Demanding Dominance: The Archetypes of Leadership in the USA

For a long time I have tried to understand politics in terms of marketing, policy and administrative competence. It’s about selling ideas, developing coherent policies, appealing to different demographics, and showing an ability to master the complex dynamics of managing change in huge bureaucracies.

But sometimes you also have to admit you got it almost entirely wrong. By those measures Trump should be 20 percentage points behind in the US election campaign, and yet he has remained consistently 2.4 to 3.2% behind Harris in polling of the popular vote, and within sight of winning the electoral college.

This election simply isn’t about competence or policy or what is objectively best for America. It’s about demonstrating dominance in an almost feral way. It doesn’t matter that Trump has become increasingly incoherent as the campaign has progressed and very little of what he says is true. He is appealing to an almost atavistic sense of what many Americans believe a true leader should look like: Male, white, rich, successful, powerful, big, physically dominant and sexually in control.

Everything has to be on Trumps terms. His rallies aren’t about trying to reach out to and persuade the persuadables. They are about indulging his joy at being the dominant figure in the room. They are not even about winning the election. He has held many of them in states he has no hope of carrying.

His rants can go on for up to two hours and are far more incoherent than any stumbles by his former nemesis, Joe Biden. At a recent “town hall” meeting in Pennsylvania, he simply stopped taking questions from the audience and swayed to his own his own music favourites list for 39 minutes.

It doesn’t matter. He is showing energy. He is showing control. He is demanding dominance. And that is what many of his followers are looking for. He is John Wayne to Harris’ Penélope Cruz: The MAIN MAN to her pretty supporting actress role. Her attempt to win the Presidency is akin to trying to overturn the natural order of things. It just ain’t right.

And before it is said that this is a racist stereotype, it is clear that Trumps emotional appeal stretches well beyond his rural, working class, white, male base. He is polling well with women and black and Hispanic voters as well. He is the living embodiment of “THE PATRICARCHY STRIKES BACK” against all this feminist, woke, LGBTQ+ empathetic nonsense – a throwback to when women and racial minorities knew their place, and were often psychologically quite comfortable or at least well-adjusted to it.

American society is changing, but that doesn’t mean the changes are always for the better or that everyone is comfortable with those changes. Like in any change process, there are winners and losers. Working class, manual, rural and less educated voters have long been losing out, and they are increasingly being joined by middle class voters as the middle classes are being hollowed out by automation, computerisation and now, artificial intelligence.

Trump won’t solve any of those problems, but he is addressing their emotional consequences. Hillary Clinton derided the “basket of deplorables” who clung to their guns and religion. Trump embraces them, and no matter how hard Harris tries, she just doesn’t seem their natural ally. It doesn’t matter what the pollsters say. It is the people who actually go out to queue and vote who matter. And an emotional feeling of rejection trumps all.

And so for all the debates and interviews and media appearances and campaign events of the past few months we see almost no change in the polls at all. If anything, there has been almost a percentage point swing to Trump, which could be enough to swing the election in such a tight race. Polls in US elections can be very volatile, but this year they have been utterly stable – indicating that some very deep underlying factors are at play that change only very slowly, if at all.

And this is also reflected in the battleground states…

Harris may still be marginally ahead by less than 1% in her must win states, but she is losing ground everywhere and the momentum is all with Trump. It’s his race to lose now, and it is difficult to see what more he can do to lose it. He has had an absolutely dreadful campaign and is still pulling ahead.

Equally, it is difficult to see what Harris can do to turn things around. She is playing by the classic campaigning rules, and it is getting her nowhere. More and more evidence is piling up about how well the economy is currently doing and how it has historically done so much better under Democratic Presidents.

It was Bill Clinton who pointed out that since the end of the Cold war, Democratic Presidents have created 50 million new jobs, while Republican Presidents have created one million. It was President Bush who brought us the financial crash, due, in part, to his program of banking deregulation. It was Obama who had to clean up the mess.

But it doesn’t seem to matter. Emotion and gut feeling does. Warnings that Trump is becoming increasingly incoherent and fascist in his rantings miss the point. Americans have no folk memory of a Hitler or a Franco and thus no guardrails against such an outcome. It’s all about immediate emotional gratification, and Trump seems to be supplying it for an increasing number of voters. It’s easier just to hate on immigrants, political opponents, or sexual minorities and blame them for all your woes.

A growing number of Americans in key swing states appear to want a “strongman” leader who tells them whom to blame, and Harris just doesn’t fit that profile.

Frank Schnittger is the author of Sovereignty 2040, a future history of how Irish re-unification might work out. He has worked in business in Dublin and London and, on a voluntary basis, for charities in community development, education, restorative justice and addiction services.