All it takes is a personal following
Goldberg: When people lose faith in institutions, they don’t become cynics, they transfer their faith to people.
I have a theory. When people lose faith in institutions (political parties, organized religion, etc.) they don’t become cynics or nihilists, they simply transfer their faith to people. Specifically, two kinds of people: themselves and charismatic celebrities.
The first category seems rather obvious to me. There’s always been an acute independent streak in Americans. “You’re not the boss of me,” “go with your gut” and “who are you to judge (me)?” could be national mottos.
But it seems to me that we’ve passed some kind of tipping point.
I don’t know when it happened, but the trend stretches back a long way. Some might want to start the timeline in the radicalism of the 1960s or the selfishness of the “Me Decade” 1970s. Others might lay blame on the alleged greed of the 1980s. The point is that Americans, regardless of ideology, are more inclined to go with their own moral or political instincts than to rely on experts or defer to institutions.
In short, our understanding of the world has become increasingly personalized, governed by our own judgments, instincts and feelings.
Which brings me to that other category of people: charismatic celebrities. From Oprah to Jordan Peterson, Americans seem less interested in putting trust in institutional “brands” and more interested in following the advice of charismatic people with whom they’ve formed a personal bond.
In contemporary America, and perhaps throughout history everywhere, the hallmark of a charismatic leader is the ability to form a personal relationship with his or her followers. People invest their faith in the leader, not in the formal institutions or organizations that traditionally serve as gatekeepers or validators of ideas or programs.
Today, political leaders have discovered the key to success isn’t in a particular platform or institution, but in having a personal following.
Institutions no longer fight to fend off mavericks or upstarts; institutions now try to attract them.
Political parties are late arrivals to this trend. Historically, they served as gatekeepers and validators of candidates. That’s no longer really the case.
Indeed, one of the great ironies of today’s America is that while partisanship is perhaps the defining feature of our politics, the parties themselves have never been weaker.
Barack Obama was an insurgent in the Democratic Party who in effect stole the nomination from the establishment choice, Hillary Clinton, in 2008. The key to his success: He was a charismatic leader who ostentatiously ran as a kind of secular redeemer. Obama’s supporters invested staggering confidence in his personality. Some of the rhetoric about him could be described as parody if people weren’t so serious about it.
Similarly, in 2016, the Republican Party establishment was simply too weak to compete with the power of Donald Trump’s personal relationship with a plurality of voters.
I suspect this dynamic will define much of our politics — and our culture — long after Trump, because he was a symptom of this trend, not the author of it.