Term Paper on "Classical Social Theory and Donald Trump"

Term Paper 6 pages (2156 words) Sources: 4

[EXCERPT] . . . .

As Royce summarizes Weber's analysis

The encroachment of bureaucracy constrains the decision-making authority of economic and political leaders, limiting the potential for rejuvenating social change and the periodic disruption of "rational rule." The tendency toward stagnation in modern society can be combated, according to Weber, only if the leaders of government and industry -- the counterweights to bureaucratic power -- have the leeway to intervene in an otherwise routinized world and interject an element of charisma into an increasingly ossified bureaucratic structure. (Royce 154)

It is difficult to read this description and not think about what Donald Trump is presently doing to the Republican Party. After all, the Republican Party never misses an opportunity to fulminate against bureaucracy and big government even when the Republican Party comprises the same bureaucracy and big government (as during the presidency of George W. Bush). The astonishing unpopularity of Congress with the American public at this moment indicates the degree to which antipathy toward "stagnation" and bureaucracy are motivating Trump's supporters: for some time, Trump's nearest competitor was Dr. Ben Carson, whose only similarity to Trump is that neither is a professional politician or a Washington insider. Although it is painful to describe Trump as "charismatic," it is true that even Trump's detractors frequently cannot look away when he is making outrageous statements on television. He is a natural and comfortable presence on television, and his outrageous statements supply a level of interest to the TV viewer.

In the final analysis, though, it is Weber's view that seems most persuasive in understanding the phenomenon of Donald Trump. "Only extraordinary conditions can bring about the triumph of charisma over the organization," Weber wrote, but it is clear that the political circumstances of 2015-2016 are extraordinary, and the narrative presented by the New York Times is one in which Donald Trump's charisma is attempting to triumph over the traditional organization of the Republican Party. It is true that Marx's account of alienation and Durkheim's account of egoistic individualism have much to offer in terms of analyzing how social circumstances have contributed to Trump's unlikely popularity with Republican voters. But Weber's concept of charisma seems to epitomize the strangeness of the situation, and Trump might best be understood according to Weber's more complicated notion of the "routinization of charisma," which describes the aftermath of a transformatively charismatic leader. In this situation, the remaining social structure must find a way to "search for a new charismatic leader on the basis of criteria of the qualities which will fit him for the position of authority" (Weber 246). The Republican Party in 2016 is, of course, largely the product of the 1980 "Reagan revolution" when a charismatic media celebrity was elected president in a landslide, and pushed through a radical ideological agenda essentially by means of being a "great communicator" on television. Since the 1980s -- the era of Reagan's presidency but also Donald Trump's rise to national celebrity -- the Republican Party has been engaged in a search for Reagan's charismatic successor to Reagan, and employed the traditional means outlined by Weber, first by electing Reagan's Vice President, then by electing that man's son. Those failures have now enabled the surviving Reagan faithful to anoint a man with Reagan's outsider status and media celebrity.

Works Cited

Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. "The Manifesto of the Communist Party." In Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader. Second edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978. Print.

Rappeport, Alan. "Looking Back at Donald Trump's 2015." The New York Times, December 30, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/us/politics/donald-trump-moments.html

Royce, Edward. Classical Social Theory and Modern Society: Marx, Durkheim, Weber. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Print.

Weber, Max. "The Routinization… READ MORE

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