Presidential Character and Scholarly Priorities

 If you mean to foster tolerance and want to protect the rights of people who hold minority viewpoints, mobilizing the masses, whether based on racial identity or ideology, is not the way to go.

The people left to their own devices.

THE ANNUAL conference of the American Political Science Association will take place in cyberspace on September 9 – 13.  This year’s theme is “Democracy, Difference, and Destabilization.”

In a chilling commentary, conference planners caution that longstanding certainty about the US Constitution as “solid and prescient enough to thwart — or at the least contain — the more authoritarian impulses of citizens and elected officials” has been called into question by the presidency of Donald Trump.

I could quibble with the rest of the statement’s woke tone and presuppositions but not with its bottom line conclusion: “America is as polarized now as it was on the cusp of the Civil War because of forces which polarize Americans into ideological, hyper-partisan camps.”

“Democracy, Difference, and Destabilization” has a catchy ring to it. However, in searching for a way forward, the program chairs ask a misguided question: “How inclusive and representative of our country’s diversity are democracy’s institutions and practices?” Pretty diverse, actually. The US Congress has more women than ever before (131); there are 53 African American House Members and three in the Senate; 51 Latinos in the House, 20 House Members who are of Asian or Indian origin, plus an unprecedented four American Indians in the House. The percentage of people of color on the Federal bench is for most jurisdictions in the double digits.

The question political scientists should be asking is: How can we reimagine representative democracy for the remainder of the 21t century – along the constitutional lines envisioned by James Madison.

The Madisonian model of democracy has no greater nemesis today than President Donald Trump. By dint of his character, Trump has manipulated the demos, exploited differences, and spurred destabilization. If you do not believe me dust off Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics, take a fresh look at Dye and Zeigler’s The Irony of Democracy, and re-read The Federalist Papers, particularly No. 10.

The point is if you mean to foster tolerance and want to protect the rights of people who hold minority viewpoints, mobilizing the masses, whether based on racial identity or ideology, is counterindicated. This lesson is something America’s responsible elites need to relearn – fast.

Trump’s presidency has played out as foretold. Americans knew about his character before Election Day 2016. Yet 62,980,160 voters put a pyromaniac in charge of an already combustible situation. When Americans contrasted Trump’s character with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s, maybe they saw difference without distinction. They were sorely mistaken. Clinton’s character may be out of kilter. Trump’s is putrefied. Or perhaps by voting for Trump, Americans were saying character does not much matter.

In our dopamine-drenched social media environment, Trump succeeds by mobilizing his doltish supporters even as he goads the hordes who oppose him into self-defeating militancy.

Alongside Trump drones are his more rational enablers who perfunctorily concede that the president’s character is problematic but argue that his policies are worth the discomfiture. I suppose they mean trying to pack the Supreme Court with justices inclined to re-criminalize abortion; or using regulatory authority to reverse irksome environmental laws, or just plain trying to keep America as white as possible for as long as possible.

To be fair, some of his policies on trade, illegal border crossings, and NATO are hardly outlandish at face value.

Like a broken clock, even Donald Trump can’t be wrong 24/7. 

It would be churlish of me as an Israeli not to admit what a relief it is to have a denizen in the White House who does not instinctively challenge every IDF military operation or decry every Jewish home constructed over the 1949 Armistice Line. It is fitting that the US Embassy is now in Jerusalem and that President Barak Obama’s 2013 Iran deal was reversed. Too bad that Trump’s administration seems no less helpless than its predecessors in preventing the mullahs from lurching toward an atomic bomb. And I shudder to think where Israelis would be if the PLO and Hamas had cleverly finessed their response to Trump’s deal of the century instead of rejecting it outright. 

I get that Trump’s America is understandably finished with endless wars in the Middle East. Still, as salesman-in-chief, Trump is delighted to flog F-35s and EA-18G Growlers to the UAE, Patriots to Kuwait, an old guided-missile frigate to Bahrain – and just about anything that goes boom to the Saudis. A welcome byproduct of this transactional approach to US foreign policy is that Israel’s zero-sum conflict with the Palestinian Arabs has been dissociated from its bridgeable differences with the broader Arab world.

Trump’s policies, for better or worse, tend to be divulged in a slapdash, circuitous manner that reflects his disordered personality. Staffers are left scrambling to justify his impetuous actions after the fact.   

His policies and character are intrinsically linked – as they have been for all previous presidents.

September 12 marks the 16^th anniversary of the death of the scholar who literally wrote the book on presidents and character, James David Barber. What better time than to revisit The Presidential Character – Predicting Performance in the White House, first published in 1972.

Barber, who was the chairman of the political science department at Duke University until 1995, was renowned for blending psychology and political science. He hopefully figured that people would factor a candidate’s character in deciding how to vote. “If there is such a thing as extraordinary sanity, it is needed nowhere so much as in the White House,” he wrote decades before Americans sent a self-described “very stable genius” there.

In 2016, voters seemingly ignored Barber’s advice to look for patterns of behavior before casting their ballots. They didn’t have to know that Donald Trump grew up in a home with a mother who was cold and withdrawn, and a father who withheld his love as punishment for perceived failure. A family where cheating and bullying were endorsed, and introspection, soul-searching, and apologizing were inexcusable signs of weakness to intuit that Trump’s personality was psychologically stunted.

Naturally, a person’s character is not determinative; it is not destiny. Humans have the capacity for growth. Or, as Barber put it, “starts, do not define finishes.” Still, he hypothesized that a president’s early life would be an essential element among a confluence of factors affecting presidential style, specifically: rhetoric, interpersonal relations, and homework. “Character is the way the president orients himself toward life not for the moment, but enduringly,” wrote Barber.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman added in Emotional Intelligence that “The bedrock of character is self-discipline; the virtuous life, as philosophers since Aristotle have observed, is based on self-control” to be able to set aside self-centeredness, to do real listening and to allow yourself to be empathetic. For Barber, character is what emerges when who we are comes up against what we must deal with in daily life. Personality and temperament matter because citizens look to the president for reassurance in times of crisis. The president ought to be able to personify the better angels of our nature.

Barber categorized presidents roughly speaking from Theodore Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter (in a revised edition). His classifications were anchored in two criteria: whether these individuals were active performers and whether they took pleasure from their job.

As presidential types went, Barber judged Thomas Jefferson as active-positive, John Adams as active-negative, James Madison as passive positive, and George Washington passive-negative.

Trump, who denigrates opponents as “low energy,” spends chunks of his days in frenzied TV watching and tweet storming clearly derives little pleasure from the presidency. Given his apparent low self-esteem and grandiose schemes, most observers identify him as active-negative.

Barber had found that active-negative presidents do not try to sway those who disagree with them. Their rigidity impels them to double-down on failing policies. They sometimes work themselves to exhaustion, become isolated and paranoid. Anger is a constant. “As the process of rigidification moves along, the President finds among his enemies an individual who, to him, personifies the threat. That person becomes the focus for the President’s aggression,” according to Barber. 

Active-negatives do little or no presidential homework. They have no use for anyone who offers an adverse opinion; total loyalty is demanded. The glass always looks half-empty. So as not to hurt them emotionally – since they are fragile and desperate for adoration – bullied advisers tell them only what they want to hear. Tormented, they cannot relish victory. They find it hard to show compassion. These individuals assume complex problems can be solved by backslapping, flattery, and personal appeals.

Barber published before Donald Trump entered politics, but he analyzed him uncannily: “His natural medium was the world of the deal, the world where a man at the right place and time could patch together a bundle of power, doing some good for himself and some for others at the same time.”

What active-negatives have in common is “strong deprivations of self-esteem” in childhood as a result of “parents who denigrated or abandoned them.” Elect an active-negative character, and you run the risk turning one person’s tragedy into a massive national and social catastrophe, warned Barber.

He might also have added that you could be unleashing a pedagogical catastrophe. Besides the immense power Donald Trump has as president, he also sets an example for children. Remember Vladimir Lenin’s mantra: “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” 

Think about what Trump could do with four more years.