There’s a lot of angst on the left about whether the performance of strength is counterproductive, inviting a backlash, leading to a spiral of escalating violence, and alienating people who might have been allies. Maybe. But I think the concern can be overblown, and I think there’s a real argument to be made on the other side.
(Ninth in a series that starts here)
It puzzles me and my friends on the Left why so many people buy into Trump’s bluster and bombast, but it shouldn’t. He may be a weak man, but he performs strength. For many people that’s enough. And it’s not just Trump or the Right—someone recently challenged Joe Biden in an open meeting about his age and Hunter Biden’s problems, and a video surfaced of Joe yelling at the guy and challenging him to a push-up contest. All my allies on the Left cringed over it but Joe lost nothing in the polls and I’m willing to bet there’s a large (male) swathe of the country that loved every minute of it. Joe was defending himself and his family, strongly. He was performing strength in a way that they appreciated viscerally. And in being so quick to perform strength when challenged, he gave them confidence that he would be strong in other situations as well.
Frederick Douglass said in his memoirs, “[The slave] is whipped oftenest, who is whipped easiest,” and goes on to provide several examples including his own experience. This was a surprise to me. The slave overseer is the quintessential example of the brutal, power-hungry man—the last person one would expect to be cowed by a show of force. He has all the formal power and strong incentive to use it. Fighting back—performing strength—might work in the short run, but you’d expect it to be disastrous in the long run.
No, says the man who was there. Turns out the overseer is no more dedicated or energetic in his job than anyone, no more competent in the prosecution of evil than most of us in the prosecution of good. So the performance of strength, even in a system that grants formal power to the other side, translates into actual strength.
We are stronger than we think, and the other side is generally weaker than they appear—morally and spiritually, if not actually. I remember a story on NPR years ago interviewing a federal agent about the takedown of a drug kingpin in Mexico. Does this really do any good, the interviewer asked. Won’t the cartel just put another person in their place? Yes they will, said the lawman. but what we find is the person they replace him with is generally not as good. There aren’t many who can run an organization like that and if you keep taking out the guy at the top, you degrade the capability of the whole organization.
This performance of strength speaks to the basement level of the spirit for all of us, no matter how highly evolved we think ourselves. But as Altemyer shows in The Authoritarians, for authoritarians and their followers it speaks especially clearly. Authoritarian followers depend on the strength of their leaders—that’s why they follow them. Authoritarian leaders have to be always strong and always win. (Which is why Trump hits those points so hard and so crudely.) If we demonstrate the weakness of those leaders, they become less attractive as leaders.
Doesn’t such performance of strength invite retaliation? Less than we think, I believe. We’re speaking to the Inner Caveman here, who recognizes individuals not ideas. Bin Laden was inspired to terrorism against America not because of some individual slight, but because American troops were stationed on Saudi Arabia’s holy land. Fighting for an ideal under threat, even a Lost Cause, poses no problem to the authoritarian follower.
But taking down a leader performs the weakness of the leader. The killing of Bin Laden did not lead to a wave of retaliatory terrorism. Iran responded to the killing of Soleimani in a relatively measured way. Attacks on the tribe may lead to retaliation—I’m thinking Ruby Ridge and Waco—but when the leader is humiliated the response seems to be different. As I sit here, I have no good examples of authoritarian leaders who were killed, became martyrs, and led to the revitalization of their cause. The deaths of even non-authoritarian leaders—Gandhi, Lincoln—did not revitalize the cause for which they died. Gandhi’s death was followed by the partition of India and Lincoln’s death by the Redemption era and Jim Crow.
Effective martyrs, I think, don’t come from the power elite. They can die without discrediting their cause. I expect the elite view martyrdom as a mug’s game.
Okay, that train of thought led to unexpected places. I’m not suggesting murdering people we don’t like, of course, and I don’t want to argue that taking down authoritarian leaders is always a good strategy. What I do want to claim is that the performance of strength in itself attracts people to our cause, whereas the strategies that are often recommended to Democrats—compromise, back off from extreme positions—performs weakness and indecision, and that in itself drives people away. We allow ourselves to be handicapped by our own principles, or what we think are our principles. All I want to argue is that we have more freedom to act than we tend to think.
More freedom to act and more responsibility to act to achieve just goals, even when our principles seem to get in the way. And for that I have the authority of the Lord Krishna Himself.
(To be continued)