TRUMP IS A ‘CHARISMATIC’ LEADER’
(and not in a good way)
Max Weber, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton
“. . . I alone can fix it!”
By Christopher B. Daly
This presidential campaign has been perplexing for many Americans — for professional politicians, for political journalists, and for voters. A major reason for that feeling arises from the fact that one candidate, Donald Trump, is so far outside the American political tradition of major-party nominees. He is closer to political figures from Europe or elsewhere than to almost any other candidate in American history.
To understand the Trump phenomenon, it is worth consulting one of the deepest thinkers about political life — the German social theorist Max Weber. In an essay titled “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber laid out a way to understand the fight for power in society. In Weber’s scheme, Trump epitomizes a type known as the “charismatic leader.”
According to Weber, “charismatic authority” is different from traditional or legal sources of authority, primarily because the charismatic leader is followed based on personal qualities. The leader’s success depends on the public’s “devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism, or exemplary character of an individual person.” In essence, a charismatic leader is endowed with special qualities because his followers believe he has those qualities.
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Trump’s authority is thus entirely personal. It is not connected to a party or a movement or a set of policies. Trump policy is whatever he says it is. If that means being pro-Putin even though the Russian spymaster/dictator is anathema to the Republican Party, so be it. Trump is not constrained by any precedent, philosophy, or party.
He is the “Lord of the Tower.” High inside Trump Tower, he has long ruled over a privately held company. He comes out of a business milieu that has little in common with most big U.S. corporations. He is not like a CEO of a big publicly traded corporation. The modern corporate executive is a cog in a giant machine — made up of corporate boards, executive committees, finance committees, legal counsel, giant organizational charts, rules, policies, and guidelines. This environment produces CEOS who are risk-averse and who know that their time at the top is limited to about four or five years.
None of that pertains to Trump. He mainly trusts only those people who work for him in Trump Tower. Any authority they have flows from him directly, in proportion to how close they are to him or how trusted. No one in the Trump camp exercises power independently or by virtue of a place in a bureaucracy. It’s all about personal relationships, as in a royal court.
Many of these qualities were on display in Trump’s most defining moment to date — his acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention:
I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice.
I AM YOUR VOICE.
I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.
That is the essence of Trumpism: he is the indispensable figure. Not a party, not a philosophy, not a team. If he can prevail over a system he calls “rigged,” he will make better deals, scare our enemies, and restore manufacturing payrolls.
American politicians are sometimes described as charismatic by people who really want to use a word more like “charming.” Jack Kennedy, for example, was often called “charismatic” based on his looks, his wit, his glamorous wife, and an ineffable quality that is something closer to good luck.
We have had our share of charming people in public life, but true charismatic leaders like Trump are actually rare in American political history. In the 1960s, George Wallace of Alabama rapidly built a personal following. Playing on the politics of resentment and racism, Wallace amassed enough primary victories to nearly capture the Democratic Party nomination for president. Like Trump, he gave fits to the party regulars. But because he was a charismatic leader, his following dispersed after his departure.
Because Trump’s power flows upward from his followers directly to him, he is free of most of the normal constraints under which national politicians operate. That is why he creates such anguish among the Republican Party establishment, among the conservative donor network, and among Republican candidates down the ballot. Trump is not beholden to any of them, and from time to time, Trump reminds them that he didn’t need them to get where he is.
Trump personifies his own movement. Obviously, there is no Trumpism without Trump.
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Not so with Hillary Clinton. She has authority because she occupies the top spot in a powerful organization that will exist long after she is gone. Without Clinton there would still be a robust Democratic Party with an enduring philosophy, a rising cadre of leaders, and a consistent message to voters.
Hillary Clinton is the opposite of a “chaos candidate” such as Trump. She conforms more closely to the type of leader Weber identified as one who exercises “legal authority.”
In Clinton’s approach to politics, professionals are respected, and qualities like steadiness, consistency, and predictability (which Trump disdains) are considered virtues. She makes plans and sticks to them. She limits access. She does not blow up at individual journalists and denounce them by name.
With Clinton, there is a structure with veteran, professional staff at all key positions, from speechwriting to finance to policy. People who occupy positions in her organization have their own power and responsibility based on their legal, bureaucratic status — not (necessarily) on how favored they are personally by Clinton herself.
In policy terms, Clinton is the kind of candidate who values consistency, who works toward broad policy goals over years and decades. She can be counted on not to improvise or to make policy on the fly by lashing out in fits of pique. She can be expected to operate entirely within the parameters of Democratic Party orthodoxy — if for no other reason, because she herself labored for decades to forge that orthodoxy.
None of that pertains to a charismatic candidate like Trump. He harkens back to political insurgents like George Wallace — not (just) in his bigotry but in his personal approach. Trump has almost no bureaucracy around him, and he churns through most staffers who are not related to him. A reporter cannot go seek out Trump’s “foreign policy shop” and get briefings on Trump’s approach to the Middle East. First of all, there is no “shop.” And, if there were a shop, there is no policy. There will be a policy when Trump makes one up, and it will change when he feels like it.
Trump might meet with Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, and if they hit it off personally, then Israel remains under U.S. protection. If they don’t hit it off, then all bets are off. No one can predict or plan on a Trump policy. As a headline in Slate put it recently: “Donald Trump doesn’t have foreign policy ideas. He has moods.”
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According to Weber, another dimension of the charismatic style of leadership involves the leader’s relationship to money. Typically, according to Weber, the charismatic leader lives “for politics” in the sense that he has a cause or wants to change things. For such a leader, a career in politics is something that he could take or leave. Not needing a salary, he can swoop in and out of politics.
For the politician who makes a career of it, the terms are naturally different. The careerist lives “off politics,” in the sense that he or she makes her living in elective or appointive office. Like most American office-seekers, they need the job.
In this campaign, Trump and Clinton are not just rivals; they embody rival approaches to politics itself. It is not the case that they are both trying to be the same kind of candidate and one is doing the better job at it. The fact is, they are striving to be quite different political types. And it must be acknowledged that they are both excellent at epitomizing these two different approaches.
Trump is the charismatic candidate of chaos. Clinton is the legalistic candidate of discipline. Together, they present American voters with a kind of choice we have never faced before in a general election for president.
Christopher B. Daly, a professor of journalism at Boston University, is the author of “Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism.”
