White House Fight Night

In his novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil gives the Habsburg world another name: Kakania. It is not a primitive country. It has ministries, laws, newspapers, officers, judges, aristocrats, experts, committees, salons, manners, and a large supply of official languages. What it lacks is the ability to say what it is.

At the center of the novel is the Parallel Campaign, a patriotic project preparing a celebration in 1918 for the 70th anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph’s reign. Important people gather. They draft memoranda, propose symbols, organize meetings, and look for a great idea. They know there must be greatness. They cannot say what it consists of.

A state can continue to function after it has lost the ability to describe itself. Offices still work. The language remains. The purpose is missing.

The jubilee never took place. Franz Joseph died in 1916, the Habsburg Empire collapsed in 1918, and World War I swept away the world whose representatives had still been preparing speeches about its greatness.

The United States is now approaching the 250th anniversary of its independence while arguing over what America is. For some, it is a constitutional republic. For others, it is a lost country to be taken back, a market, a border, a grievance, a flag, revenge. This is not background to the anniversary. It is the anniversary.

That argument recently received an image: UFC Freedom 250 on the South Lawn of the White House. It was Flag Day and President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, and the US was preparing to celebrate its semiquincentennial on July 4. A temporary arena stood on the lawn. At its center was an octagonal cage. Fighters entered. They struck, grappled, fell, rose, and were stopped. Invited guests watched. Cameras recorded. The White House stood behind them.

In mixed martial arts, the cage has an ordinary function. It marks the boundary of a regulated fight. In a stadium, that boundary belongs to sport. In Las Vegas, it belongs to sport and entertainment. On the South Lawn, it belonged to the state as well.

The address changed the object. A cage is not only sporting equipment when it stands beside the White House during a national anniversary. The word “freedom” was in the name of the event. It was also in the language of the anniversary.

The bipartisan America250 initiative describes the milestone as an opportunity to reflect on the nation’s past, honor the contributions of all Americans, and look ahead. These are ordinary words for a national commemoration. The problem is what was placed beside that language. A republic does not have an emperor, but it can still acquire courtly habits. On the South Lawn, the anniversary of the country and the birthday of the president entered the same frame. The language was national. The calendar was personal. The object at the center was a cage.

Trump did not create America’s contradictions: freedom and domination, law and vengeance, popular sovereignty and the desire for a strongman. He gives them permission. He makes domination look like candor and humiliation look like entertainment.

Compare UFC Freedom 250 to January 6, 2021. At the attack on the US Capitol, Trump’s supporters broke doors and windows. They used bodies, flags, poles, fists, and bear spray. They carried their own idea of America into the building and tried to make the state obey it.

At UFC Freedom 250, there was no attack. No one broke in. No one needed to. A cage was brought to the grounds of the presidency and made part of a celebration of freedom.

In one case, force entered the symbolic center of American power as a crime. In the other, an image of force was installed beside the symbolic center of American power as ceremony.

Musil had written about bodies and power before. In The Confusions of Young Törless, boys at a military boarding school catch another boy stealing. They do not simply report him. They punish him, humiliate him, examine him. The violence begins with a room, a weaker body, and the discovery that others can decide what will happen next.

The South Lawn was not that room. The fighters were professional athletes in a regulated sport. But the public scene was still made from bodies, violence, victors and vanquished, and applause. No doctrine had to be announced. The image was enough.

Musil understood roles. In the Parallel Campaign, someone hosts, someone drafts, someone advises, someone supplies language. The absurdity is distributed through the system. The White House event also had roles: some organized, some approved, some fought, some watched, some explained it as only entertainment, only sport, only a birthday event, only a celebration. The word “only” arrives after the fact, an attempt to reduce image to excuse.

A country can use many objects to celebrate its independence: a declaration, a ballot box, a battlefield, a slave ship, a prison, a grave. Each object would change the anniversary. Each would say something about freedom.

The venue on the South Lawn was built, approved, lit, filmed, defended, watched, and enjoyed as part of a celebration of freedom. The official word for the event was freedom. Trump’s chosen object was a cage.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2026. www.project-syndicate.org