Latest news with #charisma
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Editorial: A decade of deceit — 10 years since Trump's infamous escalator ride that took America into the basement
It was exactly 10 years ago today that Donald Trump rode the escalator from the lobby of Trump Tower into the basement and changed the country forever. Having known him well for decades as a local real estate promoter who was cast into a reality TV show where he of multi-bankruptcies played at being a business genius, we were not impressed by his campaign announcement. Trump had earlier feinted at runs for president or governor or mayor, so we were skeptical that this was a serious undertaking. We were wrong, terribly wrong. We urged that he be ignored and that his message of hate be dismissed. But our advice was not heeded and he bested the 16 other Republican contenders for the nomination (can you name them all?) before he went to beat Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College. What we didn't factor in was Trump's tremendous charisma, the same reason that NBC entertainment starred him in 'The Apprentice.' The Trump show was a hit on broadcast TV and it would be a hit in real life. Here is the short editorial we published, which appeared under a headline of 'America's Naked Cowboy': 'In keeping with a principle established when we passed on editorializing about the television show 'Jackass,' since the title said it all, we will remain silent about the native New Yorker who entered the presidential race Tuesday. 'Rational policy discussion is simply impossible when the purported candidate, citizen of a city of immigrants, stereotypes Mexicans and other Latin Americans as drug dealers and rapists, while spinning fantasies of White House triumphs that would be the envy of a cartoon dictator. 'So, no, we will not critique his boast that 'I'm really rich,' proves how very smart he is. 'Or his game-show assertion of an $8.7 billion net worth — and just you believe it because he wrote it down on a piece of paper. 'Or his dismissal of virtually everyone else as stupid or losers. 'Or the imaginary confrontation he described with the head of the Ford car company, as if he were pitching a TV pilot to a studio head, complete with a brilliant hero (him), a crafty adversary (the CEO of Ford) who would 'want to be cool,' and a reality-defying plot twist involving a humongous tax on Ford cars manufactured in Mexico. 'Or his claim to have a foolproof plan for defeating ISIS, only the plan is too good to let anyone else know about it until he's elected, never mind that the terror group is slaughtering thousands. 'Or his chest-thumping about having a unique ability to best China, because, as he said, 'I beat China all the time. All the time,' in negotiating real estate deals with Chinese investors. 'Or the spittle that gathered at the corner of his mouth as his 45-minute peroration wore on. 'All that will be said about Donald Trump, Republican contender: America, meet your very own Naked Cowboy.' Reading our words 10 years on, we did capture the essence of the man, his three campaigns and his two White House tenures. He has succeeded far beyond what we or he could have imagined from that basement kick-off and our nation and world have been taken on a journey that no one knows where it will end. _____
New York Times
a day ago
- Politics
- New York Times
Charisma Rules the World
The 2020s should have been the decade when American politics began to make sense. The multibillion-dollar industry of public opinion polling can turn vibe shifts into tweetable bar graphs and trend lines. Surveys have found that affiliation with traditional religious institutions has mostly declined over the past generation, so one might conclude that more Americans now form their worldviews and choose leaders based on cool logic and material interest. And over this data-driven landscape extends the lengthening shadow of our artificial intelligence overlords, who promise to rationalize more and more of our lives, for our own good. Yet somehow, despite the experts' interactive graphics and the tricks that large language models can do, it has only gotten harder to understand the worldviews and political choices of half the country (whichever half you don't belong to). Perhaps, then, we should pay more attention to the human quirks that confound statisticians and that A.I. can't quite crack — desires and drives that have not changed much over the centuries. That means rescuing a familiar word from decades of confusion and cliché: charisma. In New Testament Greek, the word means gift of grace or supernatural power. But when we use it to describe the appeal of a politician, a preacher's hold over his congregation or a YouTube guru with a surprisingly large following, we are taking a cue from the sociologist Max Weber. He spent much of his career studying what happens to spiritual impulses as a society becomes more secular and bureaucratic. A little more than a century ago, he borrowed 'charisma' from the Bible and Christian history to describe the relationship between leaders and followers in both religion and politics. Charisma, he wrote, is a form of authority that does not depend on institutional office, military might or claims on tradition. Instead, charisma derives from followers' belief that their leader possesses a supernatural mission and power: 'a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men.' Weber described himself as 'religiously unmusical' and insisted that he was reinventing charisma in a 'completely value-neutral sense.' But the magnetism that he observed in some leaders — and their followers' sense of calling and duty — seemed to demand a spiritual description. The secular vocabulary developing in his corner of academia, the new disciplines of the social sciences, was not up to the task. 'In order to do justice to their mission, the holders of charisma, the master as well as his disciples and followers, must stand outside the ties of this world,' he wrote. Even as he resisted his colleagues' tendencies to reduce human behavior to animal instincts and reflexes, Weber missed a key element. Charisma is not something that leaders have; it's something that they do. Charisma is a kind of storytelling. It's an ability to invite followers into a transcendent narrative about what their lives mean. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
