Democracy’s Demigods and Political Superheroes
July 27, 2024
Treating our politicians like superheroes, or for that matter supervillains, is not a good idea.
It’s hard not to notice how badly people want someone to worship right now. After Donald Trump got shot, the responses even of some of his opponents were remarkable, with people calling him a man of destiny and straightforwardly describing images of the shooting as religious icons. A week or two later, Kamala Harris received a hero’s welcome to the race, literally, as myriads gushed over her perfections on X and images like this circulated widely.
Even Joe Biden has been getting the treatment lately, as he’s gone from a doddering egotistical fool who was taking the country and his party down to a true American hero in one quick Tweet.
It’s one of the most characteristic and least plausible impulses our species displays: to promote some among us to the status of superheroes or little gods, or on the other hand demote them to supervillains and little Satans. The two go together in various ways, of course, and the Great Hope of one group is the preternatural threat to another; the redeemer of today is tomorrow’s scapegoat.
When the person thus apotheosized is, let’s say, a pop star or an athlete, the activity is relatively benign, and if your worshiped pop star ends up disappointing you and heading to rehab or whatever, you just shed a sincere tear and go on to the next. But when the Divine One is a politician who aspires to operate the coercive power of government – enforce the tax code and oversee the criminal justice system, make war and surveil the population – the matter is serious.
Charisma is mysterious stuff, an inexplicable quasi-sexual quasi-spiritual super-power. It is the great mystery of human leadership, an irrational invitation to self-violation, and a danger to us all. It might get you more or less kneeling down before an image of John F. Kennedy, or it might get you erecting gigantic statues of Ferdinand Marcos. Charisma, whatever it may be, doesn’t distinguish between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Benito Mussolini. Charisma grabs you by the gonads and leads you wherever it likes.
And though it might not be as disastrous when exuded by a Kennedy as it is when exuded by a Lenin, it also might cause you not to notice, as you assume a worshipful stance toward his image, that you are treating a pretty party boy as though he was the only hope for our species and ignoring his extreme personal failings. You might follow him to Vietnam one day, for example, wandering out again fifteen years later if you’re lucky, bewildered. You might really get used, in short, because you mistook a handsome man for a god.
Now, the images of Trump after the shooting were compelling. He showed courage. Harris has given some reasonably good speeches and has refocused the campaign. She probably has a somewhat better chance to win than Biden, though the matter is complex. Both seem to have the gift, right at the moment, of making people (different people) feel represented in the world of American politics. But that also begins to burden them with the sort of symbolic weight that no actual human being can plausibly sustain.
The line between politics and religion seems particularly permeable at the moment. But sheer irrational faith in human beings of the sort who aspire to command “the greatest military the world has ever known” is, you know, explicitly irrational.
The fate of such symbols, of people who embody or contain millions of other people and on whom millions of dreams have been pinned, in whom we have willed ourselves to believe, is to fail and to fall, a function of the buildup they received. When the whole thing works maximally, the idol merges seamlessly into the scapegoat, as when Hitler apparently inspires all the German people with a sense that they are being represented in a single body, then fantastically takes the blame for acts that the whole society cooperated to perform.
In more quotidian forms of leadership we see this all the time. Whether it’s Rishi Sunak or Emanuel Macron, people want leaders to “take responsibility” for whole economies and millions of people. Worshiping politicians then vilifying them allows us to evade our own responsibility.
Biden has actually left us with a good cautionary tale on this. He conspicuously lacks charisma, but many people tried to pump it into him, with Corvettes, sunglasses, and the Dark Brandon meme. Then he was relentlessly attacked (called a “narcissist,” for example) as the pre-scapegoat for the Democrats’ looming defeat. Then he was a hero. None of that was plausible, really; it was just image manipulation without any policy implications. In fact, this whole charisma thing floats by without any content; it might get you doing or believing anything, really. It’s a problem to be solved, not a virtue to be admired.
And treating political leaders as superheroes or gods is self-subordination and irrational image-worship; it has led directly to many a society-wide disasters, wars, and authoritarian outcomes. We’re saved by that right now only by our division, perhaps, as the persons “of destiny” square off in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or whatever plane of reality they inhabit.
In this regard, polarization is our great hope. Pray above all that we don’t all coalesce around one charismatic chump.
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