrestling president, they should probably take note that the animosity between wrestling fans and elites is mutual. Like the white-working class heroes that dominated pro wrestling storylines in past decades, white working class wrestling fans don’t very much like being told what to think or how to act.

Outside of the opinion pages, a different type of class conflict is happening in the ring. One Appalachian wrestler from Kentucky has capitalized on tension between elites and the working class by dubbing himself the Progressive Liberal. This uniquely Trump-era wrestler wears shirts emblazoned with Hillary Clinton’s face and trunks that bear Obama's face or say "Blue Wave". He berates the Appalachian crowd with airs of cultural superiority, calling them “Fox News maggots” and riffing on country music saying, “it’s simple and it’s boring, just like each and every one of you.” The wrestler also throws out nasty political one-liners like, “You know what, I think Bernie Sanders would make a great secretary of state” or “I want to exchange your bullets for bullet points. Bullet points of knowledge.”

I wonder how much right wingers will like the new gear I’m debuting this weekend. pic.twitter.com/SGzPd65w9a

— The Progressive Liberal Daniel Richards (@ProgressLib804) September 26, 2018

The Progressive Liberal acts out what white working-class fans fear from coastal elites: cultural superiority weaponized into a threat against their existence. The Progressive Liberal's patronizing espousal of elite liberal values makes him the perfect “heel” (i.e. the villain in a wrestling contest) for the Appalachian white working class because he threatens and denigrates their way of life.

So perhaps, instead of adding fuel to the fire and sneering at the “the lowbrow guilty pleasure” of professional wrestling, liberal elites should instead look to pro wrestling for clues on how they can recapture the white working class. It’s impossible to ignore how the average WWE viewer is exactly the sort-of person that Democrats failed to reach in this last election – white, male, low-income, and possessing less than a college degree. Quite simply, pro wrestling offers a unique insight into the white working class in America, primarily because they are its biggest fans.

A good start for elites would be accepting a more nuanced view on the white working class and learning to communicate with them on equal terms. While Trump represents the worst of pro wrestling, it is helpful to instead look at the best. The Dusty Rhodes or the Stone Colds of the sport were clearly able to communicate with the white working class, and it wasn’t because they were overtly racist or misogynist. What these white working class heroes did instead was authentically communicate that being working class was not an inferior way of life and that fans or even athletes didn’t need to change their culture or conform with the values of elites.

Tandem attacks on Trump and pro wrestling may give elites a nice frame for arguments for cultural superiority over the white working class, but ultimately, it’s not productive to moving the conversation forward. Democrats who won in deep red areas often did not directly attack Trump and instead avoided the extremes. They also directly appealed to working class voters by highlighting their working class backgrounds and sticking with non-partisan messaging around education and healthcare instead of divisive social issues.

Understanding the distinction between the worst of group and the best is completely lost on many elites because it is easier to be reductive about sports or classes of people than it is to have a nuanced perspective. (It’s probably also fair to say the same is true of the attitudes of many working class whites towards Blacks and Latinos.) However, if liberals want to be able to recapture the white working class and turn Trump from hero to heel, it may make sense to slack off of criticisms that espouse cultural superiority and instead turn to communications that will reassure working people that their way of life is safe.