The President Is Not Superman
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
America is facing an existential authoritarian threat from Donald Trump and the Republican Party in 2024, in part because voters have for too long thought of the presidency as an omnipotent throne.
The Glare of Presidential Power
President Joe Biden is trying to run for reelection on a record of policy successes. In modern American politics, this is a nonstarter: Many Americans no longer tie policy successes or failures to individual politicians. Instead, they decide what they like or don’t like and then assign blame or credit based on whom they already love or hate . Donald Trump understands this problem and exploits it. Whatever his other emotional and intellectual failings, he has always grasped that many American voters now want a superhero, not a president.
The public’s cultish fascination with celebrity is not a new problem, but it’s getting worse. Back in 1992, I was a young professor living in New Hampshire. I was teaching political science back in those days, but I had several years of practical experience from working in city, state, and federal politics. Nonetheless, I was unprepared for the madness that settles over the Granite State during the presidential primaries. I went to several events, and I started to worry about how dysfunctionally Americans regard the office of the chief executive.
As various contenders—including the right-wing populist Pat Buchanan —made their way through the state, I got to hear voters directly addressing the candidates. As far as I could tell, they had one overriding message for the people contending to be the Leader of the Free World at a time of tremendous global instability, and it sounded something like this:
I am an unemployed pipe fitter from Laconia, and I would like to know when you’re going to get me a job.
Say what you will about Bill Clinton, but he got it. He’d bite his lip and exude kilocalories of well-practiced empathy. George H. W. Bush—who defeated Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis four years earlier by depicting the Duke as a liberal android with antifreeze in his veins —took his turn in the barrel, checking his watch during a debate and trying to get across a message of caring by saying “Message: I care.”
I always knew that a fair number of voters would form “parasocial” relationships with presidents, a phenomenon—one that is perfectly normal, within limits—in which people think they are connected to, and know, celebrities. What I was not prepared for, however, was to see up close how ordinary citizens think of the American president as Superman (or, if you prefer, the Green Lantern ), a nearly omnipotent being who can create new realities through sheer willpower. In 1992, and again during the less contentious 1996 election, I came to understand better how the presidency in the postwar era—and especially during the Cold War—had become so large and its reach so broad that the glare of its powers wiped out the ability of voters to see any office below it.
When I would sit through events in northern New England, I was stunned that the local citizenry seemed unaware of any other level or branch of government. As an occasional talking head on New Hampshire television, I would sometimes try to engage some of these folks. I would ask: Do you have a mayor? A city council? Who is your state representative? (New Hampshire has one of the smallest ratios of voters to legislators in its House of Representatives in the union.) Have you called your state senator? What about the governor? How about your member of Congress?
Sometimes, people knew who these other officials were, and sometimes they didn’t. But in the end, there was an unshakeable faith that if you were unemployed in New Hampshire, the buck stopped in Washington, D.C.
Let’s not be too harsh in blaming the voters. Politicians—in America and elsewhere— encourage this view by doing what politicians do, taking credit for everything good that happens in the nation and sticking blame for the bad stuff on their opponents. It’s a stupid and dangerous game. When it works, it’s magic. Crime fell on your watch? Of course it did; well done, Mr. President. A new wonder drug was developed? You did that, sir. But when things go bad, the temptation to evade blame is overwhelming.
Worse, partisans have every interest in catastrophizing the state of the nation: No one runs on a slogan of “Hey, things are basically okay but we can do better.” Instead, they seek to convince voters in each cycle that the nation is a hot mess and that their nominee for president is the savior who can fix everything—even the stuff that isn’t broken. (Ironically, voters generally don’t care about the one area over which presidents do have nearly full control, foreign policy, unless it’s related to terrorism.)
Republicans, in particular, are the masters at continuously depicting the country as a hellhole and then arguing that the only recourse is to have more hailing to the chief. Their position is rooted in both bad faith and logic: The GOP is becoming a minority party, and it knows that the peculiar path through the Electoral College to the White House is the best hope for exercising national power. But make no mistake: Democrats, too, have an obsession with the presidency. The scholar Mark Lilla calls this the Democratic “daddy complex,” the belief that the president is a father figure who can solve all our problems—which is why so many Democrats show up for presidential elections and then ignore almost everything else.
Trump has played to both sides of the Superman/daddy concept, encouraging a cult of personality that endows one man with saintly powers—a man who never has to deliver, and who can never fail but can only be failed by others. (Trump reportedly wanted to emerge from his COVID treatment at Walter Reed hospital by unveiling a Superman emblem under his shirt.) His GOP competitors still refuse to recognize the irrationality of the Trump cult; in the primary debates, they have argued over policies, as if those matter. Only Vivek Ramaswamy has tried to replicate the Trump celebrity dynamic, but cults do not transfer well and his featherweight Trumpism has had limited appeal even within the GOP.
Biden, meanwhile, has clumsily tried to play the personality game by branding good economic news as “Bidenomics.” Ironically, Biden actually can take at least some credit for the economy (as an extension of his legislative successes), but tacking his name onto economic conditions when voters flatly refuse to draw that connection is a risky and hollow move that cannot even begin to break through the noise of Trump’s blood-and-soil fascism and cries for social and cultural vengeance.
Cults of personality are always a danger in mass politics, and never more so than when unscrupulous opportunists such as Donald Trump or Viktor Orbán or Recep Tayipp Erdoğan warp democratic politics by fusing the idea of the nation to themselves. The world is living through an authoritarian revival, despite some democratic successes (in Poland, most recently). America should be the example to other democracies; instead, years of glorifying individual leaders of both parties have left voters in the United States with an unrealistic understanding of the presidency and its powers—a civic weakness that Trump is exploiting every day on the campaign trail.
Tags
Who is online
238 visitors
With Trump you get Lex Luthor dressed up as SuperYanker.
And with Biden we get - Melvin.
Who is a thousand times smarter than that low functioning retard trump.
Said absolutely no one ever seriously.
I see it's "Tell a Joke Day" again.
Can you at least try to get some memes a touch more topical to my posts?
Fauci is complicit with the Chinese government in development of Covid virus
Naw, I don't feel like it.
Well, no, but keep watching that reich wing media!
I know, it requires a little personal effort.
And what have you determined the reich wing media to be?
is it based on real evidence or just feeeeeelings?
That's nuts.
yeah but stormy daniels said trump was faster than a speeding bullet...
he told her that she reminded him of Ivanka
those maga lotharios get all hair-triggered by thoughts of incest...
Looks like liberals obsessing over the sex habits of Trump.
it's like they can't get enough!
Doesn't she still owe him millions?
Few hundred $K's. Not sure if she ever paid any cuz she said she would rather go to jail. My money is on convenient forgetfulness on the part of the courts "because Trump" and she isn't in jail. If I remember it was right at $600K total
Close enough for liberals to get.
That's a given.
What about Daddy Joe Biden showering with his daughter? Or sniffing little girls hair?
What about trump fucking his?
Oh, that.
That's just made up crapola from leftists who aren't getting any.
I somewhat agree with this, but not totally. Trump voters want him not so much because who or what he is, but what he will do to their enemies (or the inferior groups).
White grievance remains the animating force in MAGA, and I dont think that will ever change.
That certainly explains why Trump's numbers keep improving with every group except white males.
Yeah, poll numbers don't support the claim, do they?
Maybe Racist Polls R US will have a new one out soon.
What? What?