Charisma, Personality, & Spectacle in American Politics
While the demands made of personalities aspiring to the Oval Office have certainly fluctuated with history, some remain indelibly baked into our national DNA. The recipe for scoring American electorate appeal has long encouraged a hearty optimism laced with a just-right tang of animus. Successful politicians stir an emotional cocktail where the bitterness of rivalry and revenge swims with the sweetness of hope and bold promises.
The American politician is also called to maintain a complicated balance between humility and self-confidence and between relatability and inviolability. He is vulnerable but not too vulnerable. He is both a bridge to the people and their chosen hero-deliverer. Crucially, he must contain a seed of ordinariness, elude (at least vaguely) to an origin story of noble struggle, and demonstrate a shameless going-to-battle grit.
Cultural critic Mark Dery, in his characteristic tart prose captures this unique polarity well:
"The American psyche is characterized, on one hand, by a Teflon optimism and a clench-jawed cheerfulness so impervious to reality it's scary and, on the other, by a coiled violence, just beneath the surface. Think of Ronald Reagan, whose on-camera persona alternated between the aw-shucks innocence of Jimmy Stewart and the tough-guy rasp of Clint Eastwood. . . ."
America's appetite is not sated by a mere intellectual at the presidential podium, no matter how well-spoken or given to parental reassurances he is. He must exude a palpable life-force and demonstrate that he is at once rooted to the earth, as much as he is eyes-lifted-to-the-sky and maybe, just maybe able to transcend the muck.
Behind the glow of folksy unity-speak must lurk the repressed glimmer of righteous wrath from which ordinary people detect solidarity and strength. It is safe to say that no other country quite replicates this intriguing political formula for citizen appeal.
America is unique in a handful of ways. Her beginnings did not pattern themselves along the slow, evolutionary lines of her counterpoints across the Atlantic. She did not inherent old kingdoms and groaning legacies. In her infancy she had no practical use for the sleepy language of political continuity, nor for the anxieties of establishment appeasement that her European forebears did. America splashed onto the global scene in a striking way circa the late 1700s, propelled here too by both the “earthiness” of collective indignation and the transcendence of trailblazing moral philosophy.
America, you see, was founded on an idea. She did not desire to capture land to satisfy a blind territorial hunger. This medieval impulse of yore was instead superseded by a newfound humanism and the enlightened political vision that it inspired. Ideas fuel a myriad of revolutions but starting a country from scratch with this particular pre-made philosophical blueprint—this was new.
Early waves of immigrants who braved arduous ocean voyages contributed to the crystallization of American character. So too did its opinionated and savvy roster of leading figures, many keen on wielding the pen, or occasionally the public square, to disseminate their ideological musings. In no time at all American spirit began to synthesize and blossom into something intrepid and passionate.
Dispensing with the pedigree-logic that swarmed their native Britain, America's leaders pivoted instead to an electoral-college model which managed to express regional interests yet also civility towards the common man. Political mobilization occurred somewhat naturally, helped along by the revolutionary residue and smaller geographical reach of the age.
What's interesting about early presidential candidates is that their popularity appears to stem from the strength of their moral character rather than the force of their personality. What inspired faith in early Americans was sound reasoning, solid virtue, and a certain air of gravitas that neatly bundled it all together. It is easy to take this sentence in and, with a shrug of defeat, decide that today's Americans have just sloppily tumbled down a path of moral degeneration.
There's some truth to this—after all, we can never fully absolve the individual of guilt. But it's also worth mentioning that a rapidly molting media environment has played a strong hand in this paradigm shift wherein the linearity of words has yielded to the hypnotic power of the “image”. Where once our ancestors might have been seduced by the elegance of rhetorical logic, now the masses clamor for some good, old-fashioned showmanship!
Charisma is hailed as an indispensable trait of anyone daring to brave the presidential race track these days. But this has not always been the case. Many of America's most emblematic commanders-in-chief, including George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln would have been found missing-the-mark if shoved into the 21st-century political fray where image and personality are king. For these men, oratorical knack was not readily available, but it ultimately didn't matter; respect was easily garnered by other means.
These days, we wish to be charmed rather than merely convinced. We crave emotional gratification from our leader, and not so much intellectual gravitas. Perhaps this illuminates something striking about our growth trajectory, or lack thereof—one for which the reductive explanation that we've been "dumbed-down" doesn't stick the landing. As it turns out, what we're most hungry for is emotional recognition and confirmation of our grievances instead of the more abstract business of future-planning—the latter of which we increasingly intuit as illusory and impotent.
Perhaps this shift underscores the present reality of Washington as a cruel snarl of entrenched corruption. Several centuries removed from the so-called "clean slate" we once inhabited, we find ourselves today in the grip of an internal rot and we pine for a leader to vocalize our daily distress. (Distress that a lineage of bureaucrats is ironically partly responsible for inducing.) We seem to subconsciously understand that the quiet, principled man of times past is insufficient to tend to the emotional wounds of the republic.
This explains, in part, why political personality matters to contemporary man so much. When incremental improvement looks futile or proves illusory, we reach towards its transcendent magic. When we do not especially feel ourselves a part of our country, we reach towards its comforting empathic embrace. There are larger dragons to slay these days, it would seem.
One of the fascinating aspects of the elevation of political personality is the extent to which it highlights not only governmental insufficiencies but also citizen hunger. This is to emphasize that the pipeline between the politician and his people is decidedly a two-way street. Former President Trump's jarring rise to the national stage revealed personal attributes that set him apart from the pack, but it also revealed rumblings of anxiety and anger in the American population that other candidates proved inadequate to metabolize and dish back out.
We live in an age of institutional annoyance. With a cacophony of information sources at our disposal, we snicker at the former holy grails. And with the democratizing sweep of the Internet, we've all entered the playing-field of media heavy-hitters. We don’t crave the signals of official endorsement nearly as much anymore, preferring instead the “wisdom” of virality.
Some people question more thanks to the clashing, confusing surge of information outlets but others trust greater thanks to this very same quality of oversaturation. In contemporary times the distance between the cynic and the devotee has dangerously shrunken—yet another symptom of digital overload if I ever saw one.
The modern commodification of the individual has abetted (or helped kindle?) the rise of annoyance with institutions who longer provide the sacred label-of-legitimacy that they once safeguarded. Everyone is their own personal brand these days. No one will shelter us; we must set out on our own. We hop jobs at quicker rates and pop up side hustles at the drop of a hat.
Increasingly we admire the maverick with his feisty words, self-optimization itch, and iconic promise more than we do the conformist everyman with his stale routine, establishment loyalties, and corporate mediocrity. On some level, we wonder whether, yikes, maybe we need to call upon both the smarmy surface and the calculated underbelly to succeed in this topsy-turvy 21st-century theater we call home. Our politicians are no different.
The difference now, as it pertains to the political circus, is that we as voters are swayed more by personality than by policies, which indicates we have evolved to care more about image and show than about function and virtue.
In his book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle author Chris Hedges writes,
“In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by clichés, stereotypes, and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious.”
He strikes a nerve, doesn't he? By calling out both our technologically-assisted displacement from reality and our evolved distaste for it. The desire to escape the disappointment of reality is understandable, but its appeasement is not advisable. Between the rooted-to-the-earth fiery political frustration and the eyes-in-the-sky political vision is a vast in-between territory that begs to be lived in.
This is the arena where workable solutions originate; this is the bridge between angst and hope capable of producing genuine positive change. If we continue with Hedges' diagnosis we will continue to leap from emotional indulgence to idealist absurdity, supercharging the cognitive dissonance flowing from Washington that we already uncomfortably experience.
The American spirit since her very beginnings has been determined and driven. If we put our minds to something, history has taught us we will prevail. The task of living in the in-between kindly asks that we recognize our own political agency, refuse to be daunted by realities of governmental decay, and learn to muddle our way forwards with a philosophy of undaunted pragmatism. If we could learn to do this perhaps our future republic would thank us.