The Age of Centrist Heroes Is Over

I Hope You Like Pizza

NOTE: I drafted this edition before the grisly presidential debate on Thursday. With more time - I’ve had a particularly busy week - I would written more on it, but I’ve added first thoughts after the jump.

Catch-up service:
Birth of the Nudge Economy
Creativity Needs Stupidity
Your Obligation To Be Optimistic
Seven Underrated Forms of Diversity

Most voters are OK with Keir Starmer becoming Prime Minister. Boring as that may sound, it is quite an achievement - for him, and for a party which frequently fails to present plausible candidates to the electorate. Many of Starmer’s own supporters yearn for a more charismatic champion - for a leader who, in their very person, quickens the pulse and inspires hope. If you are one of them, I’m going to gently suggest you put aside this dream. These days, if we want a leader who is non-mad and somewhat competent, then Starmer or someone like him is about the best we can hope for.

Personal charisma is the dark matter of politics: we all know it’s important but we can’t say what it is. Max Weber, the first academic to take it seriously, framed it as a counter-force to institutional inertia; a way of enabling outsiders to breach the establishment by way of a direct, visceral connection to the people. Since then, academics have flailed around in attempts to nail it down. There’s a summary of the literature here. Much of it seems flat-out wrong to me, but I quite like the theory of “romantic leadership”, which focuses on the relationship between a leader and their followers.

Simply put, the idea is that followers attribute a heroic identity to certain leaders, in which they see themselves reflected. The leader’s heroic image activates a heroic self-image for the follower. The leader must have something going on to begin with, whether it’s personal story or oratorical style, but political heroism is co-created. It is a magnetic field. Obama, Trump and Ocasio-Cortez are all heroic politicians in this sense, although, as we’ll see, there’s a crucial difference between the first and the second two.

I would describe Keir Starmer as an anti-hero. Not in the classical sense of a charismatically flawed protagonist, but in the sense that he is heroism-resistant. His supporters don’t feel heroic, and as far as I can tell neither does he. He is not blessed with a seductive voice or powers of oratory, and neither does he exude a strong sense of inner belief. He comes across as a little joyless, pinched, uncomfortable. He is said to be more charming in private but has great difficulty reconciling back stage and front stage selves. It’s been observed, for instance, that despite being an authentic football fan he somehow manages to make it seem as if he’s faking it when on camera.

He has started referring to himself in the third person, though not with any gusto. “Being Keir,” he recently told an interviewer, “is just ploughing on.” Heroes are not necessarily authentic: they can be playing a part, exaggerating aspects of themselves for public consumption. But it’s important that they seem to be enjoying the act. Obama loved playing the part of a secular preacher, Macron loves to cosplay Louis IV. Starmer rarely appears to be having a great time being Keir, which can make him hard to watch. Heroes tend to thrive on the energy of crowds, real or virtual. Starmer is not remotely susceptible to adulation, which is mostly a good thing, although it can make him seem closed off.

When it comes to heroes in politics, however, I’m with the political philosopher Tina Turner: we don’t need any more of them. And whether we need them or not, we’re not going to get them. The window for heroic centrists - by ‘centrists’ here, I just mean politicians with broad appeal who are interested in governing - has closed. There will be no more Obamas, Blairs or (even) Camerons. The centrists of the future will be uninspiring by necessity.

There are several reasons for this. One is that voters have learned to distrust charisma. In Britain, it was charisma which led us into Iraq and out of the EU, both decisions now widely regretted. Obama did not deliver the transformation of American politics he promised. A second reason is that we have created a hostile environment for politicians, in which every perceived slip or minor scandal is magnified into a crisis. Only the cautious survive. Another reason is that social media selects for politicians with deep but narrow appeal.

As Weber observed, charisma tends to be associated with outsiders who challenge norms. But whereas centrist challengers like Blair and Obama sought and, at their peaks, commanded support beyond their natural constituencies, today’s heroes dance with the ones who brought them. They are not loyal to their ambitions but to their audience. They have little ability or desire to expand the force field.

Social media is a seedbed for heroic cults; it is less good at growing politicians with national appeal. Indeed it makes it harder for them to emerge. It offers, in the economic sense, a perfect market for individual brands which allows for no dominant players. The competition for attention is brutal and incentivises garish rhetoric, extreme positions, and the construction of separate epistemic terrains. There is no longer one political establishment for challengers to assail, since everyone disagrees on what that establishment consists of and why it needs to be taken on.

It’s not coincidental that Biden and Starmer, the most successful centrists of recent years, are both too old to be social media natives. They were raised in a political culture in which reaching beyond your core supporters was vital to success. Both of them retain the quaint idea that politicians should persuade as well as inspire. Both aim to make actual, imperfect, workable policies which improve the lives of the whole electorate, rather than headline-generating faux-policies designed to douse supporters in dopamine while boiling the blood of opponents.

Nor is it coincidence that neither man makes people swoon when they walk into a room or post a selfie. Leaders capable of such feats become trapped in their magnetic fields early on and find it impossible, or undesirable, to escape. Ocasio-Cortez’s core supporters may get fired up by her recent performance; to everyone else it seems a bit Steve Ballmer. AOC is passionately adored and highly unpopular.

Ambitious centrists find it hard to be “authentic”, because they have to straddle increasingly atomised audiences. As the activist, media and donor classes become more extreme relative to the median voter, the stretch becomes harder and more undignified. For Labour, there was no honest route back to government. Starmer’s leadership pitch from four years ago makes for an embarrassingly sharp contrast to his current pitch. That undermines his credibility now but in truth he was the only candidate capable of winning both a leadership contest and a general election within five years. He did so because precisely he did not have authentic loyalties, factional or philosophical. The shiftiness and vagueness voters discern is the price of the ticket.

More than ever before, successful centrists have to be pizza, in Rory Sutherland’s terms (expanded on here by Nassim Taleb). Pizza is popular party food not because it’s loved by everyone but because nobody vetoes it. Since there are few pizza haters you can confidently get it in without anyone feeling excluded, even though that means foregoing the possibility of delighting those guests who love Mongolian barbecue. If few voters get dewy-eyed over Starmer, few actively despise or fear him either. No pepperoni please, some guests may find it too spicy. Margherita is fine.

A good thing about uncharismatic leaders is that the surprise is all on the upside. Biden may have outstayed his welcome (UPDATE: UNDERSTATEMENT) but he has proved a remarkably consequential president, in legislative terms. Starmer has a fair shot at exceeding low expectations. There are even signs that, under the formative pressure of an election campaign, he is loosening up. Rather than pretend to be more interesting than he is, he is starting to make a virtue of the fact that he doesn’t have interesting taste in novels or amusing dreams but is just a basic guy who wants to get on with the job of governing - which is, after all, quite a dull one, done properly. In fact, Starmer might be on the verge of developing his own brand of anti-heroic charisma. But don’t get your hopes up.

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After the jump: first thoughts on the Biden debacle.