How the Republican National Convention became CPAC

So long, politicking. Hello, political infotainment.

Patricia McCloskey.
(Image credit: Illustrated | REUTERS, iStock)

The event that will be broadcast by the Republican Party this week is not, historically speaking, a convention. It is not the site of actual politicking. It will determine nothing about who the party runs for president or what policies it pursues for the next four years. It's a PR stunt, a pseudo-event — an "artificial happening ... manufactured expressly for the purpose of getting the press to cover it" — a program of political infotainment. It is an awful lot like CPAC.

CPAC is the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering in Washington that offers an incredible amalgam of campaigning, performance art, happy hour, education, and grift. CPAC holds a presidential straw poll each year which is both a lot of fun and deeply meaningless, but then, everything at CPAC has this same feel of hyped unreality.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.