Anti-Charisma as a Type of Authority: Joe Biden and the Undoing of Crisis

Robin Wagner-Pacifici, The New School for Social Research

Sociologists have productively theorized power and politics with both typologies and genealogies. This paper combines these theorizing modalities to analyze the eventful nature of the U.S. Presidential election of 2020 and its trajectory toward the mitigation of political crisis. Thinking about presidential genealogy, the semiotics of sequence and succession favored humility over hubris in the victory of Joe Biden after, and over, Donald Trump. As well, drawing on Weber’s three types of authority (traditional, charismatic, legal-rational) and Fred Block’s elaboration of a flexible but constrained missing fourth type, this paper reads Joe Biden as an anti-charismatic representative of that fourth type. As one solution to the structural dilemmas associated with the democratic elevation of political leaders, the anti-charismatic leader reverses the direction of attention - away from the leader and toward the constituents. This paper argues that whereas charisma draws its strength from rupture and crisis, anti-charisma asserts domestic tranquility, competence, familiarity, and empathy. Together the semiotics of sequence and genealogy and the typology of authority provide important angles into the election of Joe Biden as the anti-charismatic candidate.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 37. Crisis and Social Transformation