The thing that puzzled me most in the runup to last November’s election, and that still seems to me the strangest about that whole strange year, was how people could vote for Donald Trump. Not because he’s a racist, a xenophobe, an obvious con-man – that’s just checking off boxes on the Republican bingo card. What beggared belief was how anyone, anywhere, could want to vote for this particular man, regardless of what his policies were. He was so evidently repulsive, physically and rhetorically, a buffoon with a fake tan, cartoon hair, and jowls that hung like plumb-bobs. I wasn’t alone in feeling this way, either. Commentators on the left made a regular and almost casual habit of pointing out how ridiculous Trump looked and acted. For all of us, he had a kind of anti-charisma, which makes it all the stranger that millions of people not only voted for him but did so with a level of enthusiasm Americans usually reserve for teenage pop stars.
For them, he had charisma. Were they seeing something we couldn’t see, or hearing something we couldn’t hear? I don’t think that kind of magical thinking has much explanatory value, although, as you’ll see, I’ve come back around to it in part.
What made Trump’s “charisma” make sense to me was an argument I encountered near the end of James Scott’s Domination and the Art of Resistance, a book in which Scott summarizes and theorizes thirty years of anthropological work on the phenomenon of what he calls “the hidden transcript.” Scott’s basic argument, in this book and elsewhere, is that – pace Althusser et al – downtrodden people don’t often internalize the ideologies produced by their oppressors to justify a state of affairs in which they’re oppressed. Instead, the wretched of the Earth produce counter-ideologies of their own, which are uniquely shaped by two important factors that distinguish them from the hegemonic ideologies of the master class. First, they spread without access to the systems of literate mass distribution that dominant ideologies employ; this means that they’re oral in form and, in detail at least, show a lot of variation from one instantiation to the next. Second, they spread in secrecy so as to escape punitive repression by the dominant class; this means they’re veiled or cast in a language transparent to subalterns, but opaque to those in charge. Scott’s theory is a powerful tool for interpreting mass attitudes, especially for those who, like me, study ancient materials which only give us access to such mass attitudes through the bewildered eyes and ears of the masters.
Out of all this, Scott produces a unique theory of charisma that does away with some of the hand-waving one encounters in Weberian accounts. For Scott, “charisma” is just the enthusiastic loyalty that those who share a given “hidden transcript” will demonstrate for anyone who’s able to give voice to this transcript openly and in the face of elite opposition. Pragmatically, a politician who speaks from the hidden transcript openly both puts himself at risk on behalf of and seems to identify himself with those whose ideological demands the hidden transcript expresses. But it’s also a kind of vicarious release to watch someone say all the things you’ve been afraid to say, just to those people whom you were afraid to say them to.
Is that Trump? But where’s the hidden transcript from which he’s reading? After all, any objective observer would have to agree that those who responded most enthusiastically to Trump – older white men and women – far from being oppressed, are already in charge.
But Scott’s analysis applies to perceptions, not reality. Sociologist Arlee Hochschild has powerfully outlined the ways in which white people can feel themselves to be oppressed in America, despite all contrary evidence: they see America as a line, and they feel that all sorts of strangers are jumping in line ahead of them. Their hidden discourse is actually a hatred of these strangers, almost always expressed in racist, or islamophobic terms. This transcript used to get transmitted in small-town bars and diners, but over the last two decades it’s metastasized across the internet. Of course, contra Scott, the internet is itself a system of mass dissemination, powerful in the hands of those who wield it; but it’s not the same system of mass dissemination that proponents of what Trump voters see as an oppressive, dominant transcript enjoy. Those are the newspapermen, the TV reporters: in short, “the media.” It is again perception that matters, not facts.
Offline, Trump voters feel constrained to transmit their hidden transcript in coded terms – by making fun of Black Lives Matter protesters, say, or by complaining about Colin Kaepernick’s sense of entitlement. For years now, Republican politicians have mirrored this tentative, fearful form of engagement by pressing a racist agenda only in coded terms. Trump, on the other hand, presents their transcript openly. It’s as though they themselves were speaking their minds. That’s Trump’s charisma.
In one way I find this account very satisfying, but in another I don’t. After all, though it does explain why some people might be enthusiastic about Trump, it doesn’t really say why those same people wouldn’t find him just as repulsive – physically, oratorically – as I do. Where’s the disgust?
In answer to this question, I’d like to make what Scott would probably see as an illegitimate extension of his argument. It seems to me that Trump gives voice to a hidden transcript not only through his explicit statements, but also through his very way of being.
The body first. If Trump’s supporters adore him, its because they know that they themselves are, or someday will be, physically disgusting. Rightly or wrongly, our culture assigns certain perquisites to the beautiful; it hurts to have lost these or never to have enjoyed them at all. Trump, however, looks revolting and still enjoys every privilege a regular viewer of daytime television could ever imagine. He has power, fame, and sex, or, if not that (and, indeed, I find it hard to believe that Trump can get it up anymore without murdering a dog vel sim), at least the license to abuse and manipulate members of the opposite sex. In that respect, Trump’s ascent represents a revolt of the revolting.
Now, the words. Everybody acknowledges that Trump can’t string more than two sentences together without a solecism or (obviously accidental, often sense-destroying) anakolouthon. His most popular ideas – “Mexicans are bad hombres,” “Obamacare is a disaster” – are simple, predicative sentences; anything more complicated than that, and Trump gets lost. I used to think that this was a new kind of dog-whistle, by which a candidate, by eschewing grammar, might cram a few dozen lexical items that scratched the pineal itches of his voters into the same space that a single idea, grammatically expressed, would have occupied. Now, I think it’s just a question of capacity: Trump really isn’t capable of making sense out loud (to say nothing about whether he’s capable of making sense in his own head).
David Graeber once claimed, as a succinct explanation of why Middle America keeps voting for a Republican Party that screws them at every turn, that most Americans could more easily imagine their children becoming super rich than they could imagine those same children jumping through whatever hoops were required to join the liberal intelligentsia. If there’s anything to that argument, then Trump represents its apotheosis. People go to college, at minimum, to learn to do things with words; Trump, apparently, gets things done without words. In this respect, too, he’s an imago of his own voters. Their placing him in power is itself an overturning of the dominant transcript.
It would be foolish to deny that there really is some kind of dominant transcript in America, and that elements of it are purely ideological – the notion of meritocracy, for example. Some elements of that transcript, though, may be basic to any kind of social compact. I think that an insistence on some basic level of linguistic competency is one such element, since language is what lets us make laws, friendships, and, god forbid, deals. Trump’s inability to “do” language in a way that would be effective for attaining any of those ends has so far prevented him from accomplishing anything substantial as president. The failures (Muslim bans 1 and 2, the border wall, the AHCA) keep piling up, and we can take some comfort in this: that the very substance of Trump’s “charisma” makes him unable to write his worst ideas into law. On the other hand, Trump’s more insubstantial accomplishments should worry us. He’s succeeded in creating an atmosphere of terror for Muslims and undocumented immigrants and the transgendered. That’s not nothing; it may be more important than passing laws, and it’s harder for us, as individuals, to fight against. In each of these cases, Trump has successfully injected a little bit of himself into America as a whole. He’s turning us from a society of equals into a place where wordless violence rules, and there are plenty of Americans who support him in this. That’s the real black magic of Trump’s charisma.