Author: Barbara

Leadership and followership typically proceed along an historical trajectory. Since they are twinned, and since they change over time, they were different in the early 19th and 20th centuries from what they are now, early in the 21st. Still, the Western trajectory has tended consistent at least since the Enlightenment. Power and influence have devolved away from those at the top, and toward those in the middle and at the bottom.

In the last few years, however, some have wondered: How far and fast can this devolution go? How much political power can leaders lose and followers gain without inciting instability?

A case in point is what’s been happening on some of America’s most prestigious college campuses. While most Americans support students’ right to protest, when such protests turn virulent to the point of being violent – as happened recently in Berkeley, California – the authorities feel obliged if not obligated to step in. Authority takes over when inmates overtake the asylum – when followers overwhelm leaders.

More than anything else the rise of the threatening follower at the expense of the threatened leader explains the reemergence of authoritarianism – leadership more dictatorial than democratic. Putin clamped down when Russians got restive. Erdogan clamped down when Turks got defiant. El-Sisi clamped down in the wake of the Arab spring. And Xi Jinping clamped down in response to the growing number of Chinese activists.

Additionally are strongmen in other countries that previously were liberal and democratic, such as Hungary. Additionally are would-be strongmen, such as Donald Trump, who would like nothing so much as to highjack precisely those institutions that preclude his becoming an autocrat. And, additionally is a significant percentage of the electorate that itself opts for order over disorder, for the illusion of reversion over the encroachment of change.

Which raises this question: How far will the pendulum swing? Will followers in liberal Western democracies continue to feel unmoored? Continue in consequence to revert to populism and authoritarianism? Or will the trajectory of history prove immutable – and the regression to autocracy more an aberration than a rule?

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Note: I’m hitting the road. So, no new blogs for at least the next two weeks.

According to Pew Research, views on gender and political leadership tend to be stable across major demographic groups. Moreover, strong majorities of women and men say that women and men make equally good political leaders.*

There is, however, on this matter a partisan divide. Of those who do see a gender difference, Republicans (22%) are much more likely than Democrats (9%) to say that men make better leaders than women. The skew is even greater when gender and partisanship are both factored in. Among Republican men, 27 % say that men make better leaders than women, while only 1% say that women make better leaders than men. (Among Democrats the gender gap is smaller.)

Framed differently, of Americans who most strongly supported Trump for president, nearly one quarter believed that being a man and being a leader is, or it should be, equated. As one Democratic pollster put it before last year’s election, “You have a certain group of voters who like the masculinity, the muscularity…. Most are men, particularly older men, particularly blue-collar men, white men.”**

Of course, the idea that real men are he-men – masculine and muscular – is not confined to a particular demographic. A survey of roughly 1300 men ages 18 to 30 revealed that many of not most American men live in “what some sociologists call the Man Box, constricted by a concept of manhood that includes aggression, hypersexuality, supreme authority and utter self-sufficiency.”*** Therefore, the fact that Donald Trump still feels constantly compelled to flout his putative masculinity should not be surprising. It not only reflects who he is, it reflects, to a degree anyway, who we are.

Some of this stuff is funny. It’s funny when a man who so prides himself on being manly sports a foolish combover suggesting nothing so much as too much time under a hair dryer. But some of this stuff is distinctly unfunny. Too much public drooling over certain sorts of women. Too much belittling of other men. Too much embracing of generals and military hardware. Too much contemplating a future in which America is all about hard power, and not at all about soft power.

Least funny of all is Trump’s tendency to grand illusion. Either to sell himself to us, or to sell himself to himself, or maybe both, Trump’s hyperbolic assessment of who he is and what he has accomplished is distorted at best, and dangerous at worst. Describing his first three months in office, Trump recently told an interviewer,” “We freed up so much and we’re getting great, great credit for it. We have done so much for so many people. I don’t think that there is a presidential period of time in the first 100 days where anyone has done nearly what we’ve been able to do.”

To say that this is ahistorical to the point of being delusional is to understate it. But, by flying in the face of what is, Trump’s rhetoric does underscore his overweening need to be on top.

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*Pew Research Center, Social and Demographic Trends, January 14, 2015.
** Danielle Kurtzleben, “Trump and the Testosterone Takeover of 2016,” NPR, October 1, 2016.
***Frank Bruni, “Manhood in the Age of Trump, New York Times, April 2. 2017.

To say that Donald Trump holds different standards for men than he does for women is to understate it. For example, men are more likely by him to be presumed innocent, while women are more likely by him to be presumed guilty.

I mean guilty even as in guilty of criminal activity. During the presidential campaign, Trump’s opponents for the nomination, mostly men such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, were repeatedly derided for their flaccidity. (Though Carly Fiorina, his sole female opponent, was mocked for her appearance. “Look at that face!” Trump exclaimed. “Would anyone vote for that?!”) But his opponent for the election, Hillary Clinton, was accused of being a crook, a criminal, a felon. Numberless times Trump egged on his supporters, urging them to chant, to shout at the top of their lungs, “Lock her up. Lock her up. Lock her up!”

This distinction came to mind again recently when, in the space of just a couple of days, Trump held out one standard for women and another for men. Citing no evidence whatsoever, Trump claimed that Susan Rice, national security adviser to President Obama, could have committed a crime by uncovering the identities of Trump associates who had been swept up in the surveillance of foreign officials. When he was asked about his evidence for making such a charge, Trump replied that he would reveal his sources “at the right time.” This was 12 days ago – when this time would come was never made clear.

During the same week, Trump gave his crony, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, a complete pass, even after we learned that he had been accused over the years by different women in Fox’s employ of sexual harassment. Though public outrage was swift, and though dozens of advertisers almost immediately withdrew their support, Trump did not. Trump chose to speak loudly and clearly in O’Reilly’s defense. Trump said he was a “good person,” and then added “I don’t think Bill did anything wrong.”

No surprise, I suppose, that someone with Trump’s record of objectifying women failed to find O’Reilly’s behavior objectionable. This is the same man who told MSNBC that for women who have an abortion, “there has to be some form of punishment.”

Yesterday President Trump signed legislation intended to cut off all federal funding to Planned Parenthood and other groups that perform abortions. He thereby nullified a rule signed by President Obama that barred state and local governments from withholding federal funds for family planning services that performed abortions.

The new legislation is in keeping not only with Trump’s particular priority of restricting abortions; it is also in keeping with his general priority of building a budget that strongly favors hard power over soft power. As New York Times columnist David Brooks pointed out, Trump’s proposed budget aims to cut if not decimate those parts of government that seem to him “soft and nurturing” (like poverty programs), or “emotional and airy-fairy” ((like the National Endowment for the Arts), or “smart and nerdy (like the National Institute for Health).* In contrast, it aims to beef up funding for those parts of government that seem to him “manly, hard, muscular and ripped” – most obviously those associated with the military and national security.

Trump’s budgetary priorities are evident in these numbers:
• On the one hand, he proposes to slash federal funding for the Department of State and the Agency for International Development by over one quarter – 28%.
• On the other hand, he proposes to boost federal funding for the Department of Defense by 10% – in the coming fiscal year alone. (Similar increases are slated for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the National Nuclear Security Agency.)

Trump’s budget is not yet etched in stone. But the president’s preferences are clear. As Mick Mulvaney put it – he was Trump’s pick for director of the Office of Management and Budget – “There is no question this is a hard-power budget. It is not a soft-power budget. This is a hard-power budget. And that was done intentionally.”**

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Trump’s budget is like Trump himself – all man.

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*https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/opinion/let-bannon-be-bannon.html
** http://www.npr.org/2017/03/16/520305293/trump-to-unveil-hard-power-budget-that-boosts-military-spending

Do you remember hearing about Barack Obama’s testosterone level? Or George W. Bush’s? Or even Bill Clinton’s? I do not. But, Donald Trump is different. He made sure a month before the 2016 presidential election that we all knew the level of his testosterone.

When he released his medical records this month, Donald Trump appeared on the Dr. Oz show to reveal his health information. After doing a blasé rundown of results, noting many of them “good” or “normal” or “low,” Oz made one number stand out.

Trump gave a faint smile and a meaningful eyebrow raise. The crowd cheered.*

To be sure, Trump is not the only American man preoccupied with the level of his testosterone. Testosterone prescriptions in the United States have nearly doubled in recent years, to 2.2 million in 2013, up from 1.2 million three years earlier. Clearly many American men, middle-aged and older, even those who are healthy, are turning to testosterone as an antidote for everything from sagging muscles to flagging sex drives.

Still, most men keep their concerns about having “low T” private. And, most men with “high T” do not make of themselves a public display. But, then, most American are not Donald Trump. They do not need regularly, repeatedly, loudly and publicly to confirm, and then again to reconfirm, their manhood.
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*http://www.npr.org/2016/10/01/494249104/trump-and-the-testosterone-takeover-of-2016

There are not many differences between male and female leaders, and those differences that do exist are not great. But there are some, and sometimes they matter. Similarly, there are differences in how people perceive male and female leaders – and in how they prefer them.

In general, the traits that we attribute to leaders are those stereotypically viewed as masculine: dominance, assertiveness, task-orientation, and risk-taking. Women, in contrast, are thought more collaborative and cooperative, more cautious and careful, more honest and ethical. For example, in 2015 the Pew Research Center reported that 29% of Americans associated honesty more with women, while only 3% associated honesty more with men.

In part because of these perceived differences, men and women in leadership roles adjust accordingly. Women leaders have, for example, learned that if they are seen as too dominant, they will be disliked. So, they tone down their assertiveness, lest it be viewed as aggressiveness. Similarly, if conversely, female political leaders tend to play up their interest in matters of national security, for fear of being seen as weak on defense.

Men have some of the same issues. They are not immune from gender stereotyping, including associating their own leadership prowess with their own unflagging masculinity. No leader in 21st century America exemplifies this proclivity more than President Donald Trump. We were forewarned even during the presidential campaign. When he belittled his various rivals not by challenging them on their policy positions, but by challenging them on their masculinity, we saw what was in store. Jeb Bush was derided for being “low energy.” Rick Perry was belittled for insufficient “toughness.” And Marco Rubio was emasculated, nearly literally, by being tagged “Little Marco.”

Trump’s mind-set was, then, clear early on. A real leader is a man. And a real man is a he-man.

Ironically, Trump’s hyper-masculinity is evocative of no one so much as his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, who famously chose to display himself bare-chested, astride a large horse, the personification, presumably, of Machismo. Which leaves us with this question: in a face-off between the United States and Russia, which one of the two leaders is more all-man, and which one less?

According to the information we now have, some 18 people were involved in making yesterday’s decision to carry out a missile strike against Syria. Seventeen were men. One, Dina Powell, Deputy National Security Adviser, was a woman.

The decision to carry out some sort of attack against the government of Bashar al-Assad has been widely praised, both at home and abroad. Moreover, a nearly all-male decision making group is hardly unusual at the highest reaches of government or, for that matter, at the highest reaches of business or anything else.

Still, when a leader is as fixated on the virtues of being manly as is Donald Trump, and when the matter at hand is violence, attention must be paid. Attention will be paid.

For now, suffice to say no surprise that the first thing that President Donald Trump did to receive plenty of plaudits was an act of war. The man and the moment met.

Few members of the Trump administration have survived their early months in office with their reputations unscathed. Fewer still have emerged with their reputations enhanced. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley is an exception to the general rule. Based on her brief performance as America’s Ambassador to the United Nations, she will be an increasingly prominent player on the political stage.

During her six years as governor she was known as a star politician. She was not, however, known for being a policy wonk. And she most certainly was not known for having even an ounce of expertise in global affairs which is why, when she was appointed UN Ambassador, eyebrows were raised. But, so far at least, Haley has proved the skeptics wrong. She has proved a quick and serious study. She has shown an unerring instinct for being on the right side of an argument. And she has demonstrated her willingness to take on those more highly positioned than she.

None of this should surprise us. Haley was an extremely popular governor. (In 2014, she won reelection by a landslide.) She had a record of speaking truth to power. (After Dylan Roof killed nine people in a Charleston church, Haley reversed her previous position and crafted a deal that removed the Confederate flag from the front of the statehouse.) And she had a personal and professional history of fighting long odds. (She was not only the first woman to serve as South Carolina governor, she was the first who is a member of an ethnic minority. Her parents were immigrants from Punjab, India.)

Haley’s strong and stirring speech at the United Nations in the wake of the chemical attack in Syria was her most powerful performance as ambassador so far. But, my guess is she’s just getting started. My guess is she’ll soon be at the forefront of America’s political establishment.

Summitry has been a staple of American diplomacy since at least the Second World War. In 1943 Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Tehran. In 1944 Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Yalta. And in 1945 Harry Truman met with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Potsdam. Since then every American president has sat face to face with a wide range of presidents and prime ministers – always from a position of unrivaled strength. Such summits in which American presidents have engaged for the past 75 years, have been with them having the advantage, the strong advantage, in every aspect. Military, economic, political, strategic, tactical – and personal.

Tomorrow’s summit at Mar-a-Lago between U.S. President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping will, then, be a radical departure from past practice. For the first time in nearly a century, America’s leader will be dwarfed by his foreign counterpart. On the one hand is Trump, who is personally and politically weak and has never been personally and politically weaker. On the other hand, is Xi Jinping, who is personally and politically strong and has never been personally and politically stronger. It’s not a fair fight. America’s leader is hobbled both by his miserable standing at home, and by his woeful lack of a solid foreign policy apparatus. China’s leader is heightened both by his strong standing at home, and by his experienced, strategic approach to foreign affairs. This means that whatever does emerge from this summit will be in consequence of what Xi Jinping wanted, not of what Trump negotiated.

Woe to those who remember when the United States of America strode the earth like Shakespeare’s Colossus….