News arrived this morning that the White House has been partially converted into a UFC arena. An octagonal cage now occupies the Rose Garden. The President has scheduled a title fight for next Tuesday. I had to check the date to ensure it wasn’t the Ides of March. It is not. It is simply the logical endpoint of a political culture that has traded governance for gladiatorial spectacle.
One thinks of the later Roman emperors who fought as gladiators, debasing the office to satisfy a mob’s hunger for blood. But Rome at least had the decency to do this in the Colosseum, not the Senate. Here, the seat of executive power is physically occupied by a combat sport. The symbolism is so heavy it would crush a lesser civilisation.
The United Kingdom, for all its own decline, maintains a regulatory framework for sports broadcasting that would never permit such a fusion of politics and prize-fighting. The Ofcom rules on due impartiality and harmful material are, one might say, annoyingly sensible. Our regulators ensure that even a reality show contestant cannot be elected without some vetting. But the Americans have abandoned even the pretence of standards. Their democracy has become entertainment, and their executive branch a pay-per-view event.
Compare this to the Victorian era, when the Prime Minister would not be seen in public without a top hat and a sense of gravitas. Today, the White House hosts a cage fight. The transformation from dignity to depravity took barely a century. We have gone from Gladstone to GSP (a mixed martial artist, for the uninitiated) in the same period that Rome went from Augustus to Caligula.
Critics will say I am overreacting. They will note that the President is simply appealing to a demographic, a base that enjoys violence and chants. This is precisely the problem. When the leader of the free world must cosplay as a fight promoter to maintain approval, the intellectual decadence is complete. We have exhausted ideas. We have no policy. We have only spectacle.
The regulatory contrast with the UK is instructive. Our health and safety rules would require the cage to be inspected, the fighters to have medicals, and the broadcast to be delayed for swearing. The Americans do not care. They have built a cage in the Rose Garden. The roses, I assume, have been uprooted. There is no room for flowers in the empire of violence.
One should not moralise. It is not a moral failure but a cyclical one. Every empire reaches a point where its leaders become clowns, its rituals become games, and its capital becomes a set for reality television. The White House UFC arena is the logical conclusion of a process that began when politicians started appearing on late-night shows to deliver monologues. It has simply accelerated.
I watch from across the Atlantic with the smugness of a man whose own house is burning more slowly. But the flames are coming. The British regulatory standards will not save us. They only delay the inevitable. When we finally build our own cage outside Downing Street, we will at least ensure the cage meets EU standards for weight and safety. But we will still build it.
For now, the Yanks have their spectacle. They have their champion. They have their Octagon. And they have no idea that the fight happening in the White House is not between two men in shorts, but between a fading idea of democracy and the entertainment state that has replaced it. The winner will be the void, as always.
I return to my column with a heavy heart and a light pen. The joke writes itself, but the laughter is hollow. Enjoy the fight. I shall not watch.
