Posted on 08/11/2015 7:39:33 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Has there ever been a cult of personality built around a personality so unpleasant?
The answer, by the way, is “yes,” but more about that in a moment.
After Donald Trump’s bombastic performance in last week’s debate, it’s clear that the key to his appeal is not his policy positions, which are all over the map. No, it’s all about his personality, and the paradox is that the more unpleasant his personality is revealed to be, the greater his appeal to his core group of supporters.
For example, one of my readers responded to my article criticizing the new EPA rules on power plants by touting Trump as the only candidate with “the balls” to dismantle the EPA. In reality, there is no basis in Trump’s background, his ideology (if he had one), or his public statements to think he would do anything in particular with the EPA. But that’s how Trump is regarded: as a cure for what ails you, as an all-purpose tonic for whatever somebody thinks is wrong with our current system.
People are projecting onto Trump what they want to see. They are pouring into him their fantasies about what could be accomplished by a strong leader who doesn’t care about making people angry. But that’s a dangerous fantasy to indulge.
To be sure, every presidential election is about personality. We are electing a leader who is going to make important decisions and will have to stick to them in the face of opposition. So when we look at a candidate, we’re not just looking at the values he endorses, the ideas he claims to believe, or the specific platform he has announced. We’re also asking whether he’s the sort of person who really means what he says, whether he has the guts to stand up to opposition, whether he has the charisma to rally other people to his cause, and whether he has the negotiating skills to broker deals without getting taken for a ride.
But there’s a difference between this kind of judgment about character and a cult of personality. The cult of personality is a general faith in the leader—whereas a considered judgment about a candidate is based on specific facts about the candidate’s record and past performance. So we might look to a candidate’s record in the Senate. Did he stand up against legislative cave-ins? Has he shown a willingness to buck the establishment? Or we might look to his term as governor. Did he accomplish something important? Has he faced down opposition without folding?
The GOP has plenty of people with pretty good records on this. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have shown they’re not afraid to lock horns with the GOP establishment. Scott Walker and Chris Christie have pushed through state-level reforms against vicious opposition. You may not like the specific positions of some of these candidates—the overlaps between Chris Christie supporters and Rand Paul sympathizers has got to be pretty much nil. But there’s almost certainly someone other than Trump in this race who has a longer, more consistent track record for promoting any particular policy preferences.
That’s not what support for Trump is about. Support for Trump is not about what a candidate has actually done. It’s about how loudly and recklessly he’s willing to break things. Support for Trump is a protest vote, but not a rationally considered protest vote in favor of a specific cause. It’s an expression of general, unfocused rage. Trump supporters just want someone who’s willing to turn over the tables and call people names and burn the place down. And that’s why the more unpleasant Trump is—the more he insults lady reporters and boasts about how rich he is, the more he thumps his chest about how sexy he is and calls everybody else a loser—the more they love him.
The result is a disturbing kind of cult of personality. I asked earlier about precedents for unpleasant personalities as the basis of a cult. Well, consider the original editions of the “cult of personality,” the ones built up around Stalin and Mao. Or more recently, the one built around Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. All of these men had a certain blustering charisma, much like The Donald, but they could be even more abrasive, boastful, thoughtless, insulting, and crude. And each benefited from the same paradox: the less he adhered to any standards of responsible behavior the more he thrilled his true believers with what a tough guy he was, with how much he was supposedly a strong leader who would face down the capitalist running dog imperialist fascists and deliver for “the people.”
It seems strange that this kind of banana republic cult of personality would find purchase in a republican system (republican with either a small “r” or a big one), but maybe that’s not such an impenetrable paradox. Stable systems of representative government are notoriously slow and resistant to radical change. You can elect a lot of new people to Congress, as insurgents on the right have done in recent years, but the old party leadership stubbornly clings to their positions, and if the last winner of a presidential election is opposed to your agenda, then congressional leaders can’t get much done even if they try. Changing the political system is patient work that takes decades, and most of it is done, not by electing the “right guy” in a single election, but by promoting the right ideas to your fellow citizens and actually convincing people, which is really annoying work.
What doesn’t get the job done is, from my experience, the favorite activity of Donald Trump’s supporters: insulting people on the Internet. So no wonder they want to short-circuit the system and indulge the fantasy that they can push through their agenda, whatever it is, just by electing a guy who will insult people on a bigger scale.
There will always be those who lose patience and long for someone to sweep in and knock everything over and be strong enough to bring everyone to heel. That’s a dangerous illusion, though there are some people who want it enough not to care what their strong man really stands for. But I suspect it’s much smaller number than some of the inflated early poll numbers for Trump would imply.
You nailed it. He is a con-man multiplied many times over. But this is what a conjuror does until his sleight of hand shows.
I got conned into helping an allegedly reformed ex convict...ONCE.
Once bitten..NEVER AGAIN.
I can smell these people several miles away!
BTTT.
Very true. Let’s hope people begin to notice. Let’s face i, when someone begins voicing positions you’ve long held, it’s pretty exciting. It takes a while to know what he really is.
Chix luv badboys
I think I’m gonna have a lot of fun nine months or so from now (after our non-Donald nominee is chosen, during the doldrums of the pre-convention season) simply bumping all of the breathless, hyperbolic threads posted by the Trump True Believers. I’ll stick only to the ones that compare him to Reagan, Churchill, or Jesus...which should still keep us occupied and entertained for a few weeks.
Donald’s not Cruz, in the way the Marines aren’t the Army.
Different jobs.
All anyone is saying is that he’s not Army.
So what.
Is the Marines that hit the beach.
And that’s never pretty.
My opinion is that we are going to get a POS in the White House no matter who wins. If we get a POS who at least accidentally does some positive things for Americans, that will be an improvement over the POS we have now.
Excellent article. Trump really is the anger vote; he’s a populist who knows how to stir up the mob even without having any specific solutions or without even indentifying the problems. He does it simply by spewing an unfocused anger and letting the public fill it in with their own ideas of what he would or should do - none of which he has to specify.
A populist is not a conservative. He’s somebody who plays on anger and uses it to break and gain personal control over a political system. In Chavez’ case, and that of other populists the author mentioned, this was done with an ideological objective, but in Trumps’s case, it all seems to be about projecting his insane bloated ego. At the same time, the few things he has suggested have all been very leftist, but nobody seems to care. I was surprised, for example, when he was ranting in favor of single payer health care (the ultimate goal of Obamacare) and supposed conservatives just ignored it or even praised it.
Agreeing with this about Trump is probably the last thing I have to say about the subject. Glad to see I'm not the only one who arrived at the same conclusion as the author.
GO CRUZ!!!
Italy was aided in 2006 in winning the World Cup because they teed off a certain Zidane who made his famous headbutt after being provoked, Trump is talking more measured now though you wonder about anyone who flies off the handle to make some of these twitter remarks.
>> I’ll stick only to the ones that compare [DT] to Reagan, Churchill, or Jesus <<
Not enough. Don’t overlook the FR posts that have compared him to John the Baptist. Seriously!
>> a populist who knows how to stir up the mob even without having any specific solutions or without even identifying the problems <<
Seems like you’re referring to Huey P. Long or even Barack H. Obama!
Trump has good poll numbers, if we are looking at the poll numbers, NO SPIN, seems a lot of Americans are unsure about him as well... 62%, just saying. It would not stop me from voting for him as the nominee. That was brought up on Hannity as well last night.
Now, Trump corrected the understanding of his Planned Parenthood position but the Blaze and others, are just releasing their version before Trump talked to Breitbart.
Trump certainly would NOT win a number of States with what he was saying about PP that was applauded by PP.
A big-government, game-playing reality-TV populist spouts a bunch of slightly conservative soundbites, and all of sudden huge percentages of people are strapping themselves to his mahogany bandwagon like human shields. I thought we were smarter than this.
Is there anybody on earth who believes that government will shrink under The Donald? Does somebody believe he wants to take the reins of government so he can turn those reins back over to the people, where they belong? Not a chance in hell. It’s lunacy.
Reads like this GOPe pajama boy doesn’t want anyone derailing the federal criminal gravy train. It’s way past time to start smashing noses and running the fascist scum out of America.
Yes, exactly. You’ve got the references right. He’s popular because he’s saying FU, which is how many people feel, but he has no program. This is exactly why he washed out as a candidate for Mayor of NY. He had the money to support his own campaign, but he had no program and when push came to shove, he dropped out.
Fortunately, I don’t think Trump will have even that level of success once he gets out of the media driven level (that is, boosted for his freak value) and actually has to have a program and explain it.
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