The term “political theater” has taken on some pointedly negative connotations in recent days. When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis flew two planeloads of migrants from San Antonio, Texas to Martha’s Vineyard on September 14, critics condemned the action as “political theater.”
When a group of Venezuelan migrants flown to the island filed a class-action lawsuit against the governor and Florida’s transportation secretary, claiming that they were misled and that their rights were violated, Mr. DeSantis lashed back, calling the lawsuit an act of “political theater.”
By itself, the term “political theater” carries no moral valence. Whatever valence it does carry derives from a performance’s adherence to truthfulness and from the alignment of its messaging with the methods used to put it together. When acts of nonviolent civil disobedience incorporate dramatic dimensions (actors, scenes, conflict, audience) to communicate political messages, they can certainly be considered as forms of political theater.
M.K. Gandhi’s 1930 salt march, for example, which dramatized the oppression of British colonial rule and the particular injustice of the British salt tax, has been cited as a superb example of political drama in which symbolic action inspired nationwide resistance and, later, nonviolent actions undertaken in countless venues around the world.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. understood well the power of dramatic action. Writing from a Birmingham jail cell in 1963, he explained that the goal of the Birmingham demonstrations was “to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” The key word here, of course, is “dramatize.”