There’s a world before Trump’s descent down the escalator, and there’s a world after it. The recent “No Kings” protests transmitted the idée fixe of the pre-2015 world. That idea was hostility to personal authority, or personal power—hostility to the notion of sovereignty, to the power once exercised by kings. Donald Trump, the figure who has dominated politics since 2015, is its most visible sign of contradiction. In that sense, the protesters weren’t entirely wrong. Trump’s success marks the passing of the world of the latter half of the 20th century, which was defined by hatred of personal authority.
Successive generations demolished the concept of sovereignty, casting suspicion on the notion that a leader’s decisions can legitimately reshape political or social life. This shift began in the United States when the intelligentsia promulgated the concept of “the authoritarian personality.” They found this personality in the working classes, their churches and associations, their families and fathers, and the politicians who represented them. Where there was the whiff of authoritarian character traits, fascism probably lurked.
The anti-authority impulse then extended to challenge the authority of elected bodies. Popular sovereignty became dangerous. In the late 1950s and 60s, on matters such as school prayer, unctuous judges and administrators tied the hands of potentially reactionary legislatures and frog-marched them toward secularism. In the 1970s, the target was popular sovereignty as embodied in the office of the president. The American Constitution enabled an energetic executive or administrative presidency, traces of the monarchical form. But the president’s authority was decapitated in the great act of regicide otherwise known as Watergate.
Sketching the gloomy landscape of the 1970s, the sociologist Robert Nisbet saw in the twilight of authority the rise of impersonal forces; administrators touting “best practices” stepped into the breach. Therapists, managers, and other experts became increasingly important. They coordinated with economic, social, and legal networks to constrain human agents who might otherwise upset progress.
That’s what globalization was all about. At the peak of the era of what Thomas Friedman called “the golden straitjacket,” sovereignty was outré. Successful politicians such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair dazzled their electorates with the bullion of cheap credit and narratives of an impending gilded age, while tightening the bonds ever further. They weakened the power of their offices, distributing it to central banks and international agencies.
Their actions clarified the vocation of right-thinking people. Stigmatize the authoritarian personality. Banish any individual or group that displayed its signs from the helm of government and public life. Spin an ever-tighter web of legal, administrative, and economic networks that could remove the risks of exercising personal human control over government—the risks of an energetic executive—once and for all.
All that changed with Trump’s descent down the escalator. “The golden straitjacket” had numerous critics, but no major public figure exposed its hatred of political, personal power as aggressively and abruptly as Trump did. In 2015, he thrust personal authority back to the center of public life. It’s been there ever since, an example to imitate, in enthusiasm or envy.
As president, he has fought hard to restore the bloodied Article II of the Constitution. Trump’s executive and juridical actions on behalf of presidential power even won over skeptics in the conservative legal world. Not only did he challenge the presuppositions of government via the administrative state, but he also exposed the overreaching Deep State that is devouring the American Constitution.
Indeed, “No Kings” could very well function as a pro-Trump slogan. Prior to Trump, American presidents largely functioned as kings. Like the monarch in Great Britain, U.S. presidents had long held power in theory as the “dignified” branch, while other actors in the security state made the real decisions—the “efficient” branch. Trump has been his most republican when he has upset this double government.
To be sure, anti-Trump “No Kings” protestors are more troubled by another phenomenon: Trump’s personal style of leadership. They’re not wrong to draw attention to it, but they’re wrong about its significance.
Authority depends on a person’s capacity to command in order to reshape politics. Trump mastered the new fragmented media environment, in which entertainment, rather than solemn statements, wins attention and deference. Trump made his personality an issue. His critics attacked him for it, claiming his persona was a manifestation of the dreaded authoritarian personality. But all the elements of Trump’s personality that his opponents loathe—rhetorical and physical aggression, incivility, scorn for discourse and discussion, brashness, maleness, unwillingness to apologize or express guilt, bluntly demarcating between American winners and losers, claiming the exceptional power to fix America’s problems—have proved, for better or worse, to be demonstrations of strength rather than weakness.
The importance of character traits such as “caring for people like me” or “experience,” which had mattered so much in late 20th-century mass democracy, faded away. Swathes of the electorate would of course still look for their therapist-in-chief or expert-in-chief. But more wanted a boss who asserted control, and expected those under him to follow his lead.
The reassertion of personal authority, after decades of opposition to it, has been a messy affair. It’s risible to think that Trump ever intended to abolish elections, set up a dictatorship, or establish a hereditary monarchy. But his style did help accelerate the collapse of institutional authority, such as that once held by the media. Although many of his more dramatic promises have been unrealized (stymied by a variety of forces), the symbology of authority has remained key for gaining and wielding legitimacy.
A numinous connection has developed between an electorate that confers sovereignty upon their chosen figure and the figure who exercises it. The acoustic and visual symbols this connection generates are all the more potent because at this point in the 21st century, as Mary Harrington has argued, a culture of mass literacy has vanished. This culture was essential to transmit the symbols associated with the print ideals of liberalism (for instance, the importance placed on the freedom of the press, or on discourse itself). As print culture goes, so go the symbols of liberalism. Other symbols step into their place.
Trump’s more subtle critics, who are troubled by the twilight of liberalism, noticed this transformation. They sense something has changed, and single out Trump as the chief villain. But wielding the symbols of personal authority is one area in which Trump has long ceased to be exceptional. Even those who are very far from Trump ideologically and politically still inhabit his symbolic universe, in which personal authority, hierarchy, and one’s capacity to reshape political life are of critical importance.
Emmanuel Macron’s predecessors, afraid of being labelled authoritarians by the generation of May ‘68, adopted a deliberately deflated, egalitarian style. Macron shocked the French political system by embracing the persona of “Jupiter.” He seized the opportunity that Trump’s descent down the escalator made possible. Pope Francis began his papacy in a conversational, free-wheeling style, akin to a Clintonian or Blairite doing one’s best to manage the media narrative. But after the first few years, he also imitated Trump, as his supporters embraced the theology of an imperial papacy. Joe Biden likewise leaned into a “Dark Brandon” iconography of authority to create the impression he was in charge, the simulacrum of a functioning presidency.
Politicians who can’t successfully embody the symbolism of authority, such as Biden, or those who shy away from it, such as Justin Trudeau, end up as failures. The latter launched his political career by an act of physical prowess, beating up a Conservative senator who was too lazy to train for a boxing match. It was a crude but effective way of legitimating Trudeau’s claim to lead the Liberal Party and Canada. Even in an extremely progressive country, primal assertions of authority win admiration. But Trudeau forgot the underlying lesson. In office, he preferred the symbolism of colorful socks, and his unpopularity forced him to resign in ignominy. Meanwhile, Trudeau’s successor, who invokes the physical, masculine iconography of hockey fights to win votes, has returned to more visceral politics. The liberal norms of national civility go nowhere: it’s the brash Trumpian traits that are deployed to gain victory.
The resurgence of authority is why there’s no chance of reverting to globalized, impersonal power, at least how the pre-2015 world conceived it. As candidates compete for personal authority, those vying for power repudiate the notion that economic, social, and legal networks should constrain human agents. The capacity to take back control over these networks is what matters. This helps us understand the deeper unity behind Trump’s signature policies.
All the major themes that Trump hit on when he descended the escalator—an end to mass immigration, free trade, and regime-change missions abroad—were on one level anti-globalization topics: they slashed away at the golden straitjacket. Anti-globalization themes are now so mainstream that even Keir Starmer imitates Trump’s symbology by talking tough on border control. On one level, it’s a policy victory. But the success is more profound than that. To effect that agenda demands the reassertion of the personal, political will to effect social and political change. Faced with the diminishing returns of the old regime, that’s what more and more people are looking for.
In our new world, leaders rise and fall by how well they can speak the language of authority. Whatever the full implications of this paradigm shift may be, the longing for sovereigns shows no signs of letting up.